Internet Insight
- Article 62 of 77
- Information Age, March 2003
For anyone wanting a pop-journalism history of Cisco, The Eye of the Storm is a reasonable read, but those looking for real business advice and analysis would do well to save their money.
Some books take time to warm to a theme. Some books flow easily from concept to concept with ease and style.
And then there are some books that are the literary equivalent of Frankenstein's monster - hacked-together botches with visible scar tissue that villagers will chase angrily into the night.
The Eye of the Storm: How John Chambers Steered Cisco through the Internet Collapse is part-parrot, part-cheerleader, part-nostalgic old man - but ultimately, all monster.
As author Robert Slater readily admits in his preface, The Eye of the Storm was originally supposed to be a treatise on “why Cisco is brilliant”, a project with which CEO John Chambers readily agreed to co-operate. But the dot-com collapse, which took out a goodly number of online pet stores and similarly unwise ventures, consequently removed a large percentage of Cisco customers whose need for networking equipment had fuelled Cisco's 'hyper-growth'. As a result, Slater's finished eulogy had to be rewritten to take account of Cisco's flagging fortunes, and then rewritten again as Cisco came out of the storm. Unfortunately, while Slater may be a good reporter, he fails miserably as an editor. A couple of hasty inserts into various chapters are the only real sign of his enforced change of approach, and the vast majority of the book is, at best, a potted history of Cisco.
While the author congratulates himself on gaining unprecedented access to Cisco and Chambers at a time when few journalists could even get an interview, he has failed to take advantage of the opportunity. What the reader is left with are such 'insights' as, “Cisco executives began to sense that John Chambers was no phony”; and, “that gregarious, cheerful person was who [Chambers] was”. A heart-warming tale of how Chambers helped a girl with learning difficulties by publicly revealing his own battle with dyslexia merely reinforces the impression that Slater is little more than a propagandist - and a rather clumsy one at that.
If this is the kind of insight “unprecedented access” gives Slater, perhaps it would have been better for him to have been refused access. Indeed, his warts-and-all depiction of the company's founders, Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack, who declined his requests for interviews - is, in fact, far more insightful. While they may have invented their first routers to be able to exchange love emails to each other from opposite sides of the Stanford University campus, they do not appear from Slater's narrative to have a social skill between them. For anyone wanting a pop-journalism history of Cisco, The Eye of the Storm is a reasonable read, albeit one lacking depth. Anyone looking for real business advice and analysis would do well to save their money.