"We were taught that your best weapon in life is your brain, so you’d better sharpen it. Education was the great equalizer. You didn’t have to be born into privilege to get the skills to compete, and no amount of privilege would help you if you didn’t invest in building your skills.

How you’d use those skills would depend on what the market needed. An education gave you something that no one could take away: flexibility to do what you want and the process for continuous learning.

That philosophy shaped how my family responded to the ebb and flow of West Virginia’s fortunes, and it would also shape how I ran Cisco. Education enabled my grandparents and their children to move from a contracting industry to a growing one.

My family didn’t work in the coal mines that came to dominate West Virginia’s economy, though I knew a number of people who did. Instead, Grandpa Bood built a successful road construction company while Grandpa Pierce ran a bank.

Grandma Myrtle and Grandma Lenora were both active in the community and pushed to improve education throughout the state. I learned early on that to have transformative change, groups had to come together, whether it was government and business or workers and managers.

You had to find common ground and shared goals to get things done.

I’m lucky to come from a family of optimists. I never heard my grandparents complain. Even in tough times, they talked about opportunities and were motivated by curiosity, the excitement of a challenge, and a desire to help.

My mom and dad acquired those values and passed them to us. They’d been married 57 years by the time mom died . They didn’t just love each other; they respected and supported each other’s dreams and aspirations, too. My sisters, Patty and Cindy, and I were all expected to work hard, treat others like family, and never stop learning about the world."

- John Chambers (Chairman Emeritus - Cisco), Connecting the Dots