John Chambers, the chairman and CEO of Cisco, explains why he is extremely good at pitching ideas
John Chambers, the chairman and CEO of Cisco, explains why he is extremely good at pitching ideas 
One way to judge a CEO is by how he makes public some detail of his life all on his own.u00a0
This moment came for Chambers sometime in the late 1990s, when he admitted that he was suffering from dyslexia, a learning disability that manifests primarily as a difficulty with language, particularly with reading.u00a0
But many of us, journalists and government executives, who had last week gone to Cisco's office in Bangalore may never have realised that Chambers had this disability.u00a0u00a0
"Nobody is perfect, as my wife reminds me every day," he said during a presentation, in which he walked away from the podium to make his point to the audience by mingling with them.u00a0u00a0
Of course, while Chambers himself admits that he is not perfect, his company's balance sheet is a dream when he became the CEO of Cisco in January 1995, the company's annual revenues stood at $1.2 billion. Today, this has touched $40 billion.u00a0u00a0
What drives a man like him? In some ways, Chambers' dyslexia may be one of his strengths. It is said that he cannot read sentences, and this is why he doesn't use slides with too many words. He is also a person who prefers voice mail over e-mail. When you see Cisco's TelePresence videoconferencing system in this context, you realise why his company has taken so much effort to make meetings feel as if they are happening face to face.u00a0
In fact, during a TelePresence session a few years ago, somebody from 'the other side' (in Hongkong, if my memory serves me right) actually asked me 'can I have a coffee too?' and such was the immersive feeling of the videoconferencing system that for a split second I almost believed that you can reach across and hand over some coffee to somebody on a different continent.u00a0u00a0
Would Chambers have tried to create a system like this if he was not dyslexic? Doubtful.u00a0
Of course, this doesn't mean that all that Chambers does or says is correct. He has had his bad days especially during the dot-com bust, when he had to layoff 8,500 employees (then 18 per cent of Cisco's staff strength) in March 2001. Around the same time, he also had to eat his own wordsu2014during the dot-com boom, he had said that Cisco could be the first company in the world with a market capitalisation of $1 trillionu2014but he clawed back.u00a0
And during this slowdown, he is trying to do the same by getting governments to sign up for things like intelligent urbanisation. Last week, Chambers and Karnataka CM Yeddyurappa launched a roadmap for an intelligent Bangalore. Considering that in February 2009 the government of India under its National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) decided to invest over Rs 20,000 crore on 27 projects over the next four years, we can expect Chambers to try and sell many such ideas to other states in India in the near future.u00a0
Chambers may not be perfect, but he sure knows how to make good money for his company. And that is what really matters.
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