Chambers, John T.

▪ 2001

      “The Internet will change companies, industries, and products in ways we can't even imagine. These changes will take place at speeds we have never seen before. If a company does not move rapidly, they will get left behind.” So spoke John T. Chambers, president and chief executive officer of Cisco Systems, Inc., and in that role he made sure that his company moved at speeds necessary not only to maintain its position but also to far outstrip competitors. Since becoming head of Cisco in 1995, he had led the computer networking equipment firm to a more than 10-fold increase in annual revenues and a growth of 1,700%. By 2000 it was the third largest company in the world, behind the General Electric Co. and Microsoft Corp., and in January of that year Business Week magazine, which had dubbed Chambers “Mr. Internet,” placed him on its list of the world's top 25 executives for the third time.

      John Thomas Chambers was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on Aug. 23, 1949, and grew up in Charleston, W.Va. He gained a bachelor's degree in business and a law degree from West Virginia University as well as an M.B.A. in finance and management from Indiana University at Bloomington. He began his business career at IBM Corp. in 1976, and after six years there he moved to Wang Computers. During his eight-year tenure at Wang, he had to lay off 5,000 employees, and he later said, “I'll do anything to avoid that again.” Chambers joined Cisco in 1991 as senior vice president of worldwide operations at a time when the firm had annual sales of $70 million. By 2000 annual revenue was estimated at $14 billion. One share of Cisco stock bought for $18 in 1990 was worth about $14,000 some 10 years later.

      Chambers made it clear that he did not intend to let Cisco rest on its laurels as the world's chief provider of routers, the powerful network computers that sort the information packets that speed data through the Internet. Although the firm continued to improve the speed and capacity of the routers so that they could process one billion bits of information per second, Chambers had loftier goals. He viewed the future as a time when “data, voice, and video will be delivered over a single connection in our homes.” With that in mind, he had engineered the acquisition of more than 60 companies since 1994, aiming to broaden Cisco's expertise and range of products. One area that he planned for Cisco to enter was the telecommunications business; he believed that Cisco's data networks would eventually become the world's leading voice networks. As a leader, Chambers had this credo: “Never ask your employees to do something you wouldn't be willing to do yourself.” In keeping with that policy, the man named “the best boss in America” by the 20/20 television program had an office that was described as “austere and tiny as that of an entry-level programmer,” and he and his top executives flew coach class and had no reserved parking spaces at Cisco's San Jose, Calif., headquarters.

David R. Calhoun

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