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Inder Sidhu    

Senior Vice President of Strategy and Planning for Worldwide Operations, Cisco Systems; NYT Best-selling Author, "Doing Both: Capturing Today's Profit and Driving Tomorrow's Growth"

Inder Sidhu is senior vice president of Strategy and Planning for Worldwide Operations at Cisco, the $40 billion worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. He is also a member of the companys Operating Committee.

From 2006-2010, Sidhu co-led Ciscos Emerging Countries Council, which drives business success in fast-growing geographies like China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and the Middle East. From 2006-2009, he co-led the Enterprise Business Council, which is responsible for Ciscos corporate business, representing about half of the companys total revenue.

In 2010, Sidhu published Doing Both: Capturing Todays Profit and Driving Tomorrows Growth (FT Press). In this New York Times best seller, he identifies common business dichotomies and explores how successful companies avoid difficult tradeoffs and instead achieve bigger outcomes by doing both. Using this framework, he offers a unique view of Ciscos consistent record of innovation and high performance.

Since joining Cisco in 1995, Sidhu has served in executive leadership positions in the Sales, Services and Business Development organizations. He was the VP/GM Worldwide Professional Services, VP/GM Advanced Engineering Services and VP Strategy and Business Development, Customer Advocacy.

Sidhu was previously with McKinsey & Company, an international management consulting company. He has also worked at Intel and Novell.

Sidhu is a graduate of the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School and holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds a masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India.

Sidhu channels his passion for education into guest lecturing at Harvard Business School, Stanford University, and the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Goodwill of Silicon Valley.

Sidhu lives in Saratoga, California, with his wife and three children.

Speech Topics


Doing Both: Capturing Todays Profit and Driving Tomorrows Growth

The current business landscape is ripe with dichotomies: Run today's business or invest for tomorrow? Nurture innovation or drive operational excellence? Conventional wisdom says that organizations wrestling with two divergent choices will more likely succeed if they select one option over the other and pursue it to fruition. The truth of the matter is that many companies don't succeed when deploying a one-or-the-other type strategy and that there is a much easier path to success: Doing Both. Doing Both means approaching every decision as an opportunity to seize, not a sacrifice to endure. It means avoiding false choices, reduced expectations, and weak compromises. It means finding ways to make each option benefit and mutually reinforce the other. Using concepts from his best-selling book, Cisco Senior Vice President Inder Sidhu explains why doing both is todays best growth strategy. Then, drawing on Ciscos hard-won insights and the experiences of companies like Procter & Gamble, Whirlpool, and Harley-Davidson, Sidhu presents a complete blueprint for doing both across any organization.

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