“Doing Both shows how Cisco turns business questions into market answers,
offering real-life examples that will benefit forward-looking leaders.”
—Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE
“The best business books build around a single idea, often contrarian and
counterintuitive. Everyone knows you can’t 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.”
—Sir Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco
“Companies are often confronted with false choices, such as disruptive or
sustaining innovation and optimization or reinvention. This book draws on
Cisco’s
impressive track record over the last decade to illustrate that the correct
strategy is always to do both.”
—Ratan Tata, Chairman, Tata Group
“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.”
—Clayton Christensen, Robert & Jane Cizik Professor of Business
Administration,
Harvard Business School, and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma
“Insightful recommendations from a key executive within Cisco, the game-
changing
leader in networking for the Internet.”
—Garth Saloner, Philip H. Knight Professor, and Dean, Graduate School of
Business, Stanford University
“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.”
—Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director, McKinsey & Company
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. Cisco believes
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 book, Cisco Senior
Vice
President Inder Sidhu explains why “doing both” is today’s best strategy.
Then,
drawing on Cisco’s hardwon insights and the experiences of companies like
Procter
& Gamble, Whirlpool, and Harley-Davidson, Inder presents a complete
blueprint for
“doing both” in your organization, too.
Win by Doing Both!
• Sustaining and Disruptive Innovation
• Existing and New Business Models
• Optimization and Reinvention
• Satisfied Customers and Gratified Partners
• Established and Emerging Countries
• Doing Things Right and Doing What Matters
• Superstar Performers and Winning Teams
• Authoritative Leadership and Democratic Decision Making
