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Warrior for innovation – Cisco’s new CTO strives to live up to her name

Padmasree Warrior (Cisco photo)

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — As the world’s financial crisis threatens to overwhelm all with gloom and doom, the cooler heads among us realize that discovery and innovation can’t stop if we are to build a better world – economically, technologically and environmentally.

Count Cisco’s new chief technology officer, Padmasree Warrior, is among those execs who are willing to fight for tomorrow, not just the next quarter.

Warrior (don’t you love that name?) joined Cisco in June. In a recent blog post cited by ZDnet’s Jason Hiner, she listed her 10 priorities for product development and innovation in these trying times. You won’t read this list on David Letterman, but it should be on CNBC, Fox Business and other business-oriented programs.

Here we go:

1. Prioritize products that solve relevant problems. What are people willing to pay for?

2. Make sure your solution has sustainable differentiation. What is unique?

3. Focus on quality and reliability. It works each and every time.

4. Share best practices and lessons from failures.

5. Innovate. What will you be ready with in five to 10 years' time?

6. Listen with a global perspective. Be there for friends and partners.

7. Get involved in your community. Contribute time and expertise.

8. Deflect stress to avoid negative physiological effects. Do what you enjoy: sports, meditation, music, theater or art.

9. Prioritize. Don’t start what you can’t finish

10. Pursue your passions. Spend time on what you really care about. Laugh (at yourself, too) and have fun.

When Warrior joined Cisco after more than 20 years at Motorola, she spelled out her philosophy in a conversation with Cisco’s Peter Shaplen in a June discussion.

“I'm an engineer by training, a technologist at heart. I enjoy motivating people and influencing companies to extending to new opportunities. So sometimes, I’m tactical,” she explained.

“Sometimes I am operational, sometimes strategic, sometimes a visionary, but often a collaborative leader of thought and people.”

While Cisco remains a world leader in innovation, Warrior sees challenges and opportunities ahead in a more globally competitive marketplace. Asked about collaboration and innovation, she told Shaplen:

“In the simplest sense, what innovation means to me is a new way to solve a common problem that we as users face today, right? So solve a relevant problem in a simple new way. That's what innovation means.

“There are forces at play that will change the process of innovation in the next decade, things like globalization, as we evolve from single-economics powers of strength in the world to multiple [polars] of economic strength across the world geographically distributed, things like mobility and the Internet changing the connection points across the world.

“So innovation itself is going to change in the future, where it will require companies not just to build their own solutions but to buy and partner and unify ideas from across the globe. That is what I think about when I think about collaborative innovation. That's what the world collaboration means to me is how do you unify these different aspects of innovation. That's the decade that Cisco will lead with innovation.”

Will Cisco deliver on her bold prediction? Only time will tell, of course, but Chairman John Chambers and company do have a pretty strong record. Warrior obviously wants to make her own contributions.

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