Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins: “A bad decision that is reversed is better than a delayed decision”

Chuck Robbins has been the CEO of Cisco for more than 11 years, steering it from a hardware-centric company into a software and subscription-driven business. Under his tenure, Cisco—now valued at $475 billion—has built a combination of networking and cybersecurity capabilities. Robbins hasn’t shied away from talking about past mistakes. That was no different during a recent interview with Semafor, during which he talked about how Cisco missed the first cloud adoption wave, plus a six-year stretch with no return on a $320 silicon company acquisition. During his tenure as CEO, Robbins has learned a thing or two about operating a global team of more than 86,000. One of the main principles that Robbins upholds as a leader is to not worry about scenarios out of his control—a skill he partly attributed to his upbringing in rural Georgia. “You have to plan for them, but you can’t worry about them because there’s nothing you can do about them,” Robbins said. In the 2010s, the company spent more than $1 billion building its own public cloud infrastructure to compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft—but it eventually shut down the cloud initiative and had to pivot. “When I became CEO and we started trying to rebuild those relationships, you had to listen a lot and you had to let them tell you how bad you were for a long time,” Robbins said. Over the years, Cisco’s company culture has shifted, too. Robbins said that he lives by the “disagree and commit” framework, and said the one thing he won’t tolerate is passive-aggressive behavior. “The one thing that is like death in an organization is passive-aggressive behavior,” Robbins said, adding that a major risk is when a leader appears to agree with a company strategy, only to then undermine and discredit it to their team members behind closed doors. Looking back on his career, Robbins said that “people issues” are the “most important ones.” “We always wait too long to make a move on someone who’s not the