What the boy could not do well himself, he recruited someone else to accomplish. Specifically, he was not about to lose his childhood church-league basketball championship, but being slight and, while coordinated, not supremely athletic, he needed to attract great players to join his team.
That was something that the boy -- John Chambers, who would become chief executive of Cisco Systems -- had a real knack for. "His teams always won; he picked his people very well," said his father, also John, adding with a laugh: "Whether or not they were all Methodist, I was never sure."
PHOTO: THE NY TIME
The boy grew up, and those traits became the chief executive's trademarks: organization, execution, unabashed optimism -- and, pointedly, recruiting through acquisition. Cisco, the Internet behemoth, built an empire by buying technology from start-ups, not developing it internally. The style reflected that Chambers, unlike his best-known counterparts in Silicon Valley, was foremost a salesman, not a technologist.
Now this formula is being tested.
Cisco, whose fortunes rose and fell mercurially with the Internet bubble, is acquiring companies at a markedly slower pace. Industry analysts and some former Cisco executives wonder if it can buy its way to another pinnacle, find another means to soar and to develop and mine new markets, or whether its best days are behind it, with its legacy tied inexorably to the irrational exuberance of the boom. After all, its current businesses are on a pace to register about US$19 billion in revenue this fiscal year, a 13 percent decline.
In short, Cisco is in a midlife crisis. And it has fallen upon Chambers to field a new winning team. "This is not a company you want to bet against," said Chambers, 52, whose competitive drive can be masked by the staccato twang of Appalachia.
Then again, there is no way around it: those who placed their bets with him in 2000 did not just lose -- they were battered. In March 2000, Cisco's market value peaked at US$555 billion, briefly eclipsing Microsoft as the world's most valuable company. Cisco's market value has since dropped more than US$450 billion, costing its shareholders five times what Enron cost its investors.
The company, which Chambers said was caught by surprise when corporate technology spending went from 100km an hour to zero in the blink of an eye, wrote off US$2.2 billion in unused inventory last year. It declared its first quarterly loss ever.
It laid off 8,000 people -- 17 percent of its work force -- casualties in part of Chambers' zealously optimistic outlook for the markets for routers and Ethernet switches, Cisco's main products, which route data among and within companies.
Yet Cisco is far from undone. While technology spending has stagnated, the company remains the Shaquille O'Neal of its core markets, dominating the competition. Cisco held 81 percent of the US$7 billion market for routers last year and a 62 percent share of the US$11 billion market for switches, according to the Dell'Oro Group, a market research firm.
Routers direct data to a neighborhood while switches deliver it to a particular office.
Still, after the bust, Chambers has sought to move Cisco past triage and into long-term rebuilding by reorganizing the company, cutting costs and focusing on new markets, like Internet telephony, security and wireless communications.
He acknowledged that he had erred during the boom by concentrating so much on next-generation telecommunications carriers. Those customers crashed and burned, and Chambers now courts their rivals, traditional phone companies. For the last 12 months, he has taken only US$1 in salary and options on two million shares at around US$16 a share. The stock closed Friday at US$13.74.
The strategy has been well received on Wall Street. Many stock analysts who cover Cisco remain bullish about the company and Chambers, whom they credit with seeing and capitalizing on technology trends. That may be why Cisco sales have fallen far less than those of its competitors, as Chambers is fond of pointing out.
Chambers says he tries to be consummately focused on consumers. He says he asks people constantly what Cisco can do better -- not only customers, but everyone he meets who is willing to express an opinion. He said recently that two passing joggers stopped him to say hello, and he asked them, "What do you think we ought to do better?" Two nights later, he asked the car valet at a restaurant, who said, "Keep doing what you're doing."
"I learn by listening," Chambers said. If he hears the same thing two or three times, he added, it may be worth acting upon.
But critics are skeptical. After all, they ask, how much could the chief executive of one of the world's largest high-technology companies learn from a car valet or passing joggers? The critics suggest that his inquiries are more the stuff of seduction, a constant effort to endear himself to whoever is listening. Others say they mask a more aggressive streak.
David House, now chief executive of Allegro Networks, said that when he was chief of Bay Networks, which competes with Cisco, he once had a contract all but signed with a company that had been buying its equipment and getting technical support from Cisco. At the last minute, the company backed out of the order.
Chambers says he gleaned his people skills from his mother, June, a psychiatrist, and his business skills from his father, an obstetrician and gynecologist who had a knack for business and real estate. They raised him in Charleston, West Virginia, where Chambers was a good student who overcame his dyslexia and loved all things athletic. "I tried to get him to collect stamps, but he wasn't interested," his father said, noting that sports and school were his interests.
Chambers discovered early on that he had the dyslexia. It did not prevent him from excelling in school. He received a bachelor's degree in business and a law degree from West Virginia University and an MBA from Indiana University. His father said his son succeeded not because of his unparalleled intellect but because of phenomenal organizational skills, coupled with a natural affinity for people.
"He's like his mother and I," the elder Chambers said. "We're not all that smart. We do okay, but we're not brilliant. He does have people skills -- that's his really strong point."
And he was not a quitter, apparently with one exception. He sought to get a pilot's license when he was barely in college, his father said, but stopped when he was three hours from completing the training. The father said his son secretly didn't want to disappoint his dad, who, disliking the potential risks, told him, "You screw up flying and you're going to wind up dead."
A spokeswoman for Cisco said Chambers quit -- in what must be one of the eventual multimillionaire's worst prognostications -- because he worried that he could not afford such an expensive hobby.
These days, he does not do the flying himself, but he has made enough money to own his own jet. He has two homes, a primary one in Los Altos Hills, an affluent area of Silicon Valley, and a weekend home near Carmel, an hour's drive down the coast. The Carmel house has a huge picture-window view of the Pacific.
Over all, however, Chambers says he leads a modest life with his wife, Elaine, with whom he has two grown children. He irons his own shirts, he said, and Elaine, who was also his high school sweetheart, "tells me to take out the garbage and reminds me that I'm not the CEO of the house."
For someone raised by a psychiatrist, he is not particularly introspective about his ambition.
"What drives me is building a company that will last," he said.
When pressed about his personal motivation, he added, "Changing the way the world lives, works, learns and plays."
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