Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today's Profit and Drives Tomorrow's Growth
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- ISBN13: 9780137083640
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“Doing Both shows how Cisco turns business questions into market answers, offering real-life examples that will benefit forward-looking leaders.”
—Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE
“The best business books build around a single idea, often contrarian and counterintuitive. Everyone knows you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. One of the first things you learn at business school is that management is about making difficult choices. Well, not always. This book persuades the reader that in decision making ‘and’ is often better than ‘or.’ Well worth the read.”
—Sir Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco
“Companies are often confronted with false choices, such as disruptive or sustaining innovation and optimization or reinvention. This book draws on Cisco’s impressive track record over the last decade to illustrate that the correct strategy is always to do both.”
—Ratan Tata, Chairman, Tata Group
“I have a very short personal list of ‘most-admired companies,’ and Cisco is one of them. Its management team has figured out how to break many ‘either-or’ tradeoffs that limit most companies’ abilities to innovate and grow. This book is a lucid, cogent chronicle of how they do this. Your entire management team should read it.”
—Clayton Christensen, Robert & Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma
“Insightful recommendations from a key executive within Cisco, the game-changing leader in networking for the Internet.”
—Garth Saloner, Philip H. Knight Professor, and Dean, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
“Doing Both brings together many powerful lessons behind the story of Cisco, a company with a long record of delivering consistent innovation and strong business results. I encourage senior executives to embrace the challenges presented in this thoughtful book.”
—Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director, McKinsey & Company
Over the past seven years, in a highly unstable global economy, Cisco doubled revenue, tripled profits, and quadrupled earnings per share. How? By Doing Both. When companies face key strategic decisions, they often take one path and abandon the other. They focus on innovation and new business at the expense of core businesses or vice versa. They stress discipline and sacrifice flexibility. They focus on customers and ignore partners. And they struggle. Cisco believes there is a better way: Doing Both. Doing Both means approaching every decision as an opportunity to seize, not a sacrifice to endure. It means avoiding false choices, reduced expectations, and weak compromises. It means finding ways to make each option benefit and mutually reinforce the other. In this book, Cisco Senior Vice President Inder Sidhu explains why “doing both” is today’s best strategy. Then, drawing on Cisco’s hardwon insights and the experiences of companies like Procter & Gamble, Whirlpool, and Harley-Davidson, Inder presents a complete blueprint for “doing both” in your organization, too.
Win by Doing Both!
• Sustaining and Disruptive Innovation
• Existing and New Business Models
• Optimization and Reinvention
• Satisfied Customers and Gratified Partners
• Established and Emerging Countries
• Doing Things Right and Doing What Matters
• Superstar Performers and Winning Teams
• Authoritative Leadership and Democratic Decision Making
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While simple in concept, "doing both" is very difficult in executing. The dozen or so examples gave straightforward insight to various approaches that Cisco has taken to create the organizational constructs, from "command and control" to "committees" as well as the enabling processes and technology. Knowing Cisco the way I do, I believe Inder understates the importance of Cisco's culture of accountability and execution in its ability to "do both." Perhaps a topic for another book by Inder.
One of the best business books I've read in a while, I would particularly recommend "Doing Both" as an important read for anyone who works closely with Cisco.
At the start, I was reminded of another book The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Robert Martin, which present a similar concept (integrative thinking) at a more clinical level. He describes the habit of parallel or complex thought - instead of a simple succession of thoughts in linear order, the procedure is complex, and the mind appears to be possessed of the power of simultaneous vision from different standpoints. Martin suggests that integrative thinking can be taught, although largely it is not, certainly something we might consider. Integrative thinking produces possibilities, solutions, and new ideas. It creates a sense of limitless possibility. Conventional thinking hides potential solutions in places they can't be found and fosters the illusion that no creative solution can be found.
Inder takes integrative thinking to the business level through his magnificent stories exploring ways to do both:
* Sustaining and Disruptive Innovation
* Existing and New Business Models
* Optimization and Reinvention
* Satisfied Customers and Gratified Partners
* Established and Emerging Countries
* Doing Things Right and Doing What Matters
* Superstar Performers and Winning Teams
* Authoritative Leadership and Democratic Decision Making
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, I'm sure you will too.
Inder Sidhu is the Senior Vice President of Strategy & Planning for Worldwide Operations atCisco, and the author of Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today's Profits and Drives Tomorrow's Growth. Follow Inder on Twitter at @indersidhu
Inder has delivered a very profound and well thought concept in simple and actionable words. It's interesting how he has articulated that doing both and pursuing competing priorities has a multiplier effect. A great resource for business leaders, executives and managers.
This book gave me new insights into the company's strategies, operating principles, and business practices. Overall, it is an easy, engaging, and thought-provoking read. But for readers who don't already have a good knowledge of the company and its history, some of the discussion may seem a bit too focused toward insiders.
Many companies attempt to have a sort of "skunk works" (Xerox PARC, Alcatel-Lucent, Google, 3M, Motorola), but these idea mills often fail to produce real products. Not enough resources are put behind disruptive ideas, and there is little drive to upset the bureacracy outside the skunk works to have disruptive innovation.
Sidhu proceeds to discuss how Cisco can both produce sustained innovation and disruptive innovation, covering their business model both through internal development and external acquisition. Lots of real-life examples of both failed business stories and successful ones highlight this short business tome that illustrate his point.
At times the book felt a little tedious, but the overall text was succinct and to the point. I enjoyed it and picked up information I will be sure to incorporate into my day to day business knowledge. Definitely recommended, and a good airplane read!
