At Cisco Live last week, the closing keynote featured entrepreneur, Twitter star, and former Apple software evangelist Guy Kawasaki. During his 25-year career, he’s learned a lot about innovation through both his successes and missteps. During his talk, Guy boiled down the art of innovation into 10 easy — and not so easy — steps:1. Make meaning2. Make a mantra (not a mission statement)3. Jump to the next curve4. Roll the dice5. Don’t worry, be crappy6. Let 100 flowers blossom7. Polarize people8. Churn, baby, churn9. Follow the 10-20-30 rule10. Don’t let the bozos get you downWatch the video to hear Guy’s irreverent explanation of these 10 steps, how to create your own successful innovations, and…generate revenue. Read More »

Cisco Live delivered thrills and chills this week in San Francisco, including 80s night with Devo on windy Treasure Island, some keynote disruptions, key announcements, a blogger meetup, a tweetup, and even a Twitter follower challenge between event host Carlos Dominguez and CTO Padmasree Warrior (stay tuned…a winner has not yet been declared). What better way to recap this exciting week than to pull together a video playlist of the top hits? Scroll through the playlist to watch a Twitter Q&A with John Chambers, keynote highlights, information about Cisco solutions, analyst comments, and conference overviews.
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With technical sessions, information on products and services, live keynotes, sessions in Second Life, a host of networking events and live chats, Cisco Live offers something most conferences don’t: an option not to attend…in person.Celebrating its twentieth year, the Cisco Live customer education and training event is geared toward IT, networking, and communications professionals. This year’s event, which starts Tuesday June 30 in San Francisco, is focused around the theme “Knowledge is Power.” Running concurrently with the live onsite conference, the free virtual event gives you access much of the conference. (For a fee, the Cisco Live Premiere virtual option lets you also attend the technical sessions virtually.)
To register for the virtual event, click here. But before you do, join me on a quick tour: Read More »

We love to hear collaboration success stories. It’s collaboration that allows us to share a conference table and our ideas — when in reality, we’re a continent away. These tools are breaking down barriers, making us more productive and bringing technology to life, whether at a small organization or multi-billion dollar (yen, euro, rupee…) business. At Cisco, we’re using WebEx, TelePresence, Twitter, You Tube, Facebook, Flickr, Yammer, and a variety of Web 2.0 and collaboration technologies that were just the stuff of dreams just a few years ago. And now we’re hearing from partners that they’re benefiting from these technologies as well. Watch as partners share their thoughts on collaboration and why these technologies are such a boon to business.
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By now, you’ve probably heard John Chambers talking about video being the next “killer app.” Inexpensive video devices, mobile phones, and, yes, Flip cameras mean that anyone can create a video on a shoestring budget and share it with the world via You Tube or a number of other video-sharing sites. Neilson ratings show that online video usage is up 53 percent from last year. And a recent Cisco report predicts that, “video communications traffic—including video over instant message and video calls—in 2013 will grow to 10 times its current size.”At the Partner Summit this month, John Chambers talked about the importance of video in his keynote and the role it’s playing in the next market transition, noting that video will account for 90 percent of the loads on networks around the world.

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How does a company lead a market, rather than respond to it? What is real value? What are the characteristics of a successful leader?The hallmarks of successful companies and traits of successful leaders have been discussed and argued quite a bit, especially in this economy. Offering a new take on the subject, Oren Harari, best-selling author and professor at the Graduate School of Business in the University of San Francisco, has some bold insights in his book, “Break From the Pack: How to Compete in a Copycat Economy.” In this interview, he offers tips to succeed (and lead) in any economy.
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With the news of late buzzing about the evolution of the CIO’s role, Cisco’s CIO Rebecca Jacoby sheds some light on the subject and why the CIO role is more relevant than ever. In this interview, she talks about her role as Cisco’s CIO, tips to help partners sell to a CIO, and areas where she’s investing.
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Continuing our post-Partner Summit coverage, top coach and best-selling author Marshall Goldsmith sat down for an interview with us in Boston. His leadership advice has helped everyone from a roomful of Cisco partners to the real person on whom the notorious “Wall Street” movie character Gordon Gekko was based.
In this video, Marshall tells us how successful leaders achieve positive long-term change, ways to gauge success, tips on employee retention, and customer service fundamentals that apply to both work and home life.
What sort of leadership takeaways did you get from Partner Summit?

As part of our 2009 Partner Summit recap, we’re highlighting a Flip camera interview we did with John Chambers during the Global Awards reception where Cisco honored 19 channel partners with global awards for outstanding performance. In this video, Cisco’s CEO discusses the importance of recognizing the best channel partners every year, why he attends the annual Partner Summit Global Awards reception, and what he heard/learned at this year’s event.

Much like Cal Ripken in baseball Brett Favre in football, in my 11 years at Cisco I have yet to miss a Partner Summit — giving me one of the longest streaks in company history. My record for consecutive years at Partner Summit has given me valuable perspective and insight and, as we close out the 13th annual Summit in Boston, I’d like to share with you my key takeaways. I also encourage you to visit this blog over the coming weeks as we’ll be highlighting Partner Summit keynotes and top partner videos, as well as executive and guest speaker interviews.My top 7 takeaways… Read More »

Keith Goodwin, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels, presenting at the opening Partner Summit keynote.A big opportunity for Cisco channel partners touted at the Partner Summit this week is that many customers have a significant amount of obsolete technology. In fact, Cisco estimates as much as USD$20 billion in Cisco routing and switching equipment worldwide is more than five years old and $9 billion of that will reach its end-of-life date in the company’s 2010 financial year, which begins in August. Across Europe, where partners have taken part in a pioneering swap-out program called the Installed Base Lifecycle Management (IBLM) practice, the channel has already generated incremental bookings of $200 million and a pipeline of more than $1 billion. Read More »

On day two of Partner Summit 2009 in Boston, I sat down for a chat with Cisco’s CTO Padmasree Warrior. During our discussion, she revealed her insights on the future of IT and collaboration. And, she makes one thing clear: Partners are more critical than ever for our success in the marketplace as we move into the next generation of the Internet and computing.
With yesterday’s announcement of C-Series of rack-mounted servers and continued focus on video, collaboration, virtualization, and data center, it’s the partners who are providing service, support, and implementation directly to the customer. Now, more than ever, together we are leading with our partners.

Murmurs on Wall Street and in the media point to signs that the recession has already hit its worst and that we’re headed for an upturn. While it may be too early to say the economy is on an upswing, one thing we can say with certainty is that we plan to support our partners in both turbulent and rosy times. Case in point: at Partner Summit, we’re announcing some enhancements to our Navigate to Accelerate (N2A) initiative to help in the areas where you need it most: financing, meeting the changing needs of customers, and preparing for future growth. Details on the announcement after the jump. Read More »

This year’s Partner Summit in Boston opened with a thunderous boom as Keith Goodwin launched a number of initiatives as part of Navigate to Accelerate, to help partners weather the economic storm and prepare for the upturn. During his keynote, he announced the news.
Learn more details on the announcements after the jump. And, if you want to get involved the thriving virtual Partner Summit community, watch playbacks of the keynotes, and network, visit the Virtual Partner Summit site and sign up. Read More »

Did a press interview this week and was asked what I thought of the recent HP and Microsoft expanded alliance in Unified Communications. As we prepare to host more than 1,500 partners, press, and analysts next week in Boston and roughly 4,500 virtually for our annual Partner Summit, I thought you’d like to know my response.The HP/Microsoft expanded alliance confirms what Cisco and our channel partners have known for years…the network is critical. This expanded alliance also acknowledges that interoperability is key because data, voice, and video are all important factors of Unified Communications and collaboration. This news only serves to solidify our commitment to deliver — with our channel partners — an open, interoperable solution with companies like Microsoft, Apple, and IBM. Read More »