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Published on 12/29/1999 All articles from this issue

Christopher Nordlinger makes his own luck at Cisco Systems Inc.

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By Leslie K. Martin / Town Crier Staff Writer

One week John Chambers, chief executive officer of Cisco Systems Inc., made the cover of "BusinessWeek." The same week NetAid, a Web-cast event created by Cisco to aid the world's poor, ran on the Internet.

Later that week, Los Altos residents Christopher Nordlinger and his wife watched Diane Sawyer interview Chambers on television for a segment called "The World's Greatest Boss." During the program, Nordlinger said, "My wife turned to me and said, 'You are one lucky guy.'"

The statement sums up how Nordlinger feels about working at Cisco.

Nordlinger, a senior manager in the corporate brand program at Cisco, is a good example of Chambers' philosophy of hiring the best and brightest.

Born in Washington, D.C., Nordlinger attended Sidwell Friends, the same high school attended by Chelsea Clinton, the Nixon girls and Charles Lindbergh. He got his Ph.D. in international economics through a Fulbright Scholarship at Tufts University, and then attended the international relations Fletcher graduate school at Harvard.

In graduate school, Nordlinger said, "There was a program that paid you to work overseas with the State Department," and Nordlinger worked at an embassy "in the poorest country in the world," south of the Sahara Desert in Africa.

The Fulbright took him to Senegal, Africa, and then France, where he got a job in international telecommunications at the French firm Eurospace. Though based primarily in D.C., Nordlinger's job carried him around the world.

When the job ended, before returning to graduate school, he hitchhiked through southern Africa, climbed Mount Kenya, visited the Soviet Union, and spent Christmas in Norway.

For the next decade, Nordlinger worked in international telecommunications, doing business development and marketing. These were the developmental years of data communications. At one point, Nordlinger worked at a company started by a founder of ARPA Net, the government-sponsored research project that, Nordlinger said, "really created the infrastructure for the Internet."

An offer from Eagle River Interactive, the first public company in Web design, brought him to the West Coast. When that company was bought out two years ago, Nordlinger started work at Cisco.

Cisco is known as the leader in networking for the Internet. "Being with the leader is important," Nordlinger said. "I knew that Cisco had a lot of smart people, that it had superior training and career development offerings and I wanted the opportunity to learn as much as possible."

Despite Cisco's behemoth growth, Nordlinger said the company has "maintained a degree of customer satisfaction you would never expect. It's also maintained a level of individual agility and perseverance that you don't find in most big companies. People believe here. People believe in Cisco."

It's difficult to scoff at such religious zeal when Cisco revenues are at $12.2 billion and climbing.

Nordlinger's current project at Cisco is no small task. Nordlinger explained, "I'm working with 24,000 employees world-wide to build the Cisco brand into a marketing program that helps us clearly communicate the value of Cisco to the rest of the world."

To do this, Nordlinger creates marketing programs within the company that link all the different parts of Cisco.

By developing customized software that allows customers like Xerox and Bell Atlantic to place massive, complex, and technical orders online, Cisco runs with a streamlined efficiency that Nordlinger said saves Cisco $825 million annually. Nordlinger said that other companies, even governments, arrive at Cisco daily, wanting to know how they can do what Cisco does.

"Our job," Nordlinger said, "is to really help communicate to the rest of the world, and be a model in that communication, for how we can share our best practices and share what we've learned and what we've done to do that."

Nordlinger's got the right stuff for the job, and that's more than being lucky.

For more information, see our Business Brief, below, on Cisco Systems.