People of all religions loved this man and, at times, disliked him for taking a bold stance. He had this baritone voice and easy humor that made him a memorable speaker, yet the thing that made him so compelling wasn’t how he communicated but what he communicated. He never missed an opportunity to bring people back to the big picture, to remind them of a bold ambition or a vision that was bigger than themselves. He once told me that leadership was lonely and he was right. When you’re willing to make big bets, play by different rules, and talk about dreams that seem unlikely to come true, you’re acting like a teenager. You could fall on your face. If you can then make those predictions come true, though, you have a chance to make history.
My empathy for the teenage mindset that Shimon embodied so well may stem from the fact that I consume data in a similar way, though for a very different reason. Growing up in the 1950s, it was clear early on that my brain was wired a little differently from other kids’ brains. I didn’t digest information in a linear way; I took in everything at once. I could go from A to B to Z with incredible speed, but going from A to B to C to D to E…to Z was almost painful. That became obvious when I was learning to read. I’d scroll through a page in reverse order, from right to left. I’d transpose letters and lose my place midway through a paragraph. I’d often mispronounce words. It didn’t matter that I was good at math or strong in sports. It didn’t matter how many evenings I spent reading with my mom and dad, or how many days I spent memorizing lines in class. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t get it.
Sixty years later, my hands still sweat when I think about what it was like to sit there in second or third grade as we went around the class, taking turns at reading aloud. When my turn came, I’d inevitably stumble and a few kids would laugh. I was a pretty good sport so I tried not to show how much it stung. But the memory stuck with me. Maybe that’s why some people consider me to be one of the “nice guys” in Silicon Valley. While I’ve been known to tease close friends, I don’t ridicule people. It doesn’t matter if they’re my fiercest competitor or my closest friend. No one deserves to be mocked or have negative things said about them. I remember the pain of feeling ridiculed. For a while, I even questioned my ability to learn. When I was diagnosed with a learning disability (later diagnosed as dyslexia), one teacher warned my parents that I might not make it through high school, let alone go to college. Luckily, my mom and dad didn’t share that bleak outlook. The message they gave me was that I was a bright kid who just needed to learn a different way. Even so, I understood that this was a disability I had to fight to overcome. In a linear environment, going from A to B to Z would hold you back.
It was only later that I recognized the unique strengths that came with being wired this way. While I’ve made plenty of mistakes over the years—and I’ll talk about some of them in this book—I’ve had a good track record at spotting the big trends in technology. Sometimes, I’ve moved too early. Sometimes, I’ve tried to do too much. At Cisco, I was able to navigate multiple market shifts that killed our competitors because we sensed shifts in markets and technologies long before our competitors. Those aren’t my words. That’s what Bronwyn Fryer and Thomas A. Stewart wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2008. The same piece described me as having a “nearly uncanny ability to survive downturns, see long-term trends, and identify market transitions.” Hey, I’ll take that! (Let’s just say that I’ve been called worse!) What I learned—that anyone can learn—is how to gather lots of data, step back, and connect the dots to see trends. In short, there is an advantage to a dyslexic way of thinking, which tends to make you think less in words than in pictures and graphs that take all the information in at once.
I’ve always had a knack for spotting patterns and then figuring out what’s likely to come next. I also happen to enjoy it. I love making bets. Just ask anyone who’s lost a dollar to me in Liar’s Poker or by betting on which elevator comes next. (I’m not invincible. Those elevators can be unpredictable!) The little bets are for fun: a toss of the coin or a dare to get the juices flowing. The big bets can make or break a company, reshape an economy, define a career. We made a lot of big bets at Cisco. You don’t acquire 180 companies and go from selling one product to 18 different product lines if you don’t have an appetite for risk. The difference with the Cisco bets is that I never felt I was defying the odds. In fact, it was just the opposite: In every move, I had a clear sense of where the market was going, what our competitors were doing, and what our customers wanted. Everyone else on my team did, too. What might have looked like a shot in the dark or an illogical move to others soon became a well-lit path for us. It’s not because we hired only dyslexics into leadership roles.
What differentiated Cisco’s approach was certainly a level of experience and maturity, though we sometimes hid that well. The bigger difference was that we had a shared mindset, a shared process if you will. More specifically, we developed a replicable innovation process that helped us find new ideas, try new things, move fast, and even break some glass—and then we synthesized that data to generate insights that helped us make smarter decisions. To be clear, this is about cultivating the right mindset and risk appetite for success. The No. 1 driver in how we developed products and grew our business was—and always should be—our customers. If we didn’t give them what they wanted or needed, plenty of competitors would have happily stepped in to serve their needs instead. I can share a lot of stories about how we developed products and talent and disrupted industries by working with customers in different ways, but our successes all hinged on trying to understand where the market was going and working with our customers to get there. You compete against market transitions, not against other companies. If you don’t stay focused on figuring out what’s happening in the market, it doesn’t matter if you win a few battles here or there. A new technology or business model will come along, and you’ll be left behind. Disruption can quickly lead to self-destruction if you misread the market and end up fighting the current.
The first step is to make sure that you’re truly taking a wide-angle view, collecting data from multiple players, and connecting those disparate data points to get a picture of how the market is shifting. Without really being aware of it, I’ve been crowdsourcing, pattern thinking, and beta testing my whole life. I seek insights and feedback from everyone, especially customers. I don’t pretend to be an expert in figuring out tomorrow’s needs in aviation and city design and food production but I know where to find them. I coach new leaders to collect data from customers, study competitors, seek out disrupters, and look at pertinent factors to get a sense of the big picture. Then, I zoom in on a few points to see what’s really moving the needle, pick some options to explore, and check in with customers again. It’s like a map. As more data comes in—customer feedback, engineering data, sales, the arrival of new players—the connections and trends become clearer. Once you understand how the market is changing, you can develop the right product and strategy for where the world’s going to be. That’s not a bet but a way to turn pattern thinking into a playbook. The facts are usually all there to let you figure out the big picture, if you know the right places to look. The issue is that people don’t always like what they see and feel threatened by it or even try to deny it.
I was ridiculed in 1997 for predicting that “voice will be free.” Not only were telephone calls the main source of profits and revenue for telecom companies—many of whom were my key customers—but government regulation and the amount of capital you’d needed to build a telecom infrastructure made it hard for any startup to compete. I wasn’t really looking at that space, however, because I felt the real competition was elsewhere: the internet. In the mid-1990s, it became possible to break down voice signals and transfer them like any other data from one computer to another. To me, this challenged the fundamental business model of every telecom company on the planet. Why use copper telephone wires if you could use Voice over Internet Protocol, aka VoIP? The technology was sure to improve and the cost difference was, to say the least, compelling. On the web, it costs about the same to send data across the street as it does to send it across the planet. Frankly, the same could be said of phone lines, too. Much like the internet, phone lines are a fixed cost. Whether you make a single call or 100 calls doesn’t really matter. The cost to the phone company is the same. There wasn’t really a technical reason to charge as much as a few dollars a minute for long-distance calls. Phone companies had been charging such prices because they could. There had been no meaningful alternative. With the internet, that was no longer true. To me, it was inevitable that voice calls would