D.P. Venkatesh

The Rule of Thirds Not in photography. In innovation at scale. @Cisco’s story over the past decade has, in many ways, been the story of an underdog. Many of our biggest wins were improbable victories. People didn’t think we could pull them off. The strange thing is that even after a series of successes, we still think like the underdog. That’s probably what I am most proud of. And I hope we never lose that. A few years ago, we started asking ourselves a question: How do you get the velocity of a startup AND the scale of a large company? Notice I said velocity, not speed. Speed is how fast you move. Velocity is how fast you move in the same direction. A thousand teams moving extremely fast in a thousand directions is not velocity. It is fragmentation. Historically, Cisco operated more like a holding company. The pathway to success was often becoming a General Manager. People aspired to run their own business, with their own P&L, engineering, sales, marketing, product and design teams. That can create local speed. But local optimization is the enemy of platform scale. Different metrics emerge. Different value propositions emerge. Different architectures emerge. Eventually, the organization starts competing with itself for complexity. So we made a fundamental shift: From a holding company to a platform company. That required changing more than our architecture. We had to change our operating system.