To do it right, he figured he needed to hire about 2,000 people. Although the Net was still a research tool, Chambers put his faith in technology. It has become Cisco's growth hormone. Some call him prescient. I had no choice, in my opinion.
Cisco sells networking equipment.
Chambers believed that information technology could help his company do things that competitors could not. And Cisco would reap the biggest payoffs, he contended, if it used technology to change its practices before competitors did. Customer service was at the top of his list. If I had led with them, I might not have been successful. Instead Chambers started pushing other divisions, namely, manufacturing, customer ordering and finance, to network their operations more fully.