When the Business Roundtable issued a statement in August arguing that companies should no longer advance only the interests of shareholders, Cisco’s chief executive, Chuck Robbins, was among those acclaiming the release as a seminal moment for corporate America.
Yes, Mr. Robbins is a board member of the Business Roundtable, a lobbying organization that represents many of America’s largest companies, and chairman of its immigration committee. But the statement also seemed to reflect some of what he had already been doing at Cisco, which he has run since 2015.
Though Cisco is an enterprise technology company that makes its money selling phones, video conferencing gear and data centers, it has also emerged as a good corporate citizen when the tech industry could use a few.
Cisco made a major grant to combat homelessness in Silicon Valley. It has set ambitious goals to reduce emissions. And Mr. Robbins, 54, who grew up repairing fences in rural Georgia, recently joined the board of the Ford Foundation, which is working to address inequality in its myriad forms.
This interview, which was condensed and edited, was conducted at Cisco’s offices in New York.
Where did you grow up?
I was born in Georgia, and I grew up in a small town called Grayson. My father was a planning and zoning commissioner for the town, which wasn’t all that complicated. And he was planning and zoning commissioner for the sister town, called Snellville, which still wasn’t very complicated. My mother was a secretary at the courthouse in the county.
My grandfather was right next door, and he had a farm. He was a preacher, and the farm was primarily just for sustenance, just to feed everyone. They grew everything, from corn to vegetables. We had chickens, pigs, cows. Preachers didn’t make money back then, so this was how he fed his family. And we all kind of worked on it. You go gather eggs in the morning or you’d be out repairing fences, whatever needed to be done.
What was your first job?
I worked in a lawn mower repair shop. And I suspect that the man who hired me probably had to work harder because I was there, as opposed to me making it easier on him. But I was always going around the neighborhood asking people if they had odd jobs for me to do, mowing lawns and things like that. I ended up working in restaurants as a busboy. I bagged groceries in a grocery store. Then in college, I ended up working in the computer labs.
How did you make that leap?
It was right about the time the IBM PC and the early Macs were coming on the scene, and I just loved them. I loved them. I taught myself how to code. Every time I got paid, I went and bought more memory for my computer so that I could increase the capacity. This was the days of bulletin boards and dial-up modems and everything else. It was pre-internet.
What was your first job out of college?
It was at North Carolina National Bank as a Cobalt programmer. I would get up in the morning, put on a suit, go to the bank and sit in a cube with your suit on, and program. It’s so different than today. But it was a bank, so you wore a suit.
Then about two years after I started, one of the leaders in the technology organization came to me and said: “We have these things called local area networks popping up, and we’re not really sure what they are. But we’ve hired three people who apparently know about this stuff, and we’d like for you to potentially go manage that group.” So I drove home that day and stopped at the store and bought LAN magazine, because I had no idea what they were, either.
What was it like for you to move into senior management?
The first management job I interviewed for I didn’t get, and that was a defining moment for me. I was competing with a guy who had a lot more experience than me and was probably the right guy for the job.
When I was told that I wasn’t getting the job, the head of U.S. sales for Wellfleet, where I was working at the time, said to me, “People are going to learn more about your character in the next 24 hours than they would’ve ever known about your character if you had gotten this job.” He was basically telling me, “Show up and be positive and support this thing, and you’re going to be fine.” A year later, I had another opportunity and moved into it.
Not long after you joined Cisco, in 1997, the company got hit hard when the dot-com bubble burst. Did you ever think the company was fundamentally unsound?
It was a crisis the company had never dealt with. We had customers who ceased to exist, so our business fell off a cliff. But I think that what’s clear now is that what we were doing had sustainability and it was very valuable, obviously.
We actually had to do a layoff for the first time. And most of us had no idea how to do a layoff. I had to go through training on how to talk to these people and tell them. It was awful. I knew that it wasn’t necessarily brought on by our own execution. But it still didn’t make it any easier for these folks. It was a really dark time.
“What do I need to let go of, what do I need to keep, and then what do I need to do differently now?”— Chuck Robbins
How did the company come out of that crisis?
Once you came to grips with the fact that we were coming out of it, then it felt like, O.K., we’re going to build a real business now. I remember John Chambers [Cisco’s chief executive at the time] said at one of our off sites that Jack Welch had told him, “Until you get knocked on your butt and get up, you’re not a great company.” I’ll always remember that. We got knocked on our butt. And then we became a company that had long-term viability.
How did you figure out how to lead larger teams?
Every time you get promoted, you have to think deeply about what is it that made you successful in that job and ask yourself, “What do I need to let go of, what do I need to keep, and then what do I need to do differently now?”
I’ve always believed that as leaders, you have to invert the org chart. When you look at the org chart, it’s easy to think that they all work for me. But you have to really believe that you work for the organization. Your job is to remove obstacles and help them achieve what you want them to achieve.
What did you have to do differently as you moved into senior leadership roles?
I had to learn how to be an executive. Some people overdo it on executive presence, as opposed to balancing executive presence with still being a human being. Some people are very rehearsed and very buttoned up, and there’s no human side coming out. It’s a very robotic kind of an approach to management.
When did you start thinking about your ability to use your role as a business leader to effect social change?
We had an all managers meeting in Florida, and it was one of the years they had been really battered by hurricanes. As we were planing the agenda, we had a block of time on a Wednesday afternoon for team building, and my immediate thought was, “We’re going to play golf, right?” Then a couple of ladies who worked for me said, “How about we come up with some ideas and we’ll come back to you?” And they came back and said, “Let’s take the whole team and do something giving back, do something philanthropic.”
So we went out to a Y.M.C.A. that had been just almost destroyed by a hurricane, and we spent five hours painting and cleaning. When we got back that night, the buzz was that it was the best team-building exercise they’d ever done.
Then when I became C.E.O., I stepped back and said, “O.K., how is it that a kid who lived on a dirt road in Georgia has become C.E.O. of a major tech company?” And I just realized that we have to run a good business, but there’s more to it. We need to take advantage of the power we’ve been given.
The recent Business Roundtable statement got at some of this.
The Business Roundtable statement reflects how most of us have been operating and how we’ve been thinking. It’s not like we woke up one day and said, “We need to actually do more in our communities.” We’ve been doing stuff. I think we all realize we do need to do more in our communities, but it’s not going from zero to something. The statement was sort of a stake in the ground and a public declaration that frankly creates a level of accountability.
What struck me in the statement is that there was no mention of sacrifice. The sentiments are laudable, but will the companies saying they care about the world and want to do more for all stakeholders say they are willing to take a little less and possibly pay more taxes?
It’s a balance, but I do think that is the discussion we need to have. And I don’t have the answers, to be honest. I think we have to do everything we can within the existing system, and then work with the public sector to figure out what does the next system look like.
I mean, we have to solve this as a country. As businesses, to maintain the U.S. leadership, maintain the American dream for everybody, we have to step back and figure out how we solve this going forward. Because where we are as a society is not sustainable.
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