This ebook offers a summary of the book “DOING BOTH - How Cisco Captures Today's Profit and Drives Tomorrow's Growth by Inder Sidhu”.

One of the central challenges of business is often concisely summed up in a single question: “Should we be focusing on developing the innovations and business models which will drive our future profits or should we instead be concentrating on optimizing the profitability of our current operations?"

Many companies struggle to hit the right balance in this Optimize vs. Innovate internal debate but this isn't even an issue at Cisco, the $40 billion company which produces much of the networking equipment which underpins the Internet. Instead, Cisco does both simultaneously. And even more impressively, Cisco has found all kinds of advantages can be derived from approaching every decision as an opportunity to seize rather than a sacrifice to be made. The key is to find ways to make one option benefit and mutually reinforce the other.