Seeing Things Invisible: John Chambers, Cisco and the Next Big Thing

Over the course of one treacherous year, Cisco Systems, the company that wired the Information Age, has seen its stock price crumble and its market domination challenged. For the first time ever, there are whispers about this Silicon Valley titan. Does Cisco still have what it takes to continue its mastery over the New Economy, a world in which lightening-fast shifts in technology and market demand can destroy, in the blink of an eye, billion-dollar corporations and garage start-ups alike?




"A great book about a great company by a great writer."
— Guy Kawasaki CEO, Garage.com and author of Rules for Revolutionaries



In this engrossing book, bestselling author and high-tech chronicler Jeffrey S. Young goes deep inside the new information technology that is radically changing the face of business and, at the same time, profoundly touching each of our lives. Standing alone in the eye of this electronic maelstrom is Cisco Systems, a company whose personality and drive mirror that of its tenacious CEO, John Chambers.

Through guts and guile, Chambers has built an extraordinarily aggressive company that owns the infrastructure through which more than 75 percent of the world's data travels. This remarkable achievement, however, is now under withering assault from all sides. Today, Cisco's domination of the $100 billion net-working market is threatened not only by such multinational corporations as Nortel and Lucent but also by a new breed of start-ups that are sprouting like weeds. Young, savvy com-panies such as Juniper, Redback, ONI, Sycamore, and others are moving with speed and agility to beat the giants at their own game. As John Chambers has said on many occasions, the guys he fears most are the ones who can start out with a blank sheet of paper. Today, there are lots of guys with blank sheets of paper.

s is a story of packets and photons, routers, fiber optics, and waves in an era of limitless wealth and opportunity. Yet it is also a human tale, with a handful of business warriors trying to take control of the future in the midst of technology wars and brutal competition. The stakes are nothing less than control of the future of information.

luding exclusive interviews with key high-tech executives, Cisco Unauthorized is an unforgettable portrait of a remarkable company, a brilliant CEO, and a defining moment in the Information Age.

Jeffrey S. Young, a founding editor of MacWorld magazine and Forbes.com, is the author of Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward—the definitive biography of the Apple cofounder and—Forbes Greatest Technology Stories. A contributing editor at Forbes for many years, he has written extensively about Silicon Valley and the high-tech industry for publications such as Wired and Esquire, among others. He lives in Rescue, California, and his e-mail address is jeffreysyoung@jsyoung.com.