From Old School to 21st Century CEO

In 1995, when he became Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, John Chamber was a 20th-Century leader at the top of his game. In the spirit of the era, his style was command-and-control all the way, as he himself admitted in a recent interview with Newsweek.

But today? Today, Chambers is a changed man - and his company is far more competitive than ever! As he tells Newsweek,

"I realized there was something that many of us do not understand when we take a leadership role: culture. Great companies have very strong and great cultures. A huge part of a leadership role is to drive the culture of the company and to reinforce it. The other thing that has changed dramatically is [a shift] from command and control to collaboration and teamwork. It sounds easy to do, but it’s hard, because you are trained that way in M.B.A. school, in law school. Around 80 to 90 percent of the job is how we work together toward common goals, which requires a different skill set."

Continues Chambers,

"There’s a fundamental change that may be really important to the future of business in this country and the world. At Cisco, we are moving to collaboration teams, groups coming together that represent sales, engineering, finance, legal, etc. And we’re training leaders to think across silos. We now do that with 70 different teams in the company. So we’ll have a sales leader go run engineering. A lawyer go run business development. A business development leader go run our consumer operations. We’re going to train a generalist group of leaders who know how to learn and operate in collaboration teamwork. I think that’s the future of leadership."

Ask John Chambers if 21st-Century Leadership is a fad, or if he sees it as essential to keeping his enterprise at the forefront of innovation and profits long into the future.

Click here for the entire interview. You'll especially enjoy the longer video-version found on page 2 of this story:

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/04/know-what-you-don-t-know.html

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This is part 2 of a 2-part entry. Part 1 precedes it on this blog.