How a Preacher’s Grandson From Rural Georgia Grew Up to Lead Cisco
Summary
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. 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. We had customers who ceased to exist, so our business fell off a cliff.