The role of leaders is to see patterns where others see only chaos and confusion.

Make aggressively upskilling your workforce on critical digital competencies like data analytics, artificial intelligence, software development, user experience design, and security integration a top priority. Digital transformation requires company-wide digital literacy. Give people access to internal and external learning opportunities and incentivize mastery of high-demand skills.

Developing Critical Digital Competencies Across Teams

<ul><li>Proactively build partnerships, make strategic acquisitions, leverage external advisors, and participate in industry networks in order to rapidly absorb new capabilities and scale innovations. </li><li>Do not rely solely on internal skills to handle everything. </li><li>External connections provide exposure to fresh ideas and complement in-house teams. </li><li>Tap into the larger ecosystem.</li></ul>

Fostering Internal and External Partnerships 

<ul><li>Communicate openly, honestly and frequently with employees and customers. </li><li>Transparency internally and externally builds trust in leadership, brand credibility and shared understanding required for rapid adaptation. </li><li>Authenticity requires self-awareness, humility and courage to admit mistakes. </li><li>Collect unfiltered feedback at all levels.</li></ul>

Communicating with Candor, Transparency and Humility

<ul><li>Lead with humble confidence, avoid arrogance. Actively create an inclusive environment that leverages diverse perspectives. </li><li>Seek input and collaboration from people across levels of the organization. </li><li>Diversity and cross-functional collaboration enable gathering richer insights and making well-rounded decisions.</li></ul>

Leading with Inclusive Collaboration

<ul><li>Instill an organizational culture that encourages smart risk-taking and learning rapidly from failures. </li><li>Give teams freedom to innovate outside the status quo. </li><li>Stifling innovation out of fear of risk can be deadly in fast-moving markets. </li><li>Cultivate agile creativity across the company to quickly adapt products, business models and strategies. </li><li>Innovation requires trying new ideas without worrying about failure.</li></ul>

Fostering a Culture that Encourages Innovation and Risk-Taking

<ul><li>Proactively break down rigid silos, excessive bureaucracy and unnecessary layers that slow companies down. </li><li>Govern through principle-based culture and accountability for outcomes rather than top-down rule-based micromanagement.</li><li> Enable quick resource allocation and responsive decentralized decision-making to increase organizational agility. </li><li>Remove structural obstacles to being nimble.</li></ul>

Building a Flexible, Agile Organizational Structure

Balance excelling at executing on current business models and incremental innovations for today's environment with carving out mindshare, resources and teams to invest in exploring transformative trends and opportunities for the future. Optimize today's operations for efficiency while also incubating nascent ideas that may become tomorrow's breakthrough products. Dual optimize both horizons.

Balancing Execution of Today While Investing in Tomorrow 

In Connecting the Dots, former Cisco CEO John Chambers shares leadership and management lessons from his tenure growing Cisco into a tech giant. He provides advice on leading digital transformations.

Legendary Silicon Valley visionary and one of the world's greatest business leaders, John Chambers shares the playbook and philosophy that transformed Cisco into a global tech titan and now inspire a new generation of leaders. With numerous start-ups moving from zero to a billion to bankruptcy in a matter of years, it's clear that sustaining a business in the digital age is no walk in the park. Over 20 years, John Chambers transformed a company with 400 employees and one toaster-sized product (a router) into a tech giant that's the backbone of the Internet. Along the way, he's outlasted and outmaneuvered practically every rival that ever tried to take Cisco on-Nortel, Lucent, Alcatel, IBM, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard, to name a few-and turned more than 10,000 employees into millionaires, more than any company in history. When Chambers stepped down as executive chairman in December of 2017, he left a company that didn't just shape the first Internet era but is leading the next wave of innovation in areas from cyber-security to self-driving cars. Now, in collaboration with award-winning journalist Diane Brady, Chambers shares the stories and strategies that helped his company win again and again through multiple market shifts. Posing a unique mode of thought proven to attain success, the message of this book is clear; it is not the biggest or the richest players who win, but the ones who are able to stay ahead of the trend by connecting the dots. Both enlightening and practical, this is essential reading to inspire a new generation of leaders.