Business Leaders Shouldn't Comment On Every Hot Issue, Former CEO Says
Five minutes with Cisco’s former chief, now an investor in tech startups, who says it’s a mistake to comment on everything.
John Chambers, founder and chief executive officer of JC2 Ventures.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergJohn Chambers comes prepared. The former Cisco Systems CEO walked into Bloomberg’s New York office with a thick black binder full of background material for the dozen or so meetings he had on a recent autumn day.
Those binders are a calling card of sorts, and also harken back to an era when business leaders made decisions without Zoom calls, smartphones or generative AI. “I had a playbook behind everything I did,” says Chambers, a consummate salesman who ran Cisco for two decades, during which the network equipment maker rose to become the world’s largest publicly traded company at the peak of the dot-com boom. Chambers acquired about 180 companies during his tenure, and boasts that he typically held onto the CEOs of the firms he bought — despite letting go of thousands of workers as Cisco’s growth slowed and smaller rivals ate away its market share toward the end of his tenure.