Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today's Profit and Drives Tomorrow's Growth

“Doing Both shows how Cisco turns business questions into market answers, offering real-life examples that will benefit forward-looking leaders.”

—Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE

“The best business books build around a single idea, often contrarian and counterintuitive. Everyone knows you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. One of the first things you learn at business school is that management is about making difficult choices. Well, not always. This book persuades the reader that in decision making ‘and’ is often better than ‘or.’ Well worth the read.”

—Sir Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco

“Companies are often confronted with false choices, such as disruptive or sustaining innovation and optimization or reinvention. This book draws on Cisco’s impressive track record over the last decade to illustrate that the correct strategy is always to do both.”

—Ratan Tata, Chairman, Tata Group

“I have a very short personal list of ‘most-admired companies,’ and Cisco is one of them. Its management team has figured out how to break many ‘either-or’ tradeoffs that limit most companies’ abilities to innovate and grow. This book is a lucid, cogent chronicle of how they do this. Your entire management team should read it.”

—Clayton Christensen, Robert & Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma

“Insightful recommendations from a key executive within Cisco, the game-changing leader in networking for the Internet.”

—Garth Saloner, Philip H. Knight Professor, and Dean, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University

“Doing Both brings together many powerful lessons behind the story of Cisco, a company with a long record of delivering consistent innovation and strong business results. I encourage senior executives to embrace the challenges presented in this thoughtful book.”

—Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director, McKinsey & Company

Over the past seven years, in a highly unstable global economy, Cisco doubled revenue, tripled profits, and quadrupled earnings per share. How? By Doing Both. When companies face key strategic decisions, they often take one path and abandon the other. They focus on innovation and new business at the expense of core businesses or vice versa. They stress discipline and sacrifice flexibility. They focus on customers and ignore partners. And they struggle. Cisco believes there is a better way: Doing Both. Doing Both means approaching every decision as an opportunity to seize, not a sacrifice to endure. It means avoiding false choices, reduced expectations, and weak compromises. It means finding ways to make each option benefit and mutually reinforce the other. In this book, Cisco Senior Vice President Inder Sidhu explains why “doing both” is today’s best strategy. Then, drawing on Cisco’s hardwon insights and the experiences of companies like Procter & Gamble, Whirlpool, and Harley-Davidson, Inder presents a complete blueprint for “doing both” in your organization, too.

Win by Doing Both!

• Sustaining and Disruptive Innovation

• Existing and New Business Models

• Optimization and Reinvention

• Satisfied Customers and Gratified Partners

• Established and Emerging Countries

• Doing Things Right and Doing What Matters

• Superstar Performers and Winning Teams

• Authoritative Leadership and Democratic Decision Making