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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 had an opportunity to watch both of them in action over the years. I started working with John more than 20 years ago when we jointly founded TechNet as a national, bipartisan network of tech leaders to promote policies and initiatives that foster innovation. Both of us realized that Silicon Valley was disorganized when it came to dealing with Washington, which meant we were punching below our weight in terms of having a voice there. Flying in once a year to complain about the various ways in which government is screwing up was not a winning strategy. We needed to engage on a more meaningful long-term level. It’s how John operates with all his portfolio managers, helping them to stay focused on the audacious and achievable goals.

Marc takes a similar approach. He is a bold visionary who is not afraid to take on conventional wisdom and even rattle people from time to time. He reached out many years ago during the early days of Netscape. Cisco actually owned the trademark Netscape name at that point, and I gave it to them for free. We had no use for it, and I believe in being generous when I can. Among other things, generosity might one day open the door to a deeper relationship, which it did. (We also owned the iPhone and IOS trademark names but I didn’t just give those away to Steve Jobs at Apple, in part because we were already using them.)

I’m now working with both John and Marc through JC2 Ventures, where I can tap their expertise as investors, and they have asked me to help in coaching their CEOs. The goal isn’t to help them set more achievable goals but instead to dream bigger—and then make it happen.

Mario Mazzola, one of the greatest entrepreneurs and engineering leaders I have ever known, likes to tease me sometimes by leaning over and, in his baritone Sicilian accent, solemnly offering up a piece of wisdom like, “You know, John, vision and strategy are for the amateurs. Execution is for the professionals.”

He’s kidding, of course, or at least half kidding. Mario is one of the most visionary thinkers I’ve met, not to mention one of the most effective in bringing that vision to life. He illustrates what I’m talking about. Not only does Mario think 5 or 10 years ahead when it comes to developing products, he takes a similar long-term view when hiring and managing people. Any time Mario has come to me with a game-changing product idea, he’s already mapped out the resources and timeline needed to get it done, a plan for how to launch and scale it, and an often prescient assessment of the impact it will have on not just the company but the industry as a whole. He’s part of a team that has generated unprecedented innovation for Cisco, creating eight product families across multiple business lines that each generate more than $1 billion in revenue a year. Crescendo Communications, the company that he cofounded with fellow engineers Prem Jain and Luca Cafiero, was Cisco’s first acquisition in 1993. It took the company from selling a single product, the router, into a new line of network devices called switches that became Cisco’s largest business and transformed how we sold to customers. Mario, Prem, Luca, and a brilliant engineer and marketer named Soni Jiandani collectively became known simply as “MPLS”—a play on their first names and a popular networking technique that we helped to develop.

The team became legendary for its ability to attract Silicon Valley’s top talent to work on projects that disrupted and then dominated an industry segment. In terms of speed, disruption, and the ability to transform audacious goals into profitable products, MPLS was unbeatable. To compare them to NBA champions is to do them a disservice. When you create products that become market leaders in areas as diverse as switching, storage, servers, and software-defined networking, that’s more like moving between the NBA, NFL, NHL, and Major League Baseball without missing a beat. If we had not acquired Crescendo in 1993, Cisco might not have become the world’s leading network and internet company. We passed up a chance to merge with a bigger, stronger, and better-known company and instead agreed to pay almost $95 million for one that was barely selling $10 million a year. It was a bold bet. Cisco stock took a hit. Many of the board members didn’t like it, either, and I put my job on the line to make it happen. If the deal had fallen through, as it nearly did, I almost certainly would not have stayed on to become Cisco’s next CEO, as planned.

I don’t bring this up as proof of my skills in spotting winners, though I’m happy to pretend I have a sixth sense for this stuff. I bet my career on four people I didn’t know and a technology I hadn’t tried because we shared a bold vision for how together we could transform an industry, and I could see they had the talent, brain power, and audacity to achieve those goals. While Mario and I may have different strengths, both of us focus relentlessly on outcomes and try to maximize the conditions for achieving those outcomes. When I take bold bets, I never make rash moves or think in individual transactions. Everything is connected. It’s how my brain works. It also happens to be effective.

To me, vision, strategy, and execution are like a chess game—a multidimensional, multiplayer chess game that’s being played with tremendous speed and interdependencies. Before I make a move, I play out the entire game in my head, and then I replay it under different scenarios, forward and backward, in order to anticipate not only my moves but the moves of others in the game. If you do that, you learn to anticipate the hurdles and see different ways to achieve the outcome you want. You also learn to recognize when an outcome is no longer achievable and make a decision to either change your strategy or even to concede the game and move on to another opportunity. To do that, you need to have first played out the game to the end, learn as much as you can about the other possible players to anticipate their actions—your possible countermoves—and build your strategy around the outcome you desire.

For Mario and the Crescendo team, this approach also inspired an unusual concept known as the “spin-in.” That’s an independent startup, launched with seed money from Cisco, that would enable the MPLS team to recruit and incentivize top talent to work on a breakthrough technology and turn it into a developed product that would be sold back to Cisco, assuming it was successful. We did this three times, the first one delivering a billion-dollar-a-year product and subsequent ones each delivering multibillion-dollar-a-year products that were transformative for our portfolio and enabled entrance into adjacent markets. Could these products have been developed through the usual research and development channels? Maybe, but I don’t believe the pace would have been as fast or the ambitions as bold. Could Mario, Prem, Luca, and Soni have left to launch their own startup and made much more money? Definitely. Then we might not have had technology focused on filling our needs or first dibs on the results. What mattered to all of us was the outcome. To achieve big dreams, you have to take bold bets and focus on clear outcomes.

In the previous chapter, I talked about the power of crowdsourcing multiple data points to get a better picture of patterns and trends. The most powerful source of data for me is always my customers. Further, the most powerful incentive for taking any bet is the customer. If my customer is interested in something new, I immediately become interested, too. Crescendo wasn’t even on my radar until Ford Motor Company started talking about how this little company had developed a “Fast Ethernet” technology that let you send large amounts of data over copper telephone wires at really high speeds. I had never heard of Fast Ethernet, but I knew about switches. These were the devices that connected computers, printers, and servers into a local area network that our more complex routers would then connect to the internet. As technology was evolving and networks became more interconnected, I felt the two product lines would either become more integrated or one would displace the other.

A few weeks later, I was with a customer at Boeing who started to talk about the switching technology of the future. “Let me guess,” I said. “Fast Ethernet.” My customer was surprised that I was already aware of the new technology. As with any good sales call, I then asked what we had to do to secure a $10 million order that we were trying to get. It could be mine, the Boeing executive said, if Cisco bought Crescendo and included their technology in the deal. Now, I was really motivated to find out more—and fast.

As the signals of a market transition increase, the need to take action becomes more urgent. As I thought about how this race to get scale would end up—essentially writing our own press release on the desired outcome—it became clear to me that acquiring Crescendo would not only break us away from the pack but also serve as the foundation for Cisco’s growth for the next decade. This was a market transition that, if we executed right, would allow us to leave our competitors and even our peers behind, and represented potentially a once-in-a-lifetime chance to lead the industry for the foreseeable future. As networks were becoming more complex, customers were struggling to connect a large number of vendors with different strategies and products that were not designed to work together. Suddenly, we would be able to provide the best router and the best switches, both designed to work together from one vendor. If we did this the right way, it was truly game over, although it clearly would require solid execution to make this vision and strategy work. This was clearly my decision with strong input from other members of the leadership team, one that, if it worked, would make the CEO position a given. If it didn’t, I would be held accountable for the results, as I should be. While this was clearly risky in most people’s opinion, once I’d played out the chess game in my mind, I had no doubt that it would work and was committed to making it happen and leading the industry.