Doing Both

The holiday season was marked by a good read, sweet sleep in a soft blanket and fuzzy slippers which make up the fond memories of the period. The book Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today's Profit and Drives Tomorrow's Growth by Inder Sidhu was an excellent text for me this season. Having held senior management positions at Cisco, Sidhu discusses how "Doing Both" strategy helped the company to achieve growth during his 20 years tenure before joining Nutanix.

The strategy of 'Doing Both' involves incorporating innovation for the future and optimization for the present, and expansion into new markets and building the current markets. The author argues against settling by picking one of the options. Cisco has been able to simultaneously implement innovation and optimization and to avoid the struggle of striking a balance between the two, a problem experienced by many firms. The $50 billion company has been deriving all sorts of advantages by viewing decisions as opportunities to exploit rather than sacrifices to be made. The approach involves making one choice of benefit and jointly strengthening the other.

The author explores 'Doing Both' concept, and the apparently contradictory alternatives involved, and its relevance to the management decisions. Its application in various management decisions involves learning to view every opportunity as a way of achieving a multiplier effect by seeking and attaining two seemingly contradictory goals but not a choice between two seemingly incompatible goals. In the case of Cisco, the management decisions revolve around capturing today's profit and driving tomorrow's growth. Sidhu emphasizes the need for firms to focus on sources of change that include; enhancing the current business through sustaining change, developing disruptive change outside the primary business, and turning the externally sourced change into a business. Also, he argues that leaders have to require organizations to up their game and introduce changes, including approval processes, reward systems, innovation language, altering the organization's expectations for change.

Sidhu tackles one of the major challenges encountered in business that entails whether the emphasis should be on the development of business models or innovations which will yield future profits or on enhancing the profitability of the existing operations. In 'Doing both', organizations have to avoid false choices, weak compromises, and reduced prospects and embrace ways of benefiting from each option and jointly strengthening the other. 'Doing Both' strategy is based on Cisco's insights and the experiences of other firms.

One of the central challenges of business today is often concisely summed up in a single question: “Should we be focusing on developing the innovations and business strategies which will drive our future profits or should we instead be concentrating on optimizing the profitability of our current operations?" In the book, he explores how they adopted the 'Doing Both Strategy' and developed a plan on how it can be implemented successfully in other companies too.