•You will hear part of a conversation among an interviewer, John Chambers and Carly Fiorina, CEOs of two companies. •For each qu

M: (Interviewer): What happens to the CEOs who are praised as all-wise geniuses when the Dow and NASDAQ were rocketing upwards once the market turns the other way? What can a business leader do when his or her company still strong, still profitable gets caught in a sudden ominous  climate  change?  Both  our  guests tonight will face those questions.  OK, I’m wondering whether or not, either of you or both of you have the experience in recent days where the same people who regarded you as the absolute Sun King and Queen of the world are now looking at you at all differently, because they’ve seen the value of the shares go down? I mean, do people tend to blame the CEO in the same way that they may credit the CFA] when things go well?
M: (John Chambers): I’ll give you the tough questions, Curly, first. I’ll take the second shot at it.
F: (Curly Fiorina): Well, first of all, I remember, well, something that someone once said to me about the media. What they said was, "You’re never as good as they say you are and you’re never as bad as they say you are", and that% true. I think leadership takes, and now I’m quoting John. John says all the time and it’s true, "Leadership takes more than its fair share of the credit and more than its fair share of the blame, " but that is the price of leadership.
M: (John Chambers): I would agree and I often open  up  after  somebody  says  some  nice comments and introducing for a speech with exactly that comment, "you’re never as good as things are when things go well, nor as bad when you trip a little bit. ’ The press, it gees with  the  territory.  I’ve  been  pleasantly surprised by both how our employee base and how our shareholders, even those who have lost a lot of money, probably about 95 to 98 percent of the e-mails and voice mails have been very supportive. Now they expect us to get it back up, but are very supportive of where we are.
M: (interviewer) .. But is it easier? Does it help in a way your individual company’s or yourselves that this—whatever we want to call it—down turn, Tsunami has hit so broadly?
F: (Carly Florins): Well, I think it certainly helps in  the  sense  that  what  investors,  what employees, what customers ought to be focused on in this time is: are the basic strategies changing? They shouldn’t be just because times get tough if they were the right strategies. Are the basic ways of operating changing? They shouldn’t be just because the times are getting tough.   Of  course   you   make   different discretionary decisions, but the way you treat your employees—do you still treat them with respect and empathy in the tough times as well as the good times? So people ought to be looking for the patterns that endure. And I think that’s true of investors, the smart ones are trying to say, okay, it’s going to be crummy for a couple of quarters, but do I believe in the value this company represents? Do I  believe  in  the  employees  and  the management team that are trying to uncover that value?
M: (interviewer): Let me turn to something that Carly mentioned, then I’ll want to give you a chance. She talked about the fact that when she was named CEO at Hewlett Packard, she was very conscious of the import of her words. How conscious are you of the public persona you display?
M: (John Chambers): That has changed a lot in the last couple of years. But originally, CISCO was a company that sold a couple of technicians very deep in the bowels of the IT organization, and no one knew who we were, and neither myself nor my predecessor, now my chairman John Wooldridge cared. And so we had no personal needs to be known whatsoever. And that was fine as long as two technicians were making the decisions. But once everybody from the CISCO, the Chairman of the Beard of the company, the President were making the decisions on this, the  image  of  the  company  and  what  i0 represented became very important to us. You can accomplish that through huge amount of advertising,  which  I’m  not  sure  is  real effective in many ways; or you can accomplish it in terms of the image of the company in different ways with the executive, all things being synonymous with what you’re trying to do with that image. And...