John Chambers on Surviving the Coming Shift

I had forgotten that John Chambers has worked both at IBM and at Wang Laboratories. That means he worked at companies that were leaders of two previous waves of computing technology. IBM is about as good a proxy for leadership of the mainframe era as one could find. Wang also was a leader of the minicomputer era. That's signficant as Cisco Systems attempts something no other company has achieved in the semiconductor era: leading in at least two separate eras of computing. So what's the most dangerous thing that could prevent Cisco from making history in this regard?

Hubris: the idea that your company is so powerful, so well managed, so agile that it cannot fail, even as a new computing paradigm replaces an older one.

"You have to keep it constantly in front of yourself," Chambers says. As in, looking nervously and constantly over one's shoulder, hoping to hear approaching footsteps before anyone can be seen. "We make Andy Grove look relaxed," Chambers says, alluding to the classic Grove dictum that "only the paranoid survive."

"Transition will happen; not could happen," says Chambers, who is as aware as any executive ever has been of what it would mean to lead in two waves of computing. It would make history.