Questioning CEOs

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Interviewer: OK, I want to pursue this area for just a minute, because I’m wondering whether or not, either of you or both of you have the experience in recent days where the same people who regarded you as the absolute Sun King and Queen of the world are now looking at you at all differently, because they’ve seen the value of the shares go down? I mean, do people tend to blame the ¹⁾CEO in the same way that they may credit the CEO when things go well?

John Chambers¹: I’ll give you the tough questions, Carly, first. I’ll take the second shot at it.

Carly Fiorina: Well, first of all, I remember, well, something that someone once said to me about the media. What they said was, “You’re never as good as they say you are and you’re never as bad as they say you are.” and that’s true. I think leadership takes, and now I’m quoting John, John says all the time and it’s true, “Leadership takes more than its fair share of the credit and more than its fair share of the blame,” but that is the price of leadership.

Chambers: I would agree and I often open up after somebody says some nice comments and introducing for a speech with exactly that comment “you’re never as good as things are when things go well nor as bad when you trip a little bit.” The press; it goes with the territory. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by both how our employee base and how our ²⁾shareholders, even those who have lost a lot of money, probably about 95, 98 per cent of the e-mails and voice mails have been very ³⁾supportive. Now they expect us to get it back up, but very supportive of where we are.

Interviewer: But is easier, does it help in a way your individual company’s or yourself’s that this, whatever we want to call it, down turn, Tsunami³ has hit so broadly?

Carly: Well, I think it certainly helps in the sense that what investors⁴, what employees, what customers ought to be focused on in this time is: are the basic strategies changing? They shouldn’t be just because times get tough if they were the right strategies. Are the basic ways of operating changing? They shouldn’t be just because the times are getting tough. Of course you make different ⁴⁾discretionary decisions, but the way you treat your employees, do you still treat them with respect and ⁵⁾empathy in the tough times as well as the good times? So people ought to be looking for the patterns that endure. And I think that’s true of investors, the smart ones are trying to say, okay, it’s going to be ⁶⁾crummy for a couple of quarters, but do I believe in the value this company represents? Do I believe in the employees and the management team that are trying to uncover that value?

Interviewer: Let me turn to something that Carly mentioned, then I’ll want to give you a chance. She talked about the fact that when she was named CEO at Hewlett Packard, she was very conscious of the import of her words. How conscious are you of the public ⁷⁾persona you display?

Chambers: That has changed a lot in the last couple of years. But originally, ⁸⁾CISCO was a company that sold a couple of technicians very deep in the bowels⁵ of the IT organization, and no one knew who we were, and neither myself nor my ⁹⁾predecessor⁶, now my chairman John Wooldridge cared. And so we had no personal needs to be known ¹⁰⁾whatsoever⁷. And that was fine as long as two technicians were making the decisions. But once everybody from the ¹¹⁾CIO, the Chairman of the Board of the company, the President were making the decisions on this, the image of the company and what it represented became very important to us. You can accomplish that through huge amount of advertising⁸, which I’m not sure is real effective in many ways; or you can accomplish it in terms of the image of the company in different ways with the executive, all things being ¹²⁾synonymous with what you’re trying to do with that image. So it goes with the territory and I think in today’s environment in Carly’s company or mine, you have to do that in high tech because a large part of the ¹³⁾exposure you get which is free advertising and people’s perception of your company is through the CEO’s.

Interviewer: I almost hesitate to ask this, but is there some sense in which that makes the job more enjoyable?

Carly: Well I think...

Chambers: You could say no!

Carly: ¹⁴⁾Humanizing technology and humanizing leadership, I think, are at this ¹⁵⁾juncture⁹ both important. I think that’s a little bit what John was saying. I think it’s actually healthy that people know who their leaders are, with all that that ¹⁶⁾entails. I guess there’s a difference though between knowing a leader and ¹⁷⁾caricaturing a leader.CE