Doing Both

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

The best business books build around a single idea, often contrarian and counterintuitive. Everyone knows you cant 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.

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

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. 

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

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.

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. 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 boo...