Doing Both: Capturing Today's Profit and Driving Tomorrow's Growth

"Doing Both shows how Cisco turns business questions into market answers, offering real-life examples that will benefit forward-looking leaders." —Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE

"The best business books build around a single idea, often contrarian and counterintuitive. Everyone knows you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. One of the first things you learn at business school is that management is about making difficult choices. Well, not always. This book persuades the reader that in decision making ‘and’ is often better than ‘or.’ Well worth the read." —Sir Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco

"Companies are often confronted with false choices, such as disruptive or sustaining innovation and optimization or reinvention. This book draws on Cisco’s impressive track record over the last decade to illustrate that the correct strategy is always to do both." —Ratan Tata, Chairman, Tata Group

"I have a very short personal list of ‘most-admired companies,’ and Cisco is one of them. Its management team has figured out how to break many ‘either-or’ tradeoffs that limit most companies’ abilities to innovate and grow. This book is a lucid, cogent chronicle of how they do this. Your entire management team should read it." —Clayton Christensen, Robert & Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma

"Insightful recommendations from a key executive within Cisco, the game-changing leader in networking for the Internet." —Garth Saloner, Philip H. Knight Professor, and Dean, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University

"Doing Both brings together many powerful lessons behind the story of Cisco, a company with a long record of delivering consistent innovation and strong business results. I encourage senior executives to embrace the challenges presented in this thoughtful book." —Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director, McKinsey & Company

Over the past seven years, in a highly unstable global economy, Cisco doubled revenue, tripled profits, and quadrupled earnings per share. How? By Doing Both. When companies face key strategic decisions, they often take one path and abandon the other. They focus on innovation and new business at the expense of core businesses or vice versa. They stress discipline and sacrifice flexibility. They focus on customers and ignore partners. And they struggle. Cisco believes there is a better way: Doing Both. Doing Both means approaching every decision as an opportunity to seize, not a sacrifice to endure. It means avoiding false choices, reduced expectations, and weak compromises. It means finding ways to make each option benefit and mutually reinforce the other. In this book, Cisco Senior Vice President Inder Sidhu explains why “doing both” is today’s best strategy. Then, drawing on Cisco’s hardwon insights and the experiences of companies like Procter & Gamble, Whirlpool, and Harley-Davidson, Inder presents a complete blueprint for "doing both" in your organization, too.

Win by Doing Both!
• Sustaining and Disruptive Innovation
• Existing and New Business Models
• Optimization and Reinvention
• Satisfied Customers and Gratified Partners
• Established and Emerging Countries
• Doing Things Right and Doing What Matters
• Superstar Performers and Winning Teams
• Authoritative Leadership and Democratic Decision Making

Inder Sidhu is Senior Vice President of Strategy and Planning for Worldwide Operations at Cisco, the $40 billion worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. He is also a member of the company’s Operating Committee.

From 2006-2010, Inder co-led Cisco's Emerging Countries Council, which drives business success in fast-growing geographies like China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, and the Middle East. From 2006-2009, he co-led the Enterprise Business Council, which is responsible for Cisco’s corporate business, representing about half of the company’s total revenue.

In 2010, Sidhu published Doing Both (FT Press). In this New York Times bestseller, he identifies common business dichotomies and explores how successful companies avoid difficult tradeoffs and instead achieve bigger outcomes by “doing both.” Using this framework, he offers a unique view of Cisco’s consistent record of innovation and high performance.

Since joining Cisco in 1995, Sidhu has held executive leadership positions in the Sales, Services, and Business Development groups. He has served as the Vice President and General Manager for Worldwide Professional Services, Vice President and General Manager for Advanced Engineering Services, and Vice President for Strategy and Business Development, Customer Advocacy.

Before joining Cisco, Sidhu was with McKinsey & Company, an international management consulting company. He has also worked at Intel and Novell.

Sidhu is a frequent guest lecturer at Harvard Business School, Stanford University, and the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Goodwill of Silicon Valley.

Sidhu holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and a master’s degree in business administration from the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. He also is a graduate of the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.