Disability Alert

James Bagnall, CanWest News Service
Published: Saturday, October 20, 2007

John Chambers, CEO of CISCO the giant communications company, admitted to a learning disability yet runs a company worth $200 billion.

Chambers suffers from dyslexia — a reading disorder in which people mix up letters in words. While dyslexic children often are teased mercilessly about their low scores on conventional tests, the condition has nothing to do with intelligence.

Chambers was very adept at hiding his dyslexia. It wasn’t until the late 1990s — several years after he had been appointed CEO — that he came clean. The occasion was a company “take your child to work” day. Before a crowd of hundreds of parents and children, Chambers had called on a young girl to answer a question. But the girl struggled, saying that she had a learning disability.

Chambers came to her rescue by acknowledging — for the first time in public — that he, too, had a learning disability.

The native of West Virginia spoke for nearly an hour Friday morning before an audience of more than 500 at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre. He had no notes and scarcely glanced at the slides that lit up the giant screen behind him.

To be sure, Chambers has delivered his stump speech many times in the past few months. But his ability to speak without notes is a necessary skill.

Chambers cannot read sentences, which is why the slides he uses in his presentations include only a couple of words which alert him to the general topic he wants to talk about. “I’m very good at seeing something and memorizing the whole concept,” he says.

He still has trouble with written directions and he prefers voice mail to e-mail. Through Cisco’s products, he is in a position to make his own world and those of other dyslexics somewhat easier.

What drives John Chambers? After serving for more than a decade as CEO of Cisco Systems, he is wealthy beyond his wildest dreams and has presided over several waves of technology transformation. Yet his enthusiasm for the job ahead remains unusually high.

During an interview Friday with CanWest News Service, Chambers, 58, said he had recently agreed to stay on as CEO for the next “three to five years.”

He said Cisco’s board of directors insisted on this commitment because Chambers has spent five years developing a game plan that will take years to pay dividends. Who better than Chambers to lead the fight?

There was another, more subtle clue to Chambers’ motivation.

One reason: Cisco is playing a leading role in creating the video-enabled Web.

“Everything and everyone will be connected,” he said, adding the Web 2.0 (as it’s known) will mean profound changes for how we work.
Cisco enjoys a market value of roughly $200 billion compared to less than $60 billion for the 11 companies that were its direct competitors a decade earlier.