I bet you’ll find someone who will welcome you in, fix you up a hot meal, and get you out and on your way in no time. If we come together to invest in startups, innovation, skills training, and digitization, there’s no reason why West Virginia can’t rise again.
Knowing the warmth, loyalty, and resilience of its people, I think the state can develop new centers of excellence and reinvigorate coal country in other ways. The key to this will be strong leadership from the public and private sectors and from educational institutions like West Virginia University, where I am sharing my time, money, and ideas to help develop the programs, partnerships, and people we need to nurture a startup culture. New technologies will transform everything from healthcare to tourism. With a strong vision for what’s possible, reasons to believe, and resources to help train and move people forward, the opportunities are there. The conditions for entrepreneurship are not limited to Silicon Valley. In fact, I believe Silicon Valley has become somewhat insular and risks getting left behind as entrepreneurs create new industries on the other side of the country, as well as the other side of the world.
The strategy that will enable West Virginia to come back, that enabled Cisco to come back in 2001, and that has helped me navigate every market transition is one that I first learned from my parents, Jack and June Chambers. As doctors, they taught us the importance of distinguishing between the symptoms and the disease, to look at the whole patient. The visible condition of any one person, company, state, industry, or country is always a symptom of a deeper issue. To address the real problem, you have to investigate the specific underlying issues and learn to step back to see the patterns and trends that point to the big picture. In short, you need to connect the dots.
I saw my dad take that approach in medicine, in business, and in life. Dad had this unusual combination of skills and instincts that enabled him to spot the opportunities amid disruption. Along with being an extremely successful doctor, he was a successful entrepreneur. Some of my earliest and most profound lessons in business came from watching how he capitalized on disruptive trends that some of his peers railed against. He constantly taught my sisters and me to look for signs that things were changing and think about how those shifts would play out in 5, 10, even 15 years or more.
With that kind of mindset, my dad saw opportunities everywhere. When the interstate highway system was first constructed in the late 1950s, he was excited by its potential for Charleston. While other business leaders pushed for the highway to be built outside the city to reduce traffic congestion, my dad argued that connecting its major arteries inside the city could make Charleston an engine of growth for the whole state. He was right. When plans were announced, dad invested in a local heavy equipment distributorship; he knew consumers and developers would want to lease and service such equipment locally because of its bulk and cost. As the new highway routes took shape, dad built hotels where the roads converged because he believed people would want to gather around easily accessible hubs. He then built residential developments in Charleston that offered commuters easy access to the highway to reduce their travel time to work.
Dad wanted to invest in building a better future for West Virginia. That’s why he also played a key role in consolidating the hospital system and persuaded West Virginia University to set up a satellite operation in Charleston that became one of the first regional health science campus operated by any university in the country. He didn’t try to revive the coal industry or convince Kaiser to keep its aluminum plant operating in Ravenswood. Those industries were dealing with forces beyond his control or influence. What he did see were opportunities to enhance the state’s role as an academic research hub and make cities like Charleston more attractive places to live and do business. Dad wasn’t trying to fight the market shifts. He wanted to anticipate and move ahead of them. In every crisis, he was always calmly focused on the outcome.
Those lessons were reinforced early in my career at IBM and Wang. IBM was a revered tech giant when I joined its Indianapolis office in 1976. I wasn’t all that interested in technology but I was intrigued with what it could do. The computer revolution had hit Corporate America and no brand was more powerful than Big Blue. It was the home of the mainframe computer, which relied on massive room-sized systems to process mountains of data. The technology was so compelling that IBM’s leaders couldn’t imagine people going anywhere else.
If you weren’t looking, the threats were easy to ignore. I’d joined an industry giant at the same time that a kid named Steve Jobs was creating Apple Computer with two pals in his garage and another young entrepreneur named Bill Gates was trying to build on the $16,000 of revenue he’d made in Microsoft’s first year. Although my enthusiasm for helping customers use IBM technology earned me the title of top new sales rep in my multistate region that year, I soon realized that we risked being out of touch with the people we wanted to serve. Companies were moving to minicomputers and IBM’s version was difficult to use. When I shared the negative feedback from customers, my bosses didn’t want to hear it. We were the experts; customers were supposed to buy whatever we put in front of them. That attitude may explain why IBM also let Microsoft create the operating system for its new PC without demanding that the startup stop selling software to IBM competitors. At IBM, the prevailing view was that its proprietary hardware was unbeatable; software was the commodity. It didn’t matter if customers were saying otherwise. Like West Virginia, it got stuck on a strategy and mindset that no longer fit the market. In short, IBM was blinded by its success and wasn’t willing to disrupt itself. It made the classic mistake of getting too far away from its customers, cutting off the most critical source of research into what the market needed.
When I got a call from Wang Laboratories in 1983, I decided to take it. Not only was Wang leading the next wave of innovation—the minicomputer revolution—but its home base along Boston’s Route 128 was the high-tech center of the world. Much like Silicon Valley would later do, it had become a magnet for people who wanted to create technology that could change the world. The biggest draw for me, though, was a chance to work with Wang founder and CEO, Dr. An Wang. Many people knew of his reputation as the brilliant, charismatic leader who’d invented magnetic core memory and brought word processing to the average office worker with his revolutionary minicomputer. I had a chance to witness up close what a deep thinker and decent man Dr. Wang could be. At the same time, I saw how he failed to respond to a market shift and repeat the kinds of mistakes that had cost so many West Virginians their jobs. He underestimated the strength of the PC and the Internet Revolution, which cost 32,000 people their jobs. Instead of having the courage to realize that our technology wasn’t competitive against PCs that ran Microsoft, we faded from the game. I oversaw five rounds of gut-wrenching layoffs in the 18 months before I left. We weren’t alone. The entire Boston tech cluster lost out to Silicon Valley by failing to anticipate and adapt to disruption. Like IBM, Wang was so focused on stealing market share from its peers that it underestimated the impact of a new crop of competitors. What’s more, many of our investors and analysts applauded that strategy. As the industry leader, it seemed more prudent for us to build off our core business than to take risks that might sabotage profitable products. When customers moved on the next innovation, though, the core business crumbled. It’s a script that I’ve seen play out many times over my career.
I came to Cisco in 1991, determined to never again sit idly by as the world moved in a different direction. This time, I was betting on David instead of Goliath. I moved to Silicon Valley to help build a 400-person company that nobody really knew, making $70 million a year in revenue from a microwave-sized product that few were really sure they needed. Routers were a relatively new technology that let you send data between computer networks. In the days before the World Wide Web, the value proposition of that technology wasn’t clear to a lot of companies. Friends, especially from back East, congratulated me on joining Sysco, the food distribution giant.
What excited me was Cisco’s potential. I didn’t see a manufacturer of routers. I saw a pioneer at the forefront of a tech revolution that could change the way people work, live, play, and learn. In such a small operation, I could help create a culture that would not only embrace change but seek it out. Freed from the demands of entrenched interests, we could be the disruptors instead of the disrupted. Despite our modest size, we weren’t alone in spotting opportunities in connecting people online. There were about 50 companies in the networking business in the early days of Cisco. Today, all of them have either collapsed, exited the business,