Recently, in the Herald Tribune, there was an interview with John Chambers, CEO of Cisco. One of the things about the interview that I found particularly interesting was that it seems that Chambers is really into collaboration technologies.
You would expect a networking hardware and software company to be into collaboration – the entire point of networks is to interconnect computers so that two or more computers can work together. But Chambers focuses more on Web 2.0-style collaboration, talking about video and blogs.
Today’s world requires a different leadership style — moving more into a collaboration and teamwork, including learning how to use Web 2.0 technologies. If you had told me I’d be video blogging and blogging, I would have said, no way. And yet our 20-somethings in the company really pushed me to use that more… By the second [video blog], I realized this was going to transform communications — not just for the C.E.O., but it would change how we do business.
From MediaNet to FlipCams to TelePresence, it seems – and I’m only guessing here – that Chambers is trying to take Cisco from a “networking company” to a “collaboration company” – much like Xerox tried to move from being the “copier company” to “the document company” in the late 1990s.
But it also is worth pointing out that collaboration tools are more bandwidth heavy than they have been in recent years; Chambers choosing to video-blog, for example, rather than text-blog. Telecommunications used to be about voice, now it’s about high definition video. When you have a population of 20 and 30-somethings not afraid to use the technology, they’re going to push that technology to the limits. That’s a good thing, but it bears pointing out that you only want to push the technology to the limits… not over it’s limits – which is why network monitoring tools are so important to knowing exactly what those limits are – and give you an idea of how you can start to overcome them.
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