IdeaPort : strategic innovation, foresight, and futures thinking.

From the Dec/Jan 09 issue of Fast Company magazine comes a great article about Cisco. Several paragraphs of note including:

Get ready for the upturn. “What’s our vision for where this industry is going with or without us?” That, [CEO John Cambers] says, is a five-year horizon. “What is our differentiated strategy within that vision?” That’s a two- to four-year plan. “How are we going to execute in the next 12 to 18 months?”

Chambers is convinced that the role of the CEO has to morph. He recalls a lesson he learned working for An Wang of Wang Laboratories, whom he has often called one of the smartest people he’s ever known: “One person cannot anticipate a market transition. At Wang, we transitioned four times, but we missed the fifth, from mini computers to PC and software. If you don’t catch them [all], you leave your company behind.”

It is Ron Ricci’s (Cisco VP) job to translate Chambers’s ideas into action — as he puts it, “I’m John’s scaling machine” — and he was the chief architect with Chambers of the new quasi-socialist Cisco. They were inspired in part, Ricci says, by management guru Gary Hamel’s ideas about the need to democratize strategy and distribute leadership in order to stimulate innovation.