Reorganize for Resilience

3

Lever 2: Cooperation

Ensuring Attitudes and Behaviors Are Customer Focused

IN 1986, LEONARD BOSACK and Sandy Lerner, a husband-and-wife team who managed computer networks at Stanford University, began assembling routers and other computer components in the kitchen of their San Francisco home. The young company—named Cisco, after the city where it was founded—attempted to interest a professor at the University of Washington with a new “translator” device. But because he used a computer system that was incompatible with the two handled by Cisco’s translator, the device was useless to him. His network “spoke a different language” from either of the two supported by Cisco’s initial translator device.¹ And so he rejected it.

That should have been ...