What Makes Some Companies And CEO Like Chambers Tick?

I am just sharing an internal talk that I gave to emerging leaders in my organization on the topic of Leading Change and fostering Innovation. When the Australian team was winning almost everything in the Cricket field from mid-90s through most of 2000s, their captain during the initial stages of its transformation Steve Waugh shared a secret of their success. 1, even though artificial one but deeply internalized one, helped them get better even when they won. If they won by 10 runs, they did make sure to celebrate but more than that set themselves the goal to do win by a bigger margin in the next match. So this team remained emerging and constantly strived towards reaching great heights. There is another opposing example, again from the world of sport. There was an England bowler named Monty Panesar, who was bowling in one of the Ashes tests. 鈥淚s Monty bowling in his 33rd test or the 1st test for the 33rd time?

Monty probably stopped growing and probably he started to think of himself as having been an accomplished bowler after getting a break into England playing 11 and didn't improve as much as the situation demanded. Leander Paes won the Bronze medal for India in 1996 Olympics. The aspect that was unique about this achievement was that this was the first time in 44 unbelievable years that India won an individual Olympic medal. In this barren phase for India, athletes seemed to have lost self-belief. There are a lot of stories that confirm that only participating in Olympics was a pinnacle of achievement as if winning a medal was a deal only for aliens. After Paes won, it raised the self-belief of athletes and we have won in all the Olympics since then. And my intention is to decipher the events, finding meanings and relevant learnings that could be applied at the workplace. I have been an apprentice about the subject of leading change. As much as I have thought in the past that I have mastered learning about the change, I have always fallen short as newer and unknown situations keep emerging.

Having observed our industry quite closely for a considerable time, I can safely vouch that we live in a very dynamic industry in which no two days are the same. In this little talk, I would like my focus to be narrow. 鈥nd if we don't treat it as a skill we leave a gap open to become victims of change. And one of the things that I often tell myself and my team is that we should not let ourselves be labeled as victims. Being a victim is not one of the nicest and positive feelings at all. Our attitude should make us accountable to ourselves and own-up things. 21 billion dollars. There was a lot of analysis done on why Facebook would have spent so much for just an App. I mean one could buy multiple steel companies for that sum. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easier to tell Facebook anticipated the disruption caused by Messaging apps much earlier before they even became a threat.

They realized that amount of time average users were spending on WhatsApp was the time they were b spending on Facebook. Even though they haven鈥檛 possibly earned a dollar from WhatsApp in all these years, this acquisition helped them prevent cannibalization and stay relevant. Bottom line- they had mechanisms to anticipate these changes before they caused disruption. John Chambers was a former CEO of Cisco who, after almost 2 eventful decades at top, finally hung his boots last year. In our career times, we have seen some legendary companies like Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Digital Equipment, McAfee, EMC etc. either merge with bigger companies or bite the dust altogether. What makes some companies and CEO like Chambers tick? Chambers wrote a piece in Harvard Business Review on his/Cisco鈥檚 longevity and associated the same with his ability to stay ahead of technology shifts. Did Chambers view the technology shifts and changes as a 鈥渢hreat鈥?

鈥淲hen you鈥檙e a large company with significant market share, it鈥檚 tempting to view market disruptions as a threat, but we view them as an opportunity. When a market isn鈥檛 in transition, gaining market share is hard鈥攜ou鈥檙e fighting to take one or two points of share from competitors. While describing how Chambers saw leading change as a skill, he considers listening to the customers are one of the key ways to gain insights about the trends. For Cisco, each transition required a decision about when to jump from selling a profitable product to a new technology鈥攐ften one that would cannibalize our existing product line. No one knew how to go small better than Steve Jobs. He was famously as proud of the products he didn't pursue as he was of the transformative products Apple created. In the two years after his return in 1999, he took the company from 350 products to ten. That's 340 nos, not counting anything else during that period. As a key learning, we should be ready to cannibalize something that's working for the sake of something better that you foresee coming. 鈥淭ruth is people don't like change. And the older you get, the less you like it. Change has to start here (pointing towards mind). You have to move mind before you move your bodies. Change is an intellectual process that you have to work to see it for what it is.