top 3,000 leaders) to read the book before having Sheryl come over to speak. Our challenge was getting the men to lean in, not the women. It’s easy to talk about diversity in the abstract. Once you bring it down to a personal level, attitudes change, and it has to start at the top. In 2015, Sheryl’s husband, Dave Goldberg, died suddenly while they were on vacation. She could have retreated into her grief but instead opened up about the impact of Dave’s death on her and their two young children, once again helping many others facing similar tragedies in their lives.
It reinforced the power of sharing our stories, strategies, challenges, and fears and in recognizing how our own behavior is influenced by our life experience. Will that ultimately make it easier to get the kinds of insights to see where the world’s going and connect on both an intellectual and emotional level with your team? I believe the answer is absolutely yes, and great cultures create healthy conversations on strategic issues for your company and the world.
LESSONS/REPLICABLE INNOVATION PLAYBOOK
Focus on the big picture. Pay attention to broader shifts in technology and the market, especially when they occur at the same time. As you learn to connect the dots, pattern recognition becomes easier.
Be curious. Look for ways to data-mine across multiple industries and people. Seek out reliable sources for what’s happening in different markets and adjacent industries.
Get outside your comfort zone. Think like a teenager. Your goal is to shake things up and see what others have missed. Try to shed preconceived notions that lead you to familiar conclusions.
Treat every customer and every encounter as an opportunity to gather data and learn. Where are they investing and what are they worried about?
Look for industry disruptors to understand the market gaps they’ve identified, the threats that are emerging, and the opportunities to disrupt in other areas.
Compare and contrast. Are common themes bubbling up? Align what you’re hearing with the data that you see and then make a bold bet.
Have the courage to share your concerns and have healthy debates. Open up to your team on both a business and a personal emotional level.
DREAM BIG AND BE BOLD…FOCUS ON THE OUTCOME
(Play out the Entire Chess Game Before You Make the First Move)
I’ve been criticized at numerous times in my career for being too big a dreamer, moving too fast, or being too ambitious in describing what could be achieved. I would argue the opposite. Almost every mistake I’ve made was because I didn’t move fast enough or dream big enough. I have zero regrets about my bold moves, even the ones that failed. My only wish is that I’d made even more and bolder bets, which is what I’m doing now in working with startups and helping their leaders to grow and scale their businesses. As Carlos Dominguez, my former colleague and president of Sprinklr once put it: “You can’t dip your toe in the water with John. You either jump in or you stay out.” He’s right. I don’t believe in half measures. That’s not how you win. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in business is that they don’t dare to imagine a bold outcome and understand what they need to do to achieve it. Whether you run a coal mine in West Virginia or own a taxicab in New York, you do not get ahead of disruption by making a few iterative moves. You start by disrupting yourself. You establish a bold and inspiring outcome and both anticipate and maximize the conditions to achieve that outcome. It’s a process that I still use today, whether I’m betting on robotic cricket farming to create a versatile mass-market protein to help solve world hunger or investing in technology that provides perimeter protection from drones and other unmanned vehicles.
The ability to imagine a bold outcome and set audacious goals to achieve it is not so much a personality trait as a mind-set. Two of the most visionary thinkers I know are John Doerr and Marc Andreessen. Both are legendary venture capitalists: John was an early investor in Amazon and Google, while Marc took a bet on startups likes Facebook and Instagram. Their personalities are quite different. Among other things, Marc is a technologist at heart while John tends to focus more on business outcomes. However, both are big-picture thinkers who want to empower innovators and change the world. They care about issues bigger than their own interests and constantly play out the long-term impact of current trends to figure out what matters most right now—and why.
I’ve had an opportunity to watch both of them in action over the years. I started working with John more than 20 years ago when we jointly founded TechNet as a national, bipartisan network of tech leaders to promote policies and initiatives that foster innovation. Both of us realized that Silicon Valley was disorganized when it came to dealing with Washington, which meant we were punching below our weight in terms of having a voice there. Flying in once a year to complain about the various ways in which government is screwing up was not a winning strategy. We needed to engage on a more meaningful long-term level. It’s how John operates with all his portfolio managers, helping them to stay focused on the audacious and achievable goals.
Marc takes a similar approach. He is a bold visionary who is not afraid to take on conventional wisdom and even rattle people from time to time. He reached out many years ago during the early days of Netscape. Cisco actually owned the trademark Netscape name at that point, and I gave it to them for free. We had no use for it, and I believe in being generous when I can. Among other things, generosity might one day open the door to a deeper relationship, which it did. (We also owned the iPhone and IOS trademark names but I didn’t just give those away to Steve Jobs at Apple, in part because we were already using them.)
I’m now working with both John and Marc through JC2 Ventures, where I can tap their expertise as investors, and they have asked me to help in coaching their CEOs. The goal isn’t to help them set more achievable goals but instead to dream bigger—and then make it happen.
Mario Mazzola, one of the greatest entrepreneurs and engineering leaders I have ever known, likes to tease me sometimes by leaning over and, in his baritone Sicilian accent, solemnly offering up a piece of wisdom like, “You know, John, vision and strategy are for the amateurs. Execution is for the professionals.”
He’s kidding, of course, or at least half kidding. Mario is one of the most visionary thinkers I’ve met, not to mention one of the most effective in bringing that vision to life. He illustrates what I’m talking about. Not only does Mario think 5 or 10 years ahead when it comes to developing products, he takes a similar long-term view when hiring and managing people. Any time Mario has come to me with a game-changing product idea, he’s already mapped out the resources and timeline needed to get it done, a plan for how to launch and scale it, and an often prescient assessment of the impact it will have on not just the company but the industry as a whole. He’s part of a team that has generated unprecedented innovation for Cisco, creating eight product families across multiple business lines that each generate more than $1 billion in revenue a year. Crescendo Communications, the company that he cofounded with fellow engineers Prem Jain and Luca Cafiero, was Cisco’s first acquisition in 1993. It took the company from selling a single product, the router, into a new line of network devices called switches that became Cisco’s largest business and transformed how we sold to customers. Mario, Prem, Luca, and a brilliant engineer and marketer named Soni Jiandani collectively became known simply as “MPLS”—a play on their first names and a popular networking technique that we helped to develop.
The team became legendary for its ability to attract Silicon Valley’s top talent to work on projects that disrupted and then dominated an industry segment. In terms of speed, disruption, and the ability to transform audacious goals into profitable products, MPLS was unbeatable. To compare them to NBA champions is to do them a disservice. When you create products that become market leaders in areas as diverse as switching, storage, servers, and software-defined