Blake P. Sallé, Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Emerging Technologies at Cisco Systems, believes that values within the company are crucial and thinks that it is important to always hold on to your believes and values especially when your company faces some tough times.
1. What values do you share in life?
I think values are very crucial. You see some organizations create values, mission statements and visions because they think they have to, but the most successful organizations live by them. I'll give two examples of each. First, is the company that I worked for. It was a company that had decent values but when it came to the tough times, the values started to slip away from the wayside and you saw business dealings that weren't an exact delignment. As a result, that company experienced phenomenal growth, but when times got tough it dropped off, and it's now much smaller company that it was before. I think it has a lot to do with not having the highest of ethics and integrity and if you compromise your ethics and integrity, it may give you short term business acceleration but it's certainly doesn't prepare you for the long term.
2. What is the other company that you've mentioned?
Another company that I think lacked values and was one of the most innovative companies on the planet was Enron. I, personally, think that the best leadership book that I have ever read is "The Smartest Guy in the Room". This book is the story of Enron. The reason why this book is the best book I've ever read about leadership is, it talks about what occurs when you are innovative and Enron was incredibly innovative. They were a big client of mine. They were the most innovative company, they absolutely changed trading. Enron revolutionized it. Now, what happened was in the absence of ethics and integrity they went well beyond and completely destroyed their company. In that book it illustrates the steps that were taken of where people put ethics and integrity aside and had such an innovative machine that just completely crumpled. I think it's a great example because that's how you learn: through a lot of examples.
3. Can you think of a company whose values guide it through some tough times?
Johnson & Johnson - if you go to their website, you'll see a statement that says "our credo". It's a two-page credo that describes the values of J&J and it has been around for well over a hundred years, while J&J has been in business. J&J makes every single employee to memorize the credo. They live by it, it guides them. One of the best examples of where that came in the play was the story of Tylenol, when it had couple of bottles that were laced with Cyanide and we had people die of Tylenol poison. So, J&J had a massive issue. They called in every single one of their directors from around the globe for emergency meeting. Everybody flew to New Jersey and when they got to the board table, Ralph Larson, the CEO, had laid the credo out in front of every board member and he made every board member read the credo. And they made the most vital decision, that their company ever made, in seven minutes. Ralph Larson said that they need to pull every single bottle of Tylenol off the shelves immediately, need to change how it's packaged and it's going to have a huge impact to the revenues: pulling every bottle of Tylenol globally off the shelves, just manifesting the people to do it much less the product, stop production, restart again. That choice made J&J the company it is today, because people have unbelievable trust in their values.
4. What can you say about values within Cisco?
We've been through some phenomenal times and we've been through couple of tough times. In 2001 when the market crushed was the only time in our history that we've had to do a lay-off, and John Chambers still takes that too hard, he had to do a lay-off, and he never wants to do a lay-off again. And, during times where people inspected the books of many technology companies, many technology companies had reprised options or they had changed orders to maybe get a little bit more product and a little less service, or a little more service and a little less product, they had asked resellers or other people to book business that wasn't real business. We at Cisco have been extremely conservative: if there is transaction out there that even looks to be remotely off, we take that transaction, we service the customer but we put it in reserve bookings until such time that we can prove it's a clean order. And our ethics and integrity that's been driven by John Chambers and through out the organization is really second to no one. Maybe, I would say in line with J&J. We've made the right decisions, and during these different market inflexion points we always come out stronger, because we've stayed true to our core believes, we've stayed true to our core values and that's been the compass by which we make decisions. I think it is very important that if you look at companies like Cisco and like Johnson & Johnson that let their values guide them during though times as oppose to companies like Enron that made choices which aren't in line with their values or compromise the ethics, that's when they get in trouble. I think it's clear that it is really important to make sure as a leader and as a company that you establish those values and you lead your team to adhere to them.
5. What do you think about people who compromise their values?
I think that people who compromise their values maybe get some short term gain but in a long term it often self distracts. Because people know that you don't have values or ethics and integrity and that leaks out. I think it is important to hold true to your believes given your believes are good believes. The long term gain is having the right values and following them.
Prepared by Katia Barzova, Good2Work Intern, on November 5, 2008
