Silicon Valley can happen anywhere. Here’s why other cities need to make their own.

Are Silicon Valley’s best days behind it? The Economist seems to think so. It recently ran a cover story that argued we’re at “Peak Valley” as money and entrepreneurs are starting to go elsewhere. While I agree that the relative importance of Silicon Valley may be slowing down, I have a very different take on why. For the editors of The Economist, the problem comes down to the high cost of hiring talent and the challenge of competing against wealthy tech giants. Those are certainly contributing factors but, to me, the biggest problem is complacency – we’ve been doing the right thing for too long. When you’re the dominant player on the field, it’s easy to assume that you’ll keep winning the game. I can tell you from personal experience that the large multinational companies of today probably won’t tackle the threats of tomorrow until it’s too late. It’s hard to disrupt yourself to tackle challenges that are still around the corner. It’s even harder when you’re not supported by political leaders and investors who recognize the need to take constant risks to keep up with the pace of disruption.

Most people associate me with Silicon Valley, where I was at Cisco for 27 years, including 20 as CEO. I still live in that part of California and find it’s an energizing and special place to be. However, I also spend a lot of time on the road, working with entrepreneurs and leaders in the U.S., India, France, and other parts of the world who have the potential to lead the next great wave of innovation. Through JC2 Ventures, I am investing in and working with startups to help them scale to become the next Cisco. Some of the companies in our portfolio are based here in the Valley, but most are elsewhere, in places like Arizona, Texas, Georgia, New York, France, Germany, and India. If you look at the leaders, they boast the diversity that every organization – business, government, or otherwise – should seek, with names like Joerg, Carlos, Ragy, Pankaj, Amir, Zac, Gustavo, Mike, Vijay, Mohammed, Umesh, Saket, KR, and Ron, among others. What unites them is their potential to disrupt the status quo and change the game in the industries they occupy. Increasingly, they can do that from anywhere. There’s no entitlement, not even for Silicon Valley.

Contrary to what you might read in the press, this is not a new phenomenon. Because of digital technology, it’s just happening at a much faster pace. I grew up in West Virginia when it was the chemical capital of the world and a place where generations of workers could still make a good living in the coal mines. I started my career at IBM when Big Blue was the undisputed leader of the computer revolution. I then moved to Wang Laboratories when it was leading the next wave of innovation with the minicomputer revolution, and its headquarters along Boston’s Route 128 was the high-tech center of the world. In all of these scenarios, I saw what happened when leaders failed to anticipate a new wave of technology and a new crop of competitors. Nobody is too big to fail. You have to compete in the moment but also rise above the short-term wins or problems to think 3, 5, and even 10 years out to pursue bigger and bolder dreams.

I came to Cisco and Silicon Valley in 1991, determined to never again sit idly by as the world moved in a different direction. This time, I was betting on David instead of Goliath as this was a 400-person company that nobody knew, making $70 million a year in revenue from a microwave-sized product that few were really sure they needed. Routers were a relatively new technology that let you send data between computer networks. In the days before the World Wide Web, the value proposition of that technology wasn’t clear to a lot of companies. Friends, especially from back East, congratulated me on joining Sysco, the food distribution giant. Over the next decade, we grew 65% a year and I was treated as a Silicon Valley celebrity of sorts, complete with paparazzi following me home from restaurants and praise in the media as America’s “best boss” and a “top CEO.” A year later, after the dot-com bubble bursting had wiped out a quarter of our customers and 80% of our stock price, my face was in the press for a different reason. We survived that crisis and five other downturns that could have killed our business because we learned how to reinvent ourselves again and again.

That ability to reinvent not only your company but yourself is the critical skill for every leader in the digital age. It doesn’t matter if you are leading an organization of 2 people or 200,000 people: you have to learn to be fast, flexible, and ahead of the curve. What matters isn’t your mistakes but your ability to quickly correct them and move on. Even so, winning in a startup world isn’t a solo exercise. What has kept Silicon Valley on top is the ecosystem of businesses, venture capitalists, lawyers, great universities, and supportive government leaders. Without the magnetic pull of Stanford University, an environment that both rewards financial risk and forgives failure, and policies that draw the best and brightest from around the world, there would be no Silicon Valley. Its much-coveted ecosystem is based on talent, money, innovation, and technology that can move anywhere else in the world. All of those things are highly mobile assets that congregate around opportunities, research hubs, and like-minded entrepreneurial talent. Now, the Valley risks becoming less a magnet for top talent than a target that many of them want to beat.

To me, that’s less a strike against the Valley than a warning to America as a whole. I’m less concerned about the relative decline of Silicon Valley than the need to create many more Silicon Valley’s all around the country. The United States is the only developed country in the world that lacks not only a digitization plan but also a national plan for startups and entrepreneurism. As a result, we do not have a well-thought-out strategy for creating the kinds of infrastructure, education, tax strategy, regulation simplification, skills training, and public policies to promote innovation and startups. We need to invest in smart immigration policies, training, infrastructure, and policies that are adapted to the digital age.

Most of us can agree on the need for high-speed Internet, skills training, cybersecurity, digitization of government services, and policies to promote small business. That’s not a left/right, Republican/Democrat issue. If you look at the politicians who are most ambitious in transforming their countries through digitization, one came out of a socialist party in France [Emmanuel Macron] while the other was voted in on a pro-business agenda in India [Narendra Modi]. President Bill Clinton is one of the most enlightened leaders I’ve met when it comes to harnessing the power of the Internet. He was talking about a new global economy of constant innovation almost 25 years ago, and warned against protectionist instincts, saying, “We must compete, not retreat.” President George W. Bush built on that foundation with lower taxes and an approach of just doing what he believed was right for the country. At the same time, President Bush was able to strike deals with the Democrats in areas like immigration and pension reform because he understood you have to represent all of our citizens to get things done. I’ve worked closely with nine secretaries of state from both parties and, based on those experiences, I don’t think we can be a leader in the digital era if we don’t come together and find common ground to work on shared objectives.

When new hubs emerge, I think we all win. I lived in Pittsburgh in the 1980s, when steel companies kept announcing job cuts and there seemed to be nowhere for ambitious young people to go but away. Today, Pittsburgh has become a model of entrepreneurship and innovation. I saw how Boston’s Route 128 lost its luster after the brands that dominated minicomputers missed the PC revolution and the Internet, but I’ve also seen Boston start to regain that luster as a hub for biotech, fintech, and other breakthrough technologies. We’re entering a period of disruption that’s likely to be more profound than any we’ve ever seen. Large enterprise companies, in total, aren’t going to create net new jobs; 40% of them probably won’t exist within a decade. Robots, artificial intelligence, and intelligent machines will likely replace 30 to 40% of what we do today. The number of U.S. startups is shrinking at a time when we need to be creating three times as many. That’s not easy to do when you have disengaged political leaders, a broken education system, and policies based on fear.

Americans still have many advantages when it comes to startups, including deep pools of capital, top universities, a track record of success, a transparent and democratic political system, and a reputation for being the destination of choice for the best and brightest from around the world. Once we decide to put a person on the moon, we do it faster and better than anyone else. Does that spirit extend well beyond Silicon Valley? I think so. If we want to win in the digital age, we need to encourage it everywhere in our country.

John Chambers is the author of Connecting the Dots: Lessons for Leadership in a Startup World.