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

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СКАЧАТЬ background clips related to our presence in that community, and observations from the local team, as well as a summary of our objectives for every meeting, and any other context I might need. To this day, if I’m going to speak, my briefing notes are in the playbook, too. It’s organized in such a way that I can dive into the specifics of each person and event while tying that data back to the big-picture objectives. Think of it as a replicable innovation playbook for meetings that’s enabled me to get dramatically more value out of each interaction. What it does is allow me to better tailor my insights to connect with whomever I’m talking with.

      I hadn’t realized how ingrained that habit had become until Elaine pointed it out. She’s not just my wife but also my most trusted friend and my toughest critic, so when she gives me a compliment, I rarely forget it. After one dinner several years ago, she remarked on how much effort I had put into finding an area of interest to connect with each person at the dinner that night. She was right. I wanted to arrive, armed with stories and contacts and strategies to connect with everyone I was about to meet. Not only did it make for a better evening, but I also walked away with new ideas and connections I’ve maintained to this day.

      One final thought I’d offer if you want to really learn to look at the world like a dyslexic is to let down your guard and be humble. As a general rule, leaders are not a humble bunch. It takes confidence to lead people and a certain degree of cockiness to make tough decisions when there are smarter people in the room who disagree. (Believe me, there almost always are.) You have to connect with them on an emotional level. You don’t do that by dazzling them with your talents. You share a part of who you are. Talking about dyslexia made me more relatable for a lot of people, as did my willingness to make fun of myself—whether it was being the brunt of my own jokes onstage or a voice of comfort in a crisis.

      As a leader, you might not think that you’re intimidating to people. Believe me, to many out there, you are. You might be intimidating to the people you hire, or to the ones who hired you. If you’re young, you may be intimidating to older people and vice versa. You can intimidate people because of your gender, your skin color, your accent, your clothing, your title, and any number of other factors that might seem ridiculous. That doesn’t mean you have to change who you are. But it does means you need to connect on more than just a superficial level if you want to get honest answers. You must be willing to emotionally connect with people—to really listen to their challenges and share your stories, too. If you only ask questions and don’t give any answers, you’re not enriching the other person.

      One of the leaders who really convinced me of the importance of letting down my guard was Sheryl Sandberg. We were at a conference, shortly after she had written her groundbreaking book Lean In. As chief operating officer at Facebook, Sheryl could have written several books on her successes. Instead, she wrote about the roadblocks she faced as a woman trying to build a career while having a family. At Cisco, we’d done a very good job, especially versus our peers, on promoting gender equality in our workforce, senior management team, and board of directors. However, Lean In reminded me that we could do so much more. I required everyone on our leadership team (our top 3,000 leaders) to read the book before having Sheryl come over to speak. Our challenge was getting the men to lean in, not the women. It’s easy to talk about diversity in the abstract. Once you bring it down to a personal level, attitudes change, and it has to start at the top. In 2015, Sheryl’s husband, Dave Goldberg, died suddenly while they were on vacation. She could have retreated into her grief but instead opened up about the impact of Dave’s death on her and their two young children, once again helping many others facing similar tragedies in their lives.

      It reinforced the power of sharing our stories, strategies, challenges, and fears and in recognizing how our own behavior is influenced by our life experience. Will that ultimately make it easier to get the kinds of insights to see where the world’s going and connect on both an intellectual and emotional level with your team? I believe the answer is absolutely yes, and great cultures create healthy conversations on strategic issues for your company and the world.

       LESSONS/REPLICABLE INNOVATION PLAYBOOK

      Focus on the big picture. Pay attention to broader shifts in technology and the market, especially when they occur at the same time. As you learn to connect the dots, pattern recognition becomes easier.

      Be curious. Look for ways to data-mine across multiple industries and people. Seek out reliable sources for what’s happening in different markets and adjacent industries.

      Get outside your comfort zone. Think like a teenager. Your goal is to shake things up and see what others have missed. Try to shed preconceived notions that lead you to familiar conclusions.

      Treat every customer and every encounter as an opportunity to gather data and learn. Where are they investing and what are they worried about?

      Look for industry disruptors to understand the market gaps they’ve identified, the threats that are emerging, and the opportunities to disrupt in other areas.

      Compare and contrast. Are common themes bubbling up? Align what you’re hearing with the data that you see and then make a bold bet.

      Have the courage to share your concerns and have healthy debates. Open up to your team on both a business and a personal emotional level.

       Chapter Three

       DREAM BIG AND BE BOLD…FOCUS ON THE OUTCOME

       (Play out the Entire Chess Game Before You Make the First Move)

      I’ve been criticized at numerous times in my career for being too big a dreamer, moving too fast, or being too ambitious in describing what could be achieved. I would argue the opposite. Almost every mistake I’ve made was because I didn’t move fast enough or dream big enough. I have zero regrets about my bold moves, even the ones that failed. My only wish is that I’d made even more and bolder bets, which is what I’m doing now in working with startups and helping their leaders to grow and scale their businesses. As Carlos Dominguez, my former colleague and president of Sprinklr once put it: “You can’t dip your toe in the water with John. You either jump in or you stay out.” He’s right. I don’t believe in half measures. That’s not how you win. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in business is that they don’t dare to imagine a bold outcome and understand what they need to do to achieve it. Whether you run a coal mine in West Virginia or own a taxicab in New York, you do not get ahead of disruption by making a few iterative moves. You start by disrupting yourself. You establish a bold and inspiring outcome and both anticipate and maximize the conditions to achieve that outcome. It’s a process that I still use today, whether I’m betting on robotic cricket farming to create a versatile mass-market protein to help solve world hunger or investing in technology that provides perimeter protection from drones and other unmanned vehicles.

      The ability to imagine a bold outcome and set audacious goals to achieve it is not so much a personality trait as a mind-set. Two of the most visionary thinkers I know are John Doerr and Marc Andreessen. Both are legendary venture capitalists: John was an early investor in Amazon and Google, while Marc took a bet on startups likes Facebook and Instagram. Their personalities are quite different. Among other things, Marc is a technologist at heart while John tends to focus more on business outcomes. However, both are big-picture thinkers who want to empower innovators and change the world. They care about issues bigger than their own interests and constantly play out the long-term impact of current trends to figure out what matters most right now—and why.

      I’ve СКАЧАТЬ