The Signal Interview
Henry Kissinger reputedly asked who to call if he wanted to speak to Europe. If you need to get corporate America on the line right now, Chuck Robbins is your man. For the past year, Cisco’s chair and chief executive officer has also chaired the Business Roundtable, Washington’s premier CEO conclave, making him a key interpreter for a business community looking to navigate Donald Trump’s return to power.
The Georgia-born former basketball player has not yet joined the list of CEOs paying court to the new president. But his advice to his peers on how to deal with Trump echoes their strategy: “Engagement, pure and simple.”
Dealing with Trump
The new administration seems to enjoy dealing with the business community, Robbins says, not mentioning the contrast with Joe Biden. “We won’t always agree… but I feel confident that we’ll have an opportunity to have that discussion.”
What does Trump 2.0 really mean for business? Will he unleash economic dynamism or, as some critics fear, undermine the rule of law on which companies depend? Robbins sees only a “very pro-business” administration that understands commercial success is “the backbone of what makes this country great.”
That, he adds, underpins CEOs’ optimism. After the high turnover in Trump’s first term, he also thinks the like-minded team now stepping into cabinet roles will stick around, giving executives a chance to build a more lasting rapport.
Trump’s brand is confrontation, but Robbins is projecting calm, citing the new administration’s less “ideological” approach to mergers and acquisitions as cause for hope that it will be open to compromise. At the same time, he is subtly reminding it of what business thinks pragmatism should mean. Even on tariffs, “the real wild card” whose supply chain and inflationary impacts CEOs fear, he urges Republicans to apply them “surgically” so as not to penalize US manufacturing.
The tariff debate is more than a routine policy disagreement: given that Biden kept most of Trump’s first-term tariffs in place, is it also a test of whether the business establishment is losing the argument on trade?
Robbins demurs. “We will have to think through that when we see what’s actually implemented,” he says. “You know, we’ve gone through it once, and we’ll all react appropriately and deal with it.”
Weathering the wokelash
Free trade is not the only Business Roundtable article of faith that is under attack. Five years ago, it changed its longstanding position that corporations exist principally to serve their shareholders. Its statement galvanized a consensus shift, boosting supporters of ideas like ESG investing or workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion. The backlash has been fierce but Robbins says the group he chairs is not planning a rewrite.
“Look, you go through these waves,” he says. “There will be times where society will beg us to do things and get and stay involved. There’ll be times where they want us to stay out… the pendulum swings too far in one direction, it swings too far in the other direction, and the key is getting it back to equilibrium.”
Robbins has not been a prime target for those who think corporate America went woke. But the wokelash has been one more source of pressure for a generation of CEOs who, he says, have grown used to crises, from a pandemic to geopolitical turmoil.
“There’s never been a perspective where we say, ‘Well, we should probably pause until things get back to normal.’ This is normal,” he observes. And that, he believes, makes his peer group less likely to slow investments in things like the networking equipment and security services Cisco sells.
Riding the AI wave
Our discussion took place at an AI-themed event Cisco threw for its customers in Palo Alto’s Four Seasons hotel. The AI-powered revaluation of tech stocks has done little for Cisco, which is valued at $240 billion yet trades on much the same earnings multiple as two years ago. Its “AI Summit,” gathering executives from the likes of OpenAI and Groq, was part of a strategy to recast Cisco as an indispensable partner to customers who, its surveys suggest, still feel unsure how to prepare for the artificial intelligence era.
“The AI revolution is moving into the enterprise. And I think this year is going to be a year where it really kicks in gear,” Robbins says. “We understand the enterprise very deeply, and so we think we have a unique role to play.”
Robbins is cautious about promising any Nvidia-style transformation of Cisco’s revenues — he lived through the dotcom bubble when his company’s stock soared much as the chip group’s has lately, before falling to earth. He learned then, he says, that “when you’re in a market that is just exploding, you can believe a lot of press clippings.” But as his high school basketball coach taught him, “The only thing that matters is your execution.”
Robbins isn’t about to swap his “boring CEO” suits for Jensen Huang’s leather jackets — but he is playing to his company’s strengths in networking and security. Externally, it’s a chance to shift the market narrative around Cisco. Internally, there is an urgency to his message: AI is accelerating its core markets “and we can’t miss it.”
Leading questions
Transmitting such messages to 90,000 employees is not easy. After almost a decade in charge, Robbins says he’s learned the value of transparent, even blunt, communication. His regular all-hands video calls “can get pretty animated,” he says, but they build trust.
“If I have an answer that you’re not going to like, I might say in advance you’re not going to like it, but since you asked, here’s the answer... I don’t think you can run a company effectively and have the trust of your employees if you’re not doing that. They can take the bad news if they just know you’re telling the truth.”
As CEO, Robbins says he has so many external issues to deal with that “it’s easy to get out of the details” of what is happening in the business. He has made a point lately of spending more time asking questions of customers, engineers, and sales teams.
“What I’ve learned is it matters when I go do a review on a product design. It matters when I go sit down with the sales team and talk to them about what’s going on,” he says. “Those interactions inform the bigger decisions that we have to make.”
Robbins sweats the details, but not much else. “Since I was a kid, I just don’t worry about things that are outside my control that much. We plan for them. [But] if you can’t control it, there’s no sense in stressing over it,” he says. “As much as I love this job, as much as I love everything I do every day, it doesn’t define me.”