John T. Chambers Quotes

Every market is in transition.

The leader of the market today may not necessarily be the leader tomorrow.

The external world is changing drastically, and enterprises and products will have a short lifecycle if they don't change. So we have to react to market trends. Nothing lasts forever in today's world.

You've got to keep reinventing. You'll have new competitors. You'll have new customers all around you.

Google worries - and rightly so - about how hard it is for a big company to come up with the next hot thing.

Whatever business you're in - it doesn't matter - it's going to commoditize over time. It's going to devalue. You've got to keep moving it to a higher value.

… people who have built a business doing it the old way think it would be better if things could be more stable for longer periods of time. But you have to remember, new inventions are not inherently disruptive. Invention is only disruptive if customers say, “Hey, I like this better than the old way”.

I don't think the disruptor and the business model of a disruptor necessarily is an indication of the topography of the future. If it did, you would say then that everyone will make high-end electric cars, when the answer is clearly no.

To most observers, innovation is a solitary process that requires creativity and genius, perhaps even greatness. It can't, in their view, be managed or predicted, just hoped for and, perhaps, facilitated. But for me innovation was and still is more than that. It was a battle in the marketplace between innovators or attackers trying to make money by changing the order of things, and defenders protecting their cash flow.

Businessmen must move with the times...the correlation between knowledge and business as the key to success is closer than ever.

Innovation keeps me ahead of my competition. It means that my foes must adapt to me, not the other way around.

I'm really focused on looking at where the industry is headed and how the world is evolving. Toys really need to adapt to this new era.

Many first-time founders fail to understand the difference between the potential of the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and the very finite subsection they can hope to capture. No company ever captures the entire market they pioneer. Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum, and others will jump in from the moment you've identified the potential.

Any time there's significant change, there's going to be some people who embrace the change and others who are against the change.

Disruptors are the ones with a keen sense of how the world is changing and how to get in front of change, driven by curiosity. The disrupted - not so much.

Whether in services or in manufacturing, the trick is to stay ahead of the curve. I believe we should not wait to be disrupted - we should become disruptors ourselves.

The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to existing markets, particularly to content/copyright owners who sell through well-established distribution channels.

One of the things that slightly annoys me in business is that we use words like innovation. Young people often think innovation is about doing something new, but actually it's not. It's about doing something better than your competition.

Your innovation can create new winners and losers; or at the very least, make existing companies look fresh and innovative by partnering with you. Everyone wants to align with market makers.

Make a list of competitors who will be disrupted by you. You do have competitors, right? You are better, right? If not, why are you going to Disrupt? Post a blog post about them and what makes you different.

No company has a permanent consumer franchise. No one has the only game in town. The never-ending cycle of destruction and change inherent in a capitalist economy always provides new opportunities for those with determination, goals and concentration.

I want to be in an industry where the upstarts can grow and displace the incumbents, because that's why there's so much innovation.

You either disrupt your own company or someone else will.

Any business that does not innovate will fail over time.

The Higher Education Industry is very analogous to the Newspaper industry. By the time they realize they need to change the costs to support their legacy infrastructure and costs will keep them from getting there.