From BusinessMirror
How John Chambers learned to collaborate at Cisco
by Morten Hansen
In 2001, as the dot-com boom turned to bust, Cisco CEO John Chambers saw $460 billion of his company’s overall stock market value evaporate before his eyes. Game over? Not really. Chambers began reinventing Cisco, eventually transforming it from a firm driven by a “cowboy” mentality where people worked in silos to a company built on a more collaborative approach. And so far it has paid off. Revenues are up 90 percent since 2002, while profit margins have risen to 20.8 percent from 16.3 percent. Chambers also earned the No. 4 spot on Harvard Business Review’s list of best-performing CEOs, published in February....
Morten T. Hansen is the author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results. He is a management professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information.