John Chambers, the CEO and Chairman of CISCO said, “Change is easier when it happens to others than when it does to you. When it happens to us, it makes us uncomfortable.” The CISCO Chief was speaking at the India Today Conclave 2010.
The Chambers insisted that there is an urgent need to revamp the health can education situation in India for this to happen. He also said that every function of CISCO is performed with scale, speed and flexibility.
When asked about collaboration, Chambers said, “I like command and control, but that is not the future. The future is about collaboration and teamwork. It is a new decade, but change cannot happen in incremental steps, because that will not make you lead as a country. Change happens to us all; you have to embrace it even if it makes you uncomfortable.”
Talking about a new technology called Flip which allows creation of digital movies from handheld devices; he said that this technology is great to make video blogs. He also added, “But it’s important that you create the infrastructure so that youngsters can make full use of it. And it is equally important to provide technology as it enables people to participate in the created growth.”
He told the audience, “India is destined to lead, and once you get moving, your speed will be amazing. Adapting successfully to change is premised on dealing with transitions.” Chambers explained, “It is about applying innovation to catch markets in transition. It is the ability to catch transitions and governments who support that, which is important. And that is happening in India.”
Chambers added, “I spend no time on the competition; we spend our time catching market transitions. We at CISCO dealt with the downturn, realigned the business, connected with customers and as a result we gained market share in almost every category. The only fear I have is missing market transitions and moving too far away from our customers. CISCO’s travel budget has come down from $750m to $250m as it has successfully mastered and used the video technology that does with the old fashioned way of business travel for meetings.
Emphasizing the importance of Indian markets, he said, “The biggest impediment to change in India is the leadership. I could change, so in this downturn I did not make the same mistakes that we made earlier. We went in with $30b in cash. We see emerging markets like India not just as markets to sell, but markets from where a majority of innovations will come.”
Then he turned the discussed towards education and told the audience that with virtual learning, the cost of learning in India can decrease considerably. He cautioned, “Don’t model the education system on the past, model for where it is going.”
