Jeetu Patel: belief

Transcript context

…I appreciate it. In this permission to win concept, the reason I think it's so important is it's so easy to build stuff now. Everyone's just building, building, building, launching, launching, launching. It feels like this is an increasingly important lever is why will we win in this space? I'm curious if there's an example you can share either from Box or Cisco where it's just like, "Okay, this is like we're going to do this because we have the permission to play here." I agree with you in the sense that if generating code is something that becomes abundant, that doesn't mean you're going to have better technology just because you can generate a lot of code. You still need human judgment, you still need a level of intuition on what problems are the right ones to solve. And yes, AI can help you with all of that, but it's not something that ... That's where humans have a superpower, they have instinct, and they can actually make sure that they can fulfill out a vision that says, "This is what I think this could be in the fullness of time." And so, that I think is pretty important. So, the easier it gets for us to get the bottlenecks out to generate code, the harder it gets for us to make sure that there's not AI slop in the market and that we actually are very selective on what are the things that are going to be the most important things that solve the most important problems moving forward? Example of permission to play is, I mean, there's so many ideas that a company the size of Cisco, we have constantly new ideas that keep coming up. And then in those new ideas that keep coming up, people will always say, "Oh my goodness, this company is doing so well. We should just go into that market, or we should just go into this market." And 90% of the times, 99% of the times, I find myself saying no. And the reason for that is you have to be extremely selective of where you expend your calories. And that caloric expenditure is where if you expend your calories in a very focused way, the results you'll get from that focus area tend to be outsized and disproportionate. If you dissipate that caloric burn across multitude of different areas, nothing gets enough girth to be able to go out and drive it all the way through. And so, why are we not in business-to-consumer tech at Cisco? Why are we not going out and building things that are very very B2C? Because I don't think we have a distribution channel that actually is within our DNA. I don't think that we've got permission to play there. That's an area where it would be extremely hard for people to growth that Cisco should be the one who's participating in that. Now can we do it? Of course we can do it. Is that where we want to go or do we want to go where there's so much opportunity in the areas where we can actually prosecute with the ability to operate from a position of strength that you'll just get a much better return for the dollar that you invest. You mentioned Aaron as a CEO that you learned a lot from. I'm curious what other CEOs you've learned a lot from and what's something you learned from them?…

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