John ChambersJOHN CHAMBERS . . .
The Nineties' Cisco Kid
John Chambers
by Lynn Price Reinke
The author is a communicator in the WVU
College of Business and Economics.
Fortune magazine has dubbed John Chambers the newest member of the technology industry's ruling elite. As president and chief executive officer of Cisco Systems, Inc., he oversees the fastest growing and most profitable computer company in history: a company that makes Internet routers, a product undreamt of when he was a business student at West Virginia University in the 1970s.
Today, Cisco is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. During the past two years, Chambers has grown the company from $1.2 billion in annual revenues to more than $6.5 billion. Measured by market capitalization, Cisco Systems is now the third-largest company traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
Data would go nowhere on the Internet without Cisco. Almost all E-mail m messages fly through Cisco routers, VCR-sized boxes that tell electronic messages where to go. Time magazine says with close to seventy percent of the market for routers, Cisco owns the horses of the fastest growing Pony Express in history. The company also makes switches, dial-up access servers, and network management software.
In his first two years as head of the company, Chambers helped make Cisco an envied and feared supplier of networking technology. The company acquired nineteen companies and has recently developed partnerships with Microsoft. Chambers is relentlessly customer-focused: when Cisco loses a big order, Chambers calls the company's CEO to ask how he could improve.
Chambers, a native of Charleston, W.Va., is the son of two doctors. He knew his path would be either business or medicine. Choosing the former, he graduated from WVU's College of Business and Economics in 1971 and the WVU College of Law in 1974. He also has an MBA from Indiana University.
He began his career at IBM and later went to Wang Laboratories, two successful companies that staggered under the pressure of growth. At Wang, he had to fire 4,000 employees, something he doesn't want to have to do again. He believes it's important to stay close to employees and close to customers.
"I think the leader is the lead dog on the dogsled," he explains. "Not the guy on the back with the whip."
Chambers returned to the College of Business and Economics last fall as a McDonough Caperton Distinguished Lecturer. He spoke of the rapidly changing information age and told students it would have as great an effect on their lives as the Industrial Revolution had on their grandparents. For business, some of the basics are the same--try to figure out where the market is going and how to get there sooner than anyone else--but it's the time frame that's changed.
"I think of Internet years as dog years, seven years in one," he said. "There's no more long-range planning."
The worldwide headquarters of Cisco Systems is in San Jose, California. The company has more than 10,000 employees, and it was ranked the number one place to work in the of one hundred best places to work published in Computerworld. One employee told Wired magazine that working at Cisco is addictive, like "electronic heroin."
The salaries are not the highest in the high-tech industry, although the average starting salary is $70,000 and after one year the typical employee will have accrued more than $125,000 in profit on unexercised stock options.
"I don't think people work for money," Chambers said. "At our company, people work for the chance to change a whole industry."
The company, the culture, and the CEO have combined to make Cisco the forty-seventh largest company in the world today, bigger than General Motors, but Chambers is modest and reaic about his accomplishments:
"There's no substitute for being in the right industry at the right time."
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