Biography|John Chambers — The Tasman Drive Campus Where the Board Made Him CEO

People treat the Cisco succession as a 2015 story about Chuck Robbins.

The first succession on this campus ran the other way.

On 15 November 1994, at the annual shareholders meeting, Cisco announced that president and CEO John P. Morgridge would become chairman and that executive vice president John Chambers would become president and CEO.

Both moves took effect at the end of January 1995. The company's own news release is the primary date.

Chambers had joined in January 1991 from Wang Laboratories, after six years at IBM. Cisco then employed about four hundred people and booked on the order of seventy million dollars a year.

By the time the board handed him the chief-executive title, annual sales were already above one billion. The 1995 Form 10-K lists the executive office at 170 West Tasman Drive, San Jose, on a leased forty-six-acre headquarters of eight buildings.

Britannica dates the move from Menlo Park to San Jose to 1994. The Tasman pin is the working address for the first day of the new title.

Over the next twenty years sales rose into the high forty billions, depending on which fiscal year a later summary cites. He treated acquisition as a method, not an exception.

On 4 May 2015 the board named Chuck Robbins to succeed him. Robbins took the CEO chair on 26 July 2015. Chambers stayed as executive chairman until 2017 and then as chairman emeritus with no operating authority.

The campus a visitor sees from West Tasman has been carved since. Google later bought several neighboring Tasman buildings. Building D at 170 still reads as the historic headquarters address.

Photo: Coolcaesar, Cisco Systems Building 2 on the San Jose campus, 24 August 2006, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons