Erica, I'm Robert Reese. Welcome back to the CEO Show. We're here today with Jeetu Patel. How are you, Jeetu?
Great to see you, Robert. Thank you for having me. I'm doing great.
Yeah, absolutely. And my pleasure. And Jeetu is the president, but he's also the chief product officer of Cisco. And we're going to talk more about that. But let's start off. So I had had several interviews with John Chambers, who was pretty instrumental in driving Cisco. And I have been a huge fan of the credibility, of the innovation, of the culture, of the whole company. Talk about as president what Cisco is to you.
Yeah, it's a pretty special place. I've been here for about — it'll be six years in June, July timeframe. And it's been a ride of a lifetime. I was almost going to take a job, Robert, at a different company. I was going to start in nine days. And then Chuck happened to call me. And then one thing led to the other. And before you knew it, I started in nine days, but at a different company than what I thought I was going to start at.
The beauty about Cisco is we are a company that operates at scale, but with heart. And it's hard to kind of find that. Like, people really care about the community of employees. And on the other end, we are not shy to be extremely intense and go at a pursuit very hard. So I think that combination's pretty hard to find usually.
And you know, this notion of not tolerating brilliant jerks has been a great rule for us, where we tend to not tolerate brilliant jerks, but just, you know, people that want to work collaboratively with each other. And I think that the larger you get, the more I appreciate the fact that collaboration really matters, because humans can solve amazing problems when they work together rather than working against each other.
So with that, you're talking really about a very special culture, and it's no secret that Cisco has been in the top five of Fortune's best company to work for for several years now. What really is the secret to a great culture?
You know, I feel like culture is typically a set of norms that we use to define how we work with each other. And oftentimes people equate culture with posters of attitudes that they have on walls, and it's like, you know, it's the lived experience that's far more important — the set of norms or how you work together when things get tense, when the stakes are high, when there is conflict that needs to be had because it's a necessary condition of business, when extreme candor has to be practiced because people need to always know where they stand. I think those kind of aspects really define the core dimensions of culture.
And in my mind, I think where Cisco has done exceptionally well is we've been able to preserve certain things as we've scaled, but we've not been shy to have every person that comes in actually morph and modify the culture just slightly — add to it rather than just being very fixed in the mindset of culture, saying this is the culture you have to fit with it. I always tell people when we acquire a company, when we hire a person, I'm like, you know, you don't have to fit into the culture. You have to make sure that you actually contribute to it and make it different than what it was before you came in. And then each one of the people that come in actually morph it just a little bit and it keeps getting better and better and better over time.
What a smart answer. It's not something I've heard frequently, either. So, in addition to being president of Cisco, you're also chief product officer. So, that's an interesting balance. Everyone I speak with — CEOs every single day, Fortune 500 CEOs — and everyone's talking about what AI is going to do, what it won't do. How do you look at AI and technology and innovation?
You know, the way I think about this is — and this time is compressing — but every single, every few years, we come across these moments in technology where there's a massive kind of market transition that occurs and there's a platform shift, and the assumptions of how we operate change because you've actually got a whole new set of parameters that you have to factor into how you work and how things are going to evolve. My biggest learning has been if you try to fight those mega trends, you never end up winning. And so, what you have to do is you have to identify a mega trend, differentiate it from a hype cycle because it's different from a hype cycle. And then use the mega —
