AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco President on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel

Survival of humanity depends on a successful AI. Birth rates are going down. If you have 60% of your population where you don't have enough people to take care of them, that could cause a lot of human suffering. When I got this new job, there is zero chance I would have been able to do it if AI wasn't there because I didn't know anything about so many domains that we were in.

You have to know the difference between a mega trend and hype cycle. When there's a mega trend, don't fight it. AI is a mega trend, one of the most foundational movements that we have seen in human history.

AI is moving so fast. One of the things I tell my team is fast forward six months from now. Get prepared for that world.

Every management book that you read will tell you praise in public, criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. What you have to do is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public.

Stamina trumps intellect. It's very important to have smart people, but you can become smart if you have curiosity and hunger and staying power and persistence. You can't teach hunger.

Lenny, I'm excited. Good to see you.

It was an amazing thing to pull off because we never thought we'd be able to do it, and we were really worried going into it thinking, well, we're trying to do fireside chats for 12 hours and there's a capacity of human absorption that we're trying to challenge. And so we tried to put a lot of breaks in there. We started at 9:00 a.m. and we ended at 9:00 p.m. and we had a couple hour break in the middle, but everyone stayed and everyone was engaged and we could have gone until 11 and it would have been fine. And it's because the quality of the conversations and the caliber of the guests that were there made a world of a difference.

I'd say a few things. One is, you know, the capabilities overhang is real. I think there's more functionality. On one end there's kind of this paradox of progress. On one end, we are like, you know, we're solving all these amazing problems with science. On the other end, you talk to the enterprises, they're like, we're struggling with adoption. And I feel like there's help that's going to be needed within organizations. And the reason we pulled this thing together, the goal was: what is happening in the industry and how can we help customers make sure that they can make the most of it? Because we are in one of the most foundational movements that we have seen in human history and we've got to make sure that we make the most of it. So that was one: the capabilities overhang is real.

The second area is I'd say that it's harder when you go beyond some of the more obvious use cases. Like for example, coding is a very, very good use case that you know you're starting to get a lot of success in. I mean we just had our first product that we think we will be in the next two weeks 100% written with AI, right? I don't think that's as easy when you go into every other function of the business, and that was actually very apparent that hey, this is going to require some nuance and understanding of how every business works.

And then the third one, which is a really interesting takeaway, and Marc Andreessen talked about this in your podcast a few days ago. In fact, when I talked to him, I actually started with your podcast because it was so interesting. And then we dug into it a little bit more. But like, and then you know, Kevin Scott was also talking about this, but this notion of the fact that birth rates are going down and we have a demographic shift that's happening in the world and there's going to be more people that are in the older age bracket than younger age bracket. And those older people are going to need folks to take care of them. And historically in society, that's actually always been the case. But we might be at a point where that might not be the case. And when that's not the case, you know, we worry about AI taking our jobs. I think that survival of humanity depends on a successful AI because at some point if you have, you know, 60% of your population that's in a demographic where you don't have enough people to take care of them, that could cause a lot of human suffering. So I don't think people talk about this enough and that's something that we have to take a moment and digest that this is so important for our collective success moving forward.

The older I get, the more I believe that we are actually in a simulation.

We have 90,000 employees. 43,000 watch the stream.

You know, innovation in my mind is a choice. So like, you know, I always find it interesting when people say, well, you know, you're a large company, you can't innovate. You're a small company, you can innovate. It's like, no, it's just a choice. Every day you come into work and you can choose to be thinking about being creative or you can choose to not be creative. It's like a little binary. It's a binary choice you can make every hour, right? Every minute of every day. And so we made that choice that says Cisco is going to be not just an iconic company. And you know, Chuck Robbins, our CEO, says this very eloquently. He's like, I want Cisco not just to be an iconic company. I want Cisco to also be an iconic and innovative company. And so we've got to make sure that we are actually innovating with the set of constraints that we are dealt with. You know, like every company has their own set of constraints and we have our own set of constraints and we have to make sure that given those constraints we have to actually innovate really well.

Now what are the two or three things that have happened that have really helped us out? One was being very clear on what is up for debate and what is not up for debate, because what can end up happening is you can always have a pocket veto in a large company where if you ask enough number of people, people say no. If you're a large company, you ask enough number of people, someone's going to say no, right? And so when you have conviction about something that's happening that is going to be a bet that you need to place. Like you know, what most people think in large companies is large companies don't experiment. That is in fact not true. Large companies experiment a lot. What large companies don't do is when an experiment works, they don't go all in and double down. They try to keep hedging.

We didn't hedge on AI. We said we're going to go all in. That was number one. What that meant was we had to get people to understand that their personal success and the success of the company are very aligned in us getting dextrous with the use of AI. That means that if they feel like for some reason AI is going to take their job or AI is going to be negative for them, we had to reassure them that that was not the case. But the reverse was guaranteed to be the case: that if you didn't use AI, if you weren't going to be dextrous in whatever job function you're doing, then your job is probably not going to be that relevant over here in the long run.

So that was the first thing that we did. I'm not a big fan of top-down hierarchy of going out and doing things. In fact, deep down inside I don't respect hierarchy as much. I feel like it can constrain you at times, but I wanted to make sure on this one we were very, very deliberate. The entire company is on the same page. We are an AI-first company, right? And this happened, we were kind of working towards it even prior to ChatGPT, but ChatGPT became that seminal moment in November of '22 that we actually did that. So that was one.

Number two was we had to make sure that we defined what success looked like. The way that individual success was defined was everyone wanted to be a GM at Cisco. They wanted to own their own P&L, be a general manager, because they felt like in order for me to move up the ranks, I need to be a general manager, which means I need to have my own sales team, I need to have my own marketing team, I need to have my own product team, I need to have my own engineering team. I'm going to make sure I run my own silo. And if you're a $40 billion business in product revenues, $45 billion, whatever we were at the time, and then all of a sudden your goal is that you're going to just run a bunch of $40 million businesses and break it up into a series of $40 million businesses, that's actually not a good thing for the company.

So the thing we did was we said we have to become not a holding company of 251 acquisitions and thousands of different products. We have to become a platform company, and the characteristic of the platform is you have to be tightly integrated where the customer feels the same emotion no matter what product of ours they use. Right? There's the same set of expectations that can be served: reliability, trust, elegance and design, solving a problem in the most efficient way. Those are the things we want to strive to do.

But you don't have to buy everything all at once because we also want to be realistic about the fact that not every customer only uses Cisco top to bottom. There's an ecosystem. So loosely coupled but tightly integrated. You don't have to buy everything all at once, but boy, when you do buy two things together, they work like magic. So that was the second big thing we did.

And then the third one we did was we said, let's make sure that we have a mental model shift in the company. And we did this about five, five and a half years ago, which when I first joined this was a very deliberate decision, which was we cannot operate in a walled garden. We have to make sure that we operate in an open ecosystem, which means we have to be completely comfortable with having a competitor that we're going to partner with, and that's okay. You know, we don't have to think about this in a zero-sum manner where in order for me to win someone has to lose. We can partner because if a customer has made a choice of going with company A and company B and we happen to be one of those two companies, we owe it to the customer to invest in their success in that other company because if the customer succeeds, that success has a flow-through rate to you that's going to be pretty high.

And so that's what we did, and I think those principles of building great products but making sure that it operates like a platform and having an open ecosystem, I think has been kind of central, and then not being confused about the fact that we'll be AI-first from the top down.

Cisco is a critical infrastructure company for the AI era. What does that mean? If you think about where the constraints are right now. If you think that AI is going to be one of the biggest movements and then you ask yourself the question, what could hold AI back, there's three things where we feel like we can have a direct impact that can hold AI back. Number one is there's an infrastructure constraint. There's just not enough power, compute, and network bandwidth in the world to go out and satiate the needs of AI. Number two is there's a trust deficit. If people don't trust these systems, they're not going to use them. And right now there's a lot of mistrust in these systems. You know, hallucination is a feature when you're writing poetry, but when you're trying to go out and run predictable systems, hallucination can be a bad thing. And these models are unpredictable. They're non-deterministic. And so they have to make sure that they have safety and security kind of factored into them.

And then the third area is a data gap. Like so far we've trained these models with, you know, human-generated data publicly available on the internet, but we are running out of human-generated data publicly available on the internet to train the models. And every company is going to differentiate based on their own proprietary enterprise data being used to train the models, synthetic data, and machine data, which is where the most amount of growth is. And the third category of machine data we can play a massive role in at Cisco.

So what does Cisco do then? If you think about a GPU, which is what everyone now has, it's very clear because of the great job that Jensen has done that here is what a GPU's core contribution is to AI. If these GPUs aren't together, you don't have AI. Because it used to be that you could train a model on a single GPU, but then what happened was the model got too big to be put on a single GPU. So then you had a server with eight GPUs that got connected together. So you could train a model with eight GPUs. But then that wasn't good enough. So then what happened was you said, I'm going to have a rack of servers that I'm going to network together.

That at some point wasn't big enough. And so then they said, I'm going to have a cluster of racks that are connected together. And that connected together is the operative word. That's what we end up doing is Nvidia makes the GPUs and we connect those GPUs together. AMD makes the GPUs, we connect them together.

Now what's happened, Lenny, is you have these data centers that might be hundreds of kilometers apart that need to operate like one coherent cluster, which means that they're completely in sync. Every GPU is in sync with each other when you're doing a training run. And that requires a very sophisticated set of technologies that we build to make sure that you could have two data centers 800 km apart, but boy, they run like completely in sync with each other. And that's what Cisco does. We provide the networking, we provide the optics technology, we provide the safety and security technology, we provide the observability, we provide, you know, the data platform. All of those things together for making sure that we provide critical infrastructure for the AI era.

Years ago, I had a chance to meet with Ray Kurzweil. You know, he was a chief scientist at Google for a while and I think he still is, and he had talked about, he was writing this book called Live Long Enough to Live Forever. And so I was talking to him. I'm like, what is the impact to human population if all of a sudden you can have 15 generations living simultaneously because we have an indefinite span of life? Because now all of a sudden, you know, everything has to change. Like how does housing work? How does agriculture work? How does transportation work? How does like everything change? And he looked at me and he had the most profound answer. And he said, you know, most people can't think exponentially because they always think exponentially maybe on a single dimension.

But what ends up happening in these things is you can sometimes, you have to keep in mind that exponentiality happens across multiple dimensions all at once. If you do have an indefinite span of life, you have to assume that humans are creative enough that they're going to find a way to have a three-day crop cycle and they probably will have 5,000-story, you know, skyscrapers and there will be a bunch of things in society that we have assumed are not solvable that will now be solvable.

So when you go back to your question and say what changes in this entire equation that has not been factored in, well I think today AI is looked at largely as a productivity tool and an aggregation mechanism. I have data all over and I'm going to be able to make sure that language can be used to compose the data in a way that I can give you, Lenny, the best answer to the question that you're looking for. That I think is like the 0.00001% of the tip of the iceberg, right? The reality is we will have original insights generated that don't exist in the human corpus of knowledge and we will have the physical world get augmented to language where capacity is augmented to humans.

And what we have to be careful of is that that capacity is working on behalf of humans. But if that capacity is augmented to humans, you can now do things that you really care to do and not do things that you don't care to do. And so like our biggest realization that we had when we were using Codex, for example, when we were writing, you know, code with OpenAI's, you know, kind of model and development tool, was the first three months we were screwing around with this and then there was this light bulb that went off. In fact, there was a forward-deployed engineer from OpenAI that told us about this. She said, hey, stop trying to think of this as a tool. Think of this as a teammate that got added to your team and your framing will change and the way in which you actually use the technology will change.

And that essentially, if you compound that to how society operates, that's going to be pretty profound as an implication, while keeping in mind that these safety and security risks are non-trivial and they're real and you can't be, you know, completely flippant about them because how an AI identifies its own success and its own ambition will really matter and we have to make sure that we actually keep guardrails around that because it is in service of humans. It is not to go out and build a society by itself. And I do think that those are important kind of checks that you have, checks and balances you have to keep in mind.

But the thing that people sometimes miss out in this very polarized narrative, which is we are either going to have nothing to do in society or this is going to be completely useless as a piece of technology, I think that's not a helpful narrative. In fact, what is helpful is saying as we reconstruct society for the next phase, how can we make sure that life gets infinitely better? How can we make sure that diseases get solved? How can we make sure that poverty gets eradicated? How can we make sure that how people learn and find excitement and joy out of life gets compounded meaningfully? If that happens, I think there's goodness that comes out of this.

We made a choice and I didn't know how that choice was going to go. That was actually not even an active choice. It was a passive choice. Frankly, even might have been slightly intellectually lazy in the way that we did it, but it actually worked out pretty well in the sense that we didn't really deprive her of the use of technology. Like, it's a school of thought that says keep technology away from the kids for a while. We didn't do that. And frankly, I didn't know how it was going to work out because there are things about the way that the generation is, and by the way, all of us, not just the new generation, but this kind of constantly being glued to your phone all the time and not being able to actually put that down and have a conversation, you know, is I think it's an important skill in humans to have and preserve over time.

And in fact, as AI does more for us, we should be able to have more of this time where I don't have to worry about every notification that's coming on my phone every minute of the day because maybe I can be more present in the moment that I'm in. She just turned 15 and the night before she was turning 15, what I realized is she is so emotionally mature. We were sitting down one night and she's like, hey, Dad, just so you know, I feel really good right now about having a very strong value system. I'm like, oh, okay. What does that mean? And say more. And she's like, well, can you name five things that you feel so convicted about that if the entire world disagreed with you, this is the day before she's turning 15, okay? The entire world disagreed with you, you would still feel like you were right on that and that would not waver you. She's like, I have a certain core set of things that I believe in where I am completely confident that if everyone disagreed with me, I'm still good.

Now, by the way, I have to kind of coach her on the, hey, when you get new data, be open-minded to changing your mind. But it was actually a very interesting dynamic which is, you know, if we can have them be exposed to technology but have the right value system, you might actually have the best of both worlds. And you know, the day ain't over yet. She's 15. There's a lot of, you know, chances for her getting influenced by external factors and all of that. But what you have to do is make sure that you instill the right values, but then also expose them to the reality of what the world is today and not completely insulate them from that.

And so the way that it worked out, it did end up working well. And we were lucky, for no credit to us, she was able to use technology to get her EQ higher and higher and we were lucky on that front and we know it can go sideways the other way too. But I do feel like right now, at least for my one daughter, what we try to do is get her exposed to the technology, but make sure that we focus a lot more on the values that we need to have that govern us on a day-to-day basis. You know, kindness, you know, not being arrogant, hard work, work ethic, those things matter. And I don't think those are timeless in my mind. I don't think those change because, you know, take risks, be creative, that kind of stuff.

I would take zero credit for it. I think she deserves a lot of credit for growing up to be who she's become.

Got to shout out mom.

That's right. And by the way, it's some of your beliefs and your system around you might change, but values tend to be pretty long-lasting and culture in a company tends to be pretty long-lasting. Like, you know, when Ben Horowitz talks about this very eloquently, the culture is just a set of norms that a company actually, it's not a set of beliefs, it's a set of behaviors that you exude within the company. And it's actually very, very true because when things aren't going right, how do people behave to go solve problems and come together? And that actually forms your cultural norms. And I think those cultural norms, it's very important to be intentional about it. And as you have more automation in the being intentional not just with humans but also with machines on what you want to do to create the guardrails, I think is pretty important.

Yeah.

One of the things that we would always talk about is in the areas that we're going to participate, do we have permission to play? Every company, you know, has to make sure that the way in which they provide points of insertion and logical entry into a market is a lot of times dependent on do you have the permission to play in that market? Do you have an avenue to get to your, to have a route to market to be able to take that product? Just by building a product that is amazing in some area, you don't end up actually getting it to mass-scale distribution.

And so one of the things that we would always do is ask ourselves the question, we're building this new category or we're building this new capability. Is it going to be logical for people that Box built it versus another company building it? You know, is it going to be logical for people that Cisco built it versus another company building it? So that's this notion of permission to play, the right to win. Do we have a right to win in that area because we have permission to play? And do we have the route to market to be able to take that product and get it to mass-scale distribution? And if you can do those things right, then actually your dollars that you expend on building product actually have an outsized return.

If not, then you can actually end up spending a lot of money on product where the product people think, ah, these sales guys don't get it. They don't know how to sell it. Especially in enterprise software, and the sales people think these product guys don't get it. They don't know how to build it. And so I think in order to stop that, what you have to do is you have to actually use your scale as an advantage and you have to use the areas where you've got the ability to have permission to play where people feel like this is very logical for a company like Cisco. Like when we say we're going to network the GPUs and make sure that we actually have a trusted system in AI, that is not far-fetched for someone to go out and think about because it's a very natural thing for us to do because for the past 40 years, we've been doing it for the rest of the infrastructure that was not AI. And so that's not a far cry to say, okay, we'll now do it for AI.

And I think that was an area that Aaron and I spent a fair amount of time on. And by the way, you know, I'm glad that he took that out of me. There's so much I've learned from him. The biggest area I've learned from him is you never give up and persistence beats intellect and stamina beats intellect any day of the week, twice on Sunday. And that guy is as smart as they come. But that is not the biggest reason he's successful. The biggest reason he's successful is he has an enormous amount of staying power in the game. You know, going back to my daughter's comment of no matter what everyone else says, his convictions and belief, he will actually stick by them and actually get through the hardest times.

You're pretty smart though. Like I've been watching your podcast for a while. Like you've done a pretty amazing job.

I agree with you in the sense that if generating code is something that becomes abundant, that doesn't mean you're going to have better technology just because you can generate a lot of code. You still need human judgment. You still need a level of intuition on what problems are the right ones to solve. And yes, AI can help you with all of that, but it's not something that like, that's where humans have a superpower. They have instinct and they can actually make sure that they can, you know, fulfill out a vision that says this is what I think this could be in the fullness of time. And so that I think is pretty important.

So the more the easier it gets for us to get the bottlenecks out to generate code, the harder it gets for us to make sure that there's not AI slop in the market and that we actually are very selective on what are the things that are going to be the most important things that solve the most important problems moving forward.

An example of permission to play is, I mean, there's so many ideas at a company the size of Cisco. We have constantly new ideas that keep coming up, you know, and then in those new ideas that keep coming up, people will always say, oh my goodness, this company is doing so well, we should just go into that market or we should just go into this market. And 90% of the times, 99% of the times, I find myself saying no. And the reason for that is you have to be extremely selective of where you expend your calories. And that caloric expenditure is where, you know, if you expend your calories in a very focused way, the results you'll get from that focus area tend to be outsized and disproportionate.

If you dissipate that caloric burn across a multitude of different areas, nothing gets enough girth to be able to go out and drive it all the way through. And so like, you know, why are we not in business-to-consumer tech at Cisco, right? Like why are we not going out and building things that are very, very B2C? Because I don't think we have a distribution channel that actually is within our DNA. I don't think that we've got permission to play there. That's an area where it would be extremely hard for people to grow that Cisco should be the one who's participating in that. Now, can we do it? Of course, we can do it. Is that where we want to go? Or do we want to go where there's so much opportunity in the areas where we can actually prosecute with the ability to operate from a position of strength that you'll just get a much better return for the dollar that you invest.

Chuck Robbins is one of my favorite humans and not just because I work for him. I work for him because he's one of my favorite humans. And what I've learned from him, he had this kind of great line. There was this, you know, piece of press that our media is very sensationalist by definition, right? Like they will try to create a very polarized view about the world where there actually isn't one. In most things in my life, things are not as extreme as you hear of the headlines of the media, you know, it's somewhere in the middle, right?

And there was one time that there was this article that ran and it was about like, you know, giving me an unnecessary amount of credit and frankly not giving Chuck as much credit about something that he has actually done. Like a lot of the movements that we've had internally wouldn't have happened if he had not hired me and given me agency to go do the things that I needed to get done and he was very much completely in sync with me on what needed to happen. And so, you know, when I saw this article, I had no idea the report. I reached out. I'm like, hey, I just want to let you know this was not me saying it's someone.

He said, don't worry about it, man. What I've learned in life is if you don't care about who gets the credit, you just go a lot farther in life. And it's so profound, right, in so many ways that he's just way too confident to let anything. And so the thing I've learned from Chuck is the importance of confidence and the importance of knowing what you're good at and what you're not good at. And when you're not good, you're going to assemble a team of people around you. He's just masterful at that. And it happens.

That's right. He's the CEO of Cisco. He's the chair of the Business Roundtable. He's a very dear friend of mine and I feel like there's a lot to learn from that kind of mental model and mindset.

And I've been lucky enough, Lenny, that, and this is just dumb luck, the people that I've worked with and for are all very, very close to me and I just don't let them go from my life. And so one of the things, for example, is I worked with Aaron and then when I was leaving it was very emotional, but I wanted to do something different, but we committed to each other that we're going to have dinner every six weeks. And Aaron and there's another co-founder, Jeff Kiser, and I, three of us, every six weeks in Palo Alto we have dinner, you know, and it's one of the most special things that I still do and it's a tradition now, it's been going on for six years. And I love it, you know.

You look at someone like Chuck, we have, I start my day with talking to him in the morning. We text each other and then I end the day talking to him in the evening and we probably touch base at least four or five times a day. They're not long conversations at all points in time, but we're constantly in contact with each other. And I feel like that only happens when you've established enough trust.

There's my first boss when I moved to California, this guy named Rick Devanoodi. And then there's another guy named Jeremy Burton. You know, Rick Devanoodi is still my coach. I see him every two weeks. Jeremy is someone that's a very dear friend of mine and we're neighbors and we moved and bought a place next to his just so that we could be close to him. And these are like special people in your life that have enriched your life in very different ways that I think you just have to make sure that you treasure.

About 30,000.

Yeah.

I don't know if it was, I mean I instinctively kind of knew it but it was very, very accentuated at Cisco because when you like, you know, when people say, oh, is scale hard? And my perspective has always been that the absence of scale is way harder than scale. What do I mean by that? Like if I have a startup with three people and we need to prosecute another idea and that idea requires, you know, five people working on it, I have to go raise money, right? Like it's an ent or I have to pivot my entire business.

If you have 30,000 people and you have an idea that requires five people, you just figure out a way that you allocate the dollars internally and say, let's go prosecute this idea. So in my mind, I always felt like absence of scale was way harder than the presence of scale and operating within scale seemed like it was like, yeah, you have more opportunity to do it. What I found over the years, not just at Cisco, but even when I, because I ran a small startup in Chicago for like 17 years before I moved over to the valley, what I found in the large companies is the communication framework and the

The lossiness of communication, the telephone game, so to say, has a profoundly negative effect if you're not intentional about it and if you're not careful of it. And there was this board member that we had. There's a couple board members. Um, you know, our lead director, Michael Capellas, is amazing. Um, there's this other board member, you know, Kevin is amazing. And then there's this one board member, Wes Bush, who we recently, um, you know, rolled off, but he used to be on our board. And when I got this job, he pulled me aside. He's like, 'G, I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to give you some advice and, um, take it or leave it, but I think it's going to be important for you to keep it in mind.' Like, 'What's that?' And he goes, 'Whatever you do, um, don't think about your story of the company as a marketing exercise. Think about it as the most intrinsic foundational exercise of the company and always be the custodian of the message. Don't delegate that to someone else to give it because if you have three, four, five, six, seven layers between you and the person who's actually doing the job in the front line, what you don't want to do is play the telephone game and assume that people will just cascade it when you go to your team and then say, "Okay, that team will cascade to the next team. Cascade to the next team, cascade to the next team." Every one of them will add a flavor with well-intentioned [input], and then by the time it gets to the end, people won't know what it is. So, always own telling the story.' And I'm like, 'That seems like it's a lot because like we have a very broad portfolio. We do all of these events. It's, you know, like I'm going to have to stand on stage for 90 minutes and just talk about...' He's like, 'Please do that. Make sure you don't...' And initially, the hidden benefit that came out of it that I did not realize is it massively, Lenny, simplified our business. And you know why? Because we have such a broad business with so many different industries, it's impossible for someone to be a deep expert in every single one of them across the board. Like there's just way too much surface area. But the things that we want to convey to the market, that the market should take away from us, if that story is not something that I understand well enough to be able to convey it, how do I first expect 20,000 of my sellers to be able to go tell it to the market? And how do I expect my customers to be able to digest that story? There's zero chance that would happen, right? And so that was my kind of big takeaway from this, which is don't delegate the storytelling. And the storytelling is not a marketing exercise after you've built the product. The story is why you build the product, to make the story come real. And so make sure that the story is there first and then that story has evidence and proof based on the products that you're building.

I want to make sure that they hear it from me directly so that there's no lossiness. You know, like we have this concept in networking called packet loss, when you, you know, you actually send packets over a wire and you have a loss of packets, then actually there's a loss of data. Like you don't want to have packet loss in your storytelling from you to the person on the front line because...

This is a direct connection and, you know, there's no packet loss on this one. Like you got to make sure it gets to the intended audience. And I think the reason for that is as companies get large, they can lose touch with the front lines. Like everyone gets really good with the math of the business, but they don't really always preserve the soul of the business. And there's a lossiness that happens because, you know, if you have seven, eight layers between you and the front line, even the message that's coming back to you from them is actually getting lossy. And so what you have to do is just preserve. And I think, um, what was said earlier about the intensity is the same way, which is you got to preserve the intensity, you got to preserve the sanctity of the message, and you got to preserve the clarity of the message so that everyone is clear on the direction we're going down. And if you can stay clear and stay motivated about that direction and make sure that everyone's on the same page on what needs to be done to execute, you will have success. If not, you will actually have guaranteed failure.

The first thing I feel is you have to have very clear thinking because the clarity of thought is what brings clarity of communication. So you have to spend the time with your team in sweating the details on what it is that you want to do and why you want to do it. The context of why is so lost, and constantly reminding people why it's important and having the least amount of asymmetry between the topmost layer in the organization and the bottommost layer is super. Now, by the way, you know, I'm a Section 16 officer. There are certain things that, for example, you're in a quiet period, you can't go talk about to someone else during that time period, like, you know, but that's not allowed. However, the most amount of context that you can provide them in the way that you can, because you're allowed to, the better off you are. And always treat people like adults. You know, like what I found is oftentimes when you go into corporate environments, like people start becoming very sterile in the facts that they provide. And sometimes it's okay to just say, 'Hey, we screwed up here. This was really bad.'

It's not meant to, you know, like one of the things that I found to be very counterintuitive because every management book that you read will tell you otherwise. What do they say? Praise in public and criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. I think what you have to do is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public. But when you're in private, take that moment to build the trust. Because if you build that trust and you tell them that you've got their back and you create a level of safety there in public, you don't want to be in a mode of posturing. You want to be in a mode of problem solving. When you're just giving people perfunctory compliments all the time and everything is just hunky-dory, rose-colored glasses, great, all your dashboards look green, but you're growing the business at like 1.5%. Like there's an asymmetry there. Something's broken, you know, it's like, what do we need to do over here? And so what I tend to do is use the exact opposite approach. I tend to be very, very direct in public. You know, be respectful, but be direct in public. 'This is not working. Let me tell you why it's not working. We got to face the facts.' And then be very, very kind of clear with people that you got their back in private. And don't be stingy with words on that front, you know. Um, because I feel like there are times when people are very stingy with words with people in private. You can't be stingy with words over there. And don't be stingy with critique in public because I think people need to make sure that we're solving problems together. And if we don't know the play that we're executing, if we don't know the things that we're going to need to do, then I'm not really certain if you're making collective progress. And I think it's not going to be fulfilling to either you or the recipient at some point. And those compliments will feel hollow because you didn't mean them, because you were trying to put it in between, you know, like Ben Horowitz says in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, like you have a sandwich. You say something really nice to someone, then you say something that's not really nice, and then you put... No, just treat people like adults. Tell them the facts. Watch your tone. I still have to work on that. There are times when I get very passionate, people think like, you know, but watch your tone and make sure that you debate. Conflict is a necessary condition of business, but the only way that you can have productive conflict is if you've established trust. And the only way that you can establish trust is by making sure that you spend the time to establish the trust. So spend the time to establish the trust, but then focus on the best idea winning and actually having the debate.

I was an apps guy. You know, I operated in the apps layer. I worked at Box, and even when I was at EMC, I was building apps that, you know, you build for the end user. Infrastructure is a different game. And the thing that I learned about infrastructure is you don't always get the glory, but you always get the blame.

And you have to be comfortable with the fact that you are working in a way that other people get the glory. Great infrastructure companies, the application companies get the glory when they're running on that infrastructure, you know. And so you have to be hardwired in infrastructure to orient on your ecosystem's success, not just your own success. And that is probably one of the lessons that I learned at Cisco in a very stark way, which I didn't fully appreciate until I got into the details of the infrastructure, going, 'Wow, if this thing doesn't work...' You know, like we were, um, every single time our infrastructure doesn't work. This morning I was with a medical institution and I was with a healthcare company this morning, and they were telling me that you... They were very complimentary. They were thanking us on the partnership. I asked them, 'Why are you doubling down with us?' And they're like, 'Because when the infrastructure doesn't work, people die. Someone doesn't get dialysis. Someone doesn't get a surgery done. And we need to make sure that we're working with someone where the infrastructure is working.' And so I feel like at that point in time, you can't be navel-gazing too much about, look how cool you are because you did something. You have to just make sure that you're really immediately shifting your focus to what does the customer do and what does the ecosystem do with your infrastructure so that the outcome is achieved. And you have to get very outcome-oriented. Um, and I feel like that was something that I always intellectually knew, but I didn't fully realize it until I came here on how important of a mindset shift that is. You are not talking about yourself. You're talking about the system just working. No one will come and tell you, 'Hey, Ju, um, thank you so much, my network worked today.' Right? But the moment it doesn't work, they're going to call you and say, 'You know what? My network's not working and my people can't work and patients are dying in the hospital.' And I think you just have to be comfortable with that.

That's right. And by the way, it's not surprising given that he spent like, I don't know, 26, 28 years over here. Um, like, you know why that, you know, he's conditioned with the fact that he's focused on other people succeeding from his work, you know.