fallen in the river at the age of 6, only he was probably about 14 at the time. As I walked by the coffin, I was struck by how much he looked like me. I remember his face like it was yesterday. He would have been much stronger than I’d been at 6 and certainly a lot more savvy about how to get himself out of the rapids. I don’t know the exact circumstances of his death, but I suspect he died because he panicked. Nobody was there to remind him to hold on to the pole.
The importance of staying calm under pressure was reinforced by both my parents when I was growing up. I suspect the fact that they were both doctors came into play. I was a kid who liked to race bikes, jump off bridges, take up dares, and chase down adventures wherever I could find them. I’ll never forget running home after colliding with a metal pipe near the same river where I almost drowned. I had to run half a mile with blood gushing from my head. As I came in, literally dripping with blood, sweat, and tears, my mom put her hand on my head and told me I only had a puncture wound. “It probably won’t require any stitches,” she said. “You’ll be fine.” With some soap and water, a bandage, and a hug, I was probably sent back out the door. If any of you have parents in the medical profession, my mom’s reaction might sound familiar. When you deal every day with people who are injured, sick, and often scared, you learn the importance of staying calm. Panicking over symptoms does not help you diagnose the disease. As a result, I’m usually at my calmest in a crisis. To this day, when a friend, a startup, or even a competitor has a problem, they’ll often call me up to ask for advice because they know that I’ll help them separate emotion from the facts in deciding on next steps. My two sisters are the same way.
What I learned at Elk River has been critical in helping me stay focused and calm through crises such as the 2001 dot-com crash. That wasn’t a raging river but what I described at the time as a “100-year flood,” a stock market plunge that wiped out a quarter of our customers and 80 percent of our stock price. Many of our competitors died and, to be frank, I would describe that time as a near-death experience for Cisco as well. That said, I never worried that we wouldn’t make it. Not once. People find that hard to believe, but it’s true. Don’t get me wrong, the layoffs we had to do haunted me and I still cringe when I think of some of the headlines. I made some mistakes, but I never doubted that we’d make it. I believed that our fundamental strategy was right and I held on to that pole the entire time. I knew if we focused on what we needed to do, we wouldn’t drown. I’d learned that lesson in West Virginia.
Most people associate me with Silicon Valley, where I was at Cisco for 27 years. I still live in that part of California and find it’s an energizing and special place to be. Still, nothing can match the heartache and the hope that I feel for my home state. West Virginia is a place that a lot of people hear about but very few people actually know. Some might know of its beautiful scenery, rich history, coal mines, and hardworking, friendly people. Others associate it with hillbillies and communities torn apart by addiction and the despair of chronic unemployment. Like everywhere else, it’s a place that’s been dealt winning and losing hands over the years. We’ve all heard about the problems afflicting West Virginia, from the long-term decline of coal mining and lack of industry in once-vibrant industrial towns to low education rates and high addiction rates that some blame, in part, on the injuries that come with manual labor.
I grew up in a suburb of Charleston, but in some ways my first hometown was Ravenswood, West Virginia. It’s about an hour north of Charleston, where Sandy Creek meets the Ohio River, built on land that was once owned by George Washington. The then-future U.S. president chose the property in 1770 as part of his compensation for having helped the British win the French and Indian War. While he took note of the area’s rich soil and abundant wildlife in his journal, what he really liked was its location at the intersection of two waterways. Every day, pioneer families were loading their possessions onto flatboats and making one-way trips down the Ohio River to find new homes out West. It wouldn’t take much, in Washington’s view, to turn this 2,500-acre piece of land into a profitable hub for settlers heading to a new frontier. He was right, in 1770.
Washington didn’t get a chance to develop the area. He soon had his hands full with leading the American Revolution and becoming the nation’s first president. By the time his descendants got around to building there a generation later, the market had moved on, and the opportunity that Washington identified had gone with it. The land around the Ohio River Valley was settled and pioneers were pushing farther West by rail or road, neither of which connected to what became the city of Ravenswood in 1852. If Washington had created a place to stop for provisions along the river, Ravenswood might have been well positioned to become a transportation hub. Instead, developers bypassed it, extending their rail lines and roads through nearby towns. When it comes to getting market transitions right, timing is everything.
By the time I got there in 1949, Ravenswood was a quiet community of 1,175 people. Its natural beauty hadn’t diminished since Washington first set eyes on it. As a land of opportunity, though, it fell short. Many of the residents were older and getting close to retirement, including Walt and Myrtle Ritchie, and Pierce and Lenora Chambers. I knew them as Grandpa Bood, Grandma Myrtle, Grandpa Pierce, and Grandma Lenora. The two couples lived about three blocks apart, which was very convenient for shuttling a baby back and forth.
That baby was me. Both my parents were in medical school at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University when I was born, so my grandparents took care of me in West Virginia for a period of time to let mom and dad finish their studies. If they hadn’t stepped up, I could have derailed my mom’s career before it even started. For a lot of young women after World War II, having a baby put an immediate end to any hope of having a career. The ads that had encouraged women to work in factories during the war were being replaced with the message that they should give those jobs back to the men and go home to raise kids. My mom wanted to raise kids but she also wanted to be a doctor, and my grandparents supported that dream. They’d all gone to college in West Virginia. In fact, through four generations, every single member of my family has earned a college degree, including every aunt, uncle, and cousin. It was understood by each member of my family that after high school, you’d go on to college and get a degree. My sisters and I never questioned that we’d do the same.
You’ll find Democrats and Republicans in my family, along with vegetarians and meat-eaters, and plenty of other differences that can spark a fun debate, but there are two things that all of us share to our core: a deep love of West Virginia and an unwavering belief in the power of education. We were taught that your best weapon in life is your brain, so you’d better sharpen it. Education was the great equalizer. You didn’t have to be born into privilege to get the skills to compete, and no amount of privilege would help you if you didn’t invest in building your skills. How you’d use those skills would depend on what the market needed. An education gave you something that no one could take away: flexibility to do what you want and the process for continuous learning.
That philosophy shaped how my family responded to the ebb and flow of West Virginia’s fortunes, and it would also shape how I ran Cisco. Education enabled my grandparents and their children to move from a contracting industry to a growing one. My family didn’t work in the coal mines that came to dominate West Virginia’s economy, though I knew a number of people who did. Instead, Grandpa Bood built a successful road construction company while Grandpa Pierce ran a bank. Grandma Myrtle and Grandma Lenora were both active in the community and pushed to improve education throughout the state. I learned early on that to have transformative change, groups had to come together, whether it was government and business or workers and managers. You had to find common ground and shared goals to get things done. I can still vividly remember the exciting, emotional debates that would occur around my grandparents’ and parents’ dinner tables when they discussed how education must change to create the skills needed for the jobs of the future. There was also, as you would expect, a healthy give-and-take about which political party was best equipped to do this. But the key takeaway was always that government and business leaders must work together to position the nation, state, or county for the future. I have said many times before that the two greatest equalizers in life are education and the internet. I believe that now more than ever. It is why, over the last 25 years, one of the ways I have tried to give back is to help spur this discussion with government and business leaders that the current education system is letting us down and will continue