How Cisco’s Chuck Robbins gets his team to ‘disagree and commit’

The presence of AI luminaries like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Sam Altman of OpenAI at a Cisco event earlier this year symbolized how one of Silicon Valley’s most established but staid companies has repositioned itself. The network hardware pioneer missed the shift to the cloud, but has recast itself under Chuck Robbins as a pivotal player in AI infrastructure, and it now counts Huang and Altman’s companies among its partners.

“At the end of the day, you have to connect all these things,” Robbins says of the chipmakers and large language model companies in an interview for The CEO Signal show. What Cisco provides is “the plumbing” to do so, after a decade of investments in silicon and software that have radically changed Cisco’s business model.

Some of those bets took time to show returns — six years, in the case of his $1 billion investment in Cisco’s Silicon One architecture — but Robbins is now reaping the rewards. Cisco’s stock is up more than 55% so far this year, lifting its valuation close to $500 billion as demand from AI hyperscalers takes its revenues to new records.

Robbins’ strategy has been to balance Cisco’s traditional hardware business with more software and recurring revenues, while playing to its strengths as a partner to big companies that are struggling to deploy new AI technology and worrying about the cybersecurity vulnerabilities it might expose.

But Cisco had come late to the cloud computing party, and it first needed to rebuild trust with its biggest customers, Robbins says: “You had to listen a lot, and you had to let them tell you how bad you were for a long time. And then you had to deliver.”

He also had to push through pockets of resistance in a company where “there were many hardware purists who said ‘It’s not going to work,’” he adds. Most people understood his vision for the company and have swung behind it, Robbins says, but when asked how he deals with people who did not, his answer is blunt.

“You get rid of them,” he says. “The one thing that is like death in an organization is passive-aggressive behavior.” Looking back on his time as CEO, he says, “the biggest pain point[s]” have been where he waited too long “to make a move on someone who’s not the right person.”

So his message to the insiders who doubted his software strategy was clear: “You can believe what you want to believe, and I’m going to believe what I want to believe — and you can be successful somewhere else.”

Casting the deciding vote when there are two bad choices

“Everybody says leadership’s lonely; I don’t,” Robbins says. “Leadership’s not lonely. My team is with me. But I tell people, when a decision gets to my desk, there are two bad choices.” The calls that CEOs get asked to make are often the ones that their executives cannot agree on, he explains.

Robbins’ approach in those situations is to “go deep in the teams,” asking two groups with clashing opinions of a deal or a decision to present their arguments to him for 90 minutes each.

His message to those teams’ leaders is that they should “disagree and commit” — they can argue their case before a decision is made, but then they must accept an outcome that will leave one of them unhappy. In such moments, he will tell his executives: “I’m actually less qualified to make this decision than the two of you are. So if you’re bringing it to me, know that you’re going to get a subpar decision relative to what one of you thinks, and one of you is going to be disappointed. But that’s the way it is.”

The risk, Robbins says, is that the executive who loses the argument lets their team members know that they disagree with the CEO’s ultimate decision. “That festers,” Robbins warns: “You have to go back to them and say, ’Look, the decision’s made. You brought it to me. You wanted me to make it. Just because you don’t like it, we still have to move. Let’s go!”

Understanding how the CEO’s voice changes the debate

Robbins learned from one big mistake he made early on in his push into software: not hiring people who had already led such a transformation at another company. “If you are driving a meaningful amount of change to an outcome that you don’t have experience with, you have to go hire people that have done it before,” he says.

Having pushed that change internally, his challenge now is to keep up with the rate of geopolitical and technological change around him. “You wake up in the morning, there’s a tweet, there’s an event that happened in the world, and you’ll get redirected,” he observes — but his task is to stay focused.

“There’s a set of things that only I can do. And I have to remember those. And there’s a set of things that my team does, and I don’t need to get into those until they need me to.” The trick, he says, is knowing when one of his executives should pull him in on something and when he should get out of the way.

Having the CEO in the room “changes the dynamic,” he notes, with people tending to fall in behind any opinion he expresses. So Robbins now tries “to wait and just not share,” so that others state their views before he does. On other occasions, he will ask the people who report to him whether they’d rather he not be in the room at all: “Do you guys want to meet with me or without me?”

A decade-long perspective on the CEO’s ‘pace car’ role

“When you’re wrapping up year 11 [as CEO], you’re a little calmer than you would be if it was year two,” Robbins says, explaining his habit of not sweating over things he can’t control. As a new CEO, you have “a runway of time” to make changes, but then comes a period when “anything that’s going wrong now is mine, because I’ve been here long enough.”

If Robbins is more comfortable now with “the ups and downs” of his job, it’s in part because of the perspective that comes with time. But he has also assembled a leadership team strong enough to allow him to handle the external demands on his time, which he says are now orders of magnitude higher than they were seven or eight years ago.

The world’s macro uncertainties are such that Robbins has concluded he cannot wait to make the perfect call on the questions that end up on his desk. “You get 80% of the information you need to make a decision, and then you’ve got to make it and then you’ve got to adapt on the fly,” he says: “A bad decision that is reversed is better than a delayed decision.”

Robbins’ pursuit of his broader mission — restoring Cisco to relevance a generation after the dot-com boom that briefly made it the world’s most valuable company — has been as much about speed as it has about strategy. He even tries to respond to WhatsApp and WebEx messages faster than any of his executives do, he says, because “I try to set that pace for people.”

It is just as important to recruit people into senior roles who share that sense of urgency, he adds. “If I hire people that want to succeed and want to move fast, then they’re going to get frustrated if they have people who aren’t that way, and then they’re going to hire people that want to go at the same pace. It takes a while, but you end up with an organization that moves faster.”

The CEO’s role is to be “the pace car,” Robbins says, modeling the behaviors that they want to see in the rest of the company. “If you want your team to communicate more effectively, you need to communicate more effectively. If you want your team to move faster, you have to move faster,” he explains. “And for those people who aren’t moving at the same pace, make the changes faster.”