Connecting the Dots: Leadership Lessons in a Start-up World. John Chambers

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СКАЧАТЬ Guzzi, a former colleague at Wang Laboratories and a strong Democrat who’d spent the first part of his career in Massachusetts state politics, including four years as Secretary of the Commonwealth. During the 1988 presidential election, Paul and I were at a customer meeting in Chicago and started talking with a hotel doorman about the various candidates. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis had a double-digit lead in the polls at that point, but the doorman told the two of us that he planned to vote for George Bush. As we were leaving, Paul turned to me and said, “Bush is going to win.” It seemed like a bold prediction to make off a sample size of one. But Paul viewed this man as what I’d consider to be a subject expert: a lifelong Democrat who clearly cared about the issues that were the foundation of Dukakis’s campaign. The doorman was also African American, and black voters traditionally vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. If he felt that the governor was not effective on those policies, the odds were high that many of his peers felt the same way. For Paul, who had probably talked to thousands of voters over his career, the doorman’s comments were telling and signaled a profound shift in the big picture. He’d been seeing other data that suggested a pattern of vulnerability for Dukakis and this clinched it. While the early polls may have considered Dukakis a shoo-in, Bush won. While the doorman might or might not have predicted Bush’s win, Paul did. He connected the dots and knew what to look for.

      Many years later, Elaine and I were in a limousine and started talking politics with our driver, who was African American. Donald Trump had recently become the Republican candidate and I was curious to know what the driver thought of him. It turned out he was planning to vote for Trump. He knew about Trump’s record on race relations and wasn’t sure if Trump’s policies were as likely to hurt him as help, but he was fed up with the establishment in Washington and was willing to take a risk. Much like the doorman in Massachusetts, his support was a powerful data point that conventional wisdom might turn out to be wrong. As I talked to more people on my travels, it became clear to me that Trump was winning support across party lines, which was not yet showing up in the polls. So when former Bloomberg TV anchor Cory Johnson asked me to pick the likely winner at a summit in May 2016, I said, “If you had to bet on momentum right now, candidly it’s going to be Trump.” Hillary Clinton was leading in most polls and I ended up breaking my own record as a Republican to vote for her on election night, but I could see that the pattern pointed to a victory for Trump. Whether that would be good for the country was beside the point. This was the reality of what was going on, and many people didn’t see it coming.

      You might think that it’s easier to spot data and connect the patterns today. After all, we have a world of information and artificial intelligence at our fingertips. I think it’s actually becoming much more difficult. Greater access to content has made it easier for people to seek out news that reinforces their existing point of view. Instead of using technology to connect with other cultures, we increasingly connect with people who remind us of ourselves and reinforce what we already know. We filter the world through our “friends” and lose faith in our institutions. It’s easy to see why. Elections that could be more transparent and democratic in the digital age instead seem more vulnerable to manipulation and even hacking. Journalists can be as partisan as the people they cover and, even when they’re not, get accused of peddling unreliable news. Leaders whose countries could be hubs of innovation instead give in to fear and resentment, worsening the problems they promised to fix. More information doesn’t make us more informed.

      That’s why it’s so important to get outside your comfort zone and talk to people who don’t cross your path every day—at the end of the day, we all need to remain as curious as we were as teenagers. That might sound like strange advice in a business book but I can tell you that my curiosity about things I don’t understand has been a critical factor in my success as a leader. It’s easier to spot opportunities and changes when you’re on the outside. That’s why teenagers can be so effective at spotting the next big thing. They have very limited power so they’re more inclined to look beyond the people in charge. Your product looks different through the eyes of different consumers. Sometimes, you get the best advice from people who aren’t your friends and, in fact, might actually be your rivals. I always listen to my critics and pay attention to the people who are trying to disrupt my industry. If you never feel uncomfortable or out of your element, you’re not likely to innovate in a meaningful way. There has to be some discomfort to be creative.

      Being dyslexic probably gave me a head start. I was not comfortable in school. In fact, I found it to be really tough in the early years. Learning to cope with a learning disability is hard work. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking otherwise. I graduated from high school toward the top of my class, but it wasn’t because the words looked less jumbled on a page. I had to work through it and around it to learn what I needed to know. I was lucky to have my parents and Mrs. Anderson in my corner. Even so, I faced hours and hours of frustration, trying different techniques until something stuck. I love Mrs. Anderson but I do not look back on those years of tutoring with fondness. I hated going to those sessions. They were hard, but they did help me to develop a work ethic that’s stuck with me to this day. If you read about others who’ve reached their goals with dyslexia, whether it’s Virgin founder Richard Branson or Charles Schwab, you see that same drive and willingness to put in the hours. Once you’ve faced dyslexia, conquering other challenges can seem more manageable. You learn that you can achieve tough goals if you persevere. You understand your own limitations and learn to tap the talents of others to complement the areas in which you’re weak. That kind of persistence can come from having to overcome any number of challenges in life. What it does is make you realize that there are no easy answers. When one customer tells me that they like a company, it’s one data point to consider. If I rushed out to buy the company based on one recommendation, I’d probably be a fool. Sometimes you have to dig and be patient and go back again and again to get the right result.

      When you visualize networks in your head, you often end up creating similar networks on the ground. If you can make sense of seemingly chaotic data points to create understanding, you will be rewarded. The network is more powerful than any one part. At Cisco, we created open platforms and networks of products that we organized into “architectures” to help people achieve certain solutions. We had networks of suppliers to build and take those products to customers, as well as networks of partners to achieve common goals that we couldn’t reach alone.

      The power of your network is not just the number of people or devices connected to it, but also the strength that you create and derive from that network that gives you all those data points in a way that lets you make better decisions. A lot of what you see on LinkedIn or Facebook are fragile networks in which many of the connections are between relative strangers. Convincing hundreds of people to accept your LinkedIn request doesn’t indicate a deep network, and neither does the number of Twitter followers, especially now that we know that kind of volume can be bought. You can really only see the strength of a network when it’s put to the test. Do people come through on requests? Can you mobilize the network to take action on a shared goal? Are there multiple links between people within the network or are they all linked through you? The most resilient networks are bound together by a tremendous sense of trust. When I go to talk about a new product concept to a major customer in the Middle East and he cuts me short to say, “John, I believe in your vision because I believe in you,” that’s trust. When a stranger asks to connect on LinkedIn or someone adds you as their 4,743rd “friend” on Facebook, I suspect the bond is very loose, if it even exists at all.

      How do you walk into an unfamiliar situation and connect the dots? The short answer is that you prepare. I’ve been very lucky in my career and I’ve found that the more prepared I am, the luckier I seem to get. The more I know about the people I’m about to meet, the better questions I’m able to ask and the better the products we’re able to build or buy. I use the same strategy for every trip, every event, and every customer meeting that I’ve done over the last 25 years. It’s based on a playbook developed by my assistant Debbie Gross, which is another reason I couldn’t have run the company without her. She or another member of the communications team created a briefing book organized to follow the flow of each day and each event or meeting. It contained bios of every person I was scheduled СКАЧАТЬ