in our institutions. It’s easy to see why. Elections that could be more transparent and democratic in the digital age instead seem more vulnerable to manipulation and even hacking. Journalists can be as partisan as the people they cover and, even when they’re not, get accused of peddling unreliable news. Leaders whose countries could be hubs of innovation instead give in to fear and resentment, worsening the problems they promised to fix. More information doesn’t make us more informed.
That’s why it’s so important to get outside your comfort zone and talk to people who don’t cross your path every day—at the end of the day, we all need to remain as curious as we were as teenagers. That might sound like strange advice in a business book but I can tell you that my curiosity about things I don’t understand has been a critical factor in my success as a leader. It’s easier to spot opportunities and changes when you’re on the outside. That’s why teenagers can be so effective at spotting the next big thing. They have very limited power so they’re more inclined to look beyond the people in charge. Your product looks different through the eyes of different consumers. Sometimes, you get the best advice from people who aren’t your friends and, in fact, might actually be your rivals. I always listen to my critics and pay attention to the people who are trying to disrupt my industry. If you never feel uncomfortable or out of your element, you’re not likely to innovate in a meaningful way. There has to be some discomfort to be creative.
Being dyslexic probably gave me a head start. I was not comfortable in school. In fact, I found it to be really tough in the early years. Learning to cope with a learning disability is hard work. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking otherwise. I graduated from high school toward the top of my class, but it wasn’t because the words looked less jumbled on a page. I had to work through it and around it to learn what I needed to know. I was lucky to have my parents and Mrs. Anderson in my corner. Even so, I faced hours and hours of frustration, trying different techniques until something stuck. I love Mrs. Anderson but I do not look back on those years of tutoring with fondness. I hated going to those sessions. They were hard, but they did help me to develop a work ethic that’s stuck with me to this day. If you read about others who’ve reached their goals with dyslexia, whether it’s Virgin founder Richard Branson or Charles Schwab, you see that same drive and willingness to put in the hours. Once you’ve faced dyslexia, conquering other challenges can seem more manageable. You learn that you can achieve tough goals if you persevere. You understand your own limitations and learn to tap the talents of others to complement the areas in which you’re weak. That kind of persistence can come from having to overcome any number of challenges in life. What it does is make you realize that there are no easy answers. When one customer tells me that they like a company, it’s one data point to consider. If I rushed out to buy the company based on one recommendation, I’d probably be a fool. Sometimes you have to dig and be patient and go back again and again to get the right result.
When you visualize networks in your head, you often end up creating similar networks on the ground. If you can make sense of seemingly chaotic data points to create understanding, you will be rewarded. The network is more powerful than any one part. At Cisco, we created open platforms and networks of products that we organized into “architectures” to help people achieve certain solutions. We had networks of suppliers to build and take those products to customers, as well as networks of partners to achieve common goals that we couldn’t reach alone.
The power of your network is not just the number of people or devices connected to it, but also the strength that you create and derive from that network that gives you all those data points in a way that lets you make better decisions. A lot of what you see on LinkedIn or Facebook are fragile networks in which many of the connections are between relative strangers. Convincing hundreds of people to accept your LinkedIn request doesn’t indicate a deep network, and neither does the number of Twitter followers, especially now that we know that kind of volume can be bought. You can really only see the strength of a network when it’s put to the test. Do people come through on requests? Can you mobilize the network to take action on a shared goal? Are there multiple links between people within the network or are they all linked through you? The most resilient networks are bound together by a tremendous sense of trust. When I go to talk about a new product concept to a major customer in the Middle East and he cuts me short to say, “John, I believe in your vision because I believe in you,” that’s trust. When a stranger asks to connect on LinkedIn or someone adds you as their 4,743rd “friend” on Facebook, I suspect the bond is very loose, if it even exists at all.
How do you walk into an unfamiliar situation and connect the dots? The short answer is that you prepare. I’ve been very lucky in my career and I’ve found that the more prepared I am, the luckier I seem to get. The more I know about the people I’m about to meet, the better questions I’m able to ask and the better the products we’re able to build or buy. I use the same strategy for every trip, every event, and every customer meeting that I’ve done over the last 25 years. It’s based on a playbook developed by my assistant Debbie Gross, which is another reason I couldn’t have run the company without her. She or another member of the communications team created a briefing book organized to follow the flow of each day and each event or meeting. It contained bios of every person I was scheduled to meet, data on what Cisco was doing for that client or their community, background clips related to our presence in that community, and observations from the local team, as well as a summary of our objectives for every meeting, and any other context I might need. To this day, if I’m going to speak, my briefing notes are in the playbook, too. It’s organized in such a way that I can dive into the specifics of each person and event while tying that data back to the big-picture objectives. Think of it as a replicable innovation playbook for meetings that’s enabled me to get dramatically more value out of each interaction. What it does is allow me to better tailor my insights to connect with whomever I’m talking with.
I hadn’t realized how ingrained that habit had become until Elaine pointed it out. She’s not just my wife but also my most trusted friend and my toughest critic, so when she gives me a compliment, I rarely forget it. After one dinner several years ago, she remarked on how much effort I had put into finding an area of interest to connect with each person at the dinner that night. She was right. I wanted to arrive, armed with stories and contacts and strategies to connect with everyone I was about to meet. Not only did it make for a better evening, but I also walked away with new ideas and connections I’ve maintained to this day.
One final thought I’d offer if you want to really learn to look at the world like a dyslexic is to let down your guard and be humble. As a general rule, leaders are not a humble bunch. It takes confidence to lead people and a certain degree of cockiness to make tough decisions when there are smarter people in the room who disagree. (Believe me, there almost always are.) You have to connect with them on an emotional level. You don’t do that by dazzling them with your talents. You share a part of who you are. Talking about dyslexia made me more relatable for a lot of people, as did my willingness to make fun of myself—whether it was being the brunt of my own jokes onstage or a voice of comfort in a crisis.
As a leader, you might not think that you’re intimidating to people. Believe me, to many out there, you are. You might be intimidating to the people you hire, or to the ones who hired you. If you’re young, you may be intimidating to older people and vice versa. You can intimidate people because of your gender, your skin color, your accent, your clothing, your title, and any number of other factors that might seem ridiculous. That doesn’t mean you have to change who you are. But it does means you need to connect on more than just a superficial level if you want to get honest answers. You must be willing to emotionally connect with people—to really listen to their challenges and share your stories, too. If you only ask questions and don’t give any answers, you’re not enriching the other person.
One of the leaders who really convinced me of the importance of letting down my guard was Sheryl Sandberg. We were at a conference, shortly after she had written her groundbreaking book Lean In. As chief operating officer at Facebook, Sheryl could have written several books on her successes. Instead, she wrote about the roadblocks she faced as a woman trying to build a career while having a family. At Cisco, we’d done a very good job, especially versus our peers, on promoting gender equality in our workforce, senior management team, and board of directors. However, Lean In reminded