John T. Chambers

Wearable technology will tell us how well we are sleeping and whether we need to exercise. Sensors in the street will help us avoid traffic jams and find parking. Telemedicine applications will allow physicians to treat patients who are hundreds of miles away.

If every company becomes a technology company, business models and transitions are going to occur. From a CEO's perspective, this is going to be the biggest technology transition of all times.

People who might normally have to travel hours to a distant city to see a cardiologist can now do so virtually, through Cisco technology, at their local hospital or health clinic. Clinicians use technology to share patient reports and diagnostic images and collaborate on cases.

In France, President Francois Hollande is leveraging the next wave of the Internet to jumpstart economic reforms and create jobs for hundreds of thousands of citizens. A historically socialist government, France has had the courage to quickly implement unique partnerships with the business community to drive entrepreneurial spirit and thinking.

The window was open for us to play in the consumer as data, voice, video came together. This is where you have to have the courage to take good business risks because if you don't, you never win.

I wasn't always interested in technology. I had been a student for a long time - I'd earned a bachelor's degree, a law degree, and an MBA - and decided that I wanted to work in a large corporation, focusing on finance and law, in either New York or Chicago.

You have venture capitalists. We view them as experts who also help finance your company and give directions and also some pretty candid discussions about what you have to do better.

At Cisco, we are moving to collaboration teams, groups coming together that represent sales, engineering, finance, legal, etc. And we're training leaders to think across silos.

A well-run organization turns over 10% of their organizations, including senior leadership. I don't have the heart to do that.

I think at least my philosophy of leadership is you focus more on the areas you have to improve or the mistakes than you do on your successes. And that's just how I am in real life. I don't want to let down my customers, my employees, my shareholders.

Today's world requires a different leadership style - more collaboration and teamwork, including using Web 2.0 technologies. If you had told me I'd be video blogging and blogging, I would have said, 'No way.' And yet our 20-somethings in the company really pushed me to use that more.

We'll have a sales leader go run engineering. A lawyer go run business development. A business development leader go run our consumer operations. We're going to train a generalist group of leaders who know how to learn and operate in collaboration teamwork. I think that's the future of leadership.

Widening the talent pipeline sufficiently will require a generational commitment to teaching math and science, providing technical training, and mentoring young people of all backgrounds so they understand the full range of possibilities that a career in technology affords.