In February, I paid a visit to Cisco’s San Jose campus to speak with Jim Grubb, Cisco’s Chief Demonstration Officer. For eleven years, Grubb has accompanied CEO John Chambers on stage to demonstrate all sorts of current and future networking technology that will change the way the world lives, works, plays and learns. Although John Chambers is considered one of the most astonishing presenters in the business world today, Grubb’s demos are among the anticipated and memorable elements of a Cisco presentation.
Grubb says exciting demos have the following four elements.
- Exciting demos have a high “gee-whiz” factor.
- Exciting demos are funny.
- Exciting demos are relevant to your audience.
- Exciting demos have a human connection.
I summarized Grubb’s four key points in my BusinessWeek.com column, Four Steps to a Lively Demo, February 10, 2009.
Grubb offered more advice than space in the column allowed, so here is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Jim, thank you for your time. I’ve enjoyed watching the demos you give with Mr. Chambers. Tell me, is your title really Chief Demonstration Officer or is that what Chambers calls you on stage?
I have two cards. One is VP of Corporate Communications Architecture. The other says Chief Demonstration Officer. John [Chambers] wanted to know what to call me. Don Listwin, who used to run marketing, said we should call you a Chief Demonstration Officer. I told him I liked the sound of it. It’s a very impressive title! What else are you going to call me? It’s a dedicated function. We do between thirty to fifty events a year, one a week on average. It’s a full-time job.
How long have you been presenting and why do you enjoy it so much?
“I joined Cisco in 1993 and I’ve been presenting with John for eleven years. I love to tinker and I’ve done a lot of performing like music and theater. And through my career, I’ve held a lot of jobs where I was in front of people. I was a training instructor for awhile and a systems engineer, so I did a lot of customer demonstrations.
I don’t know where I got this skill but I love to explain things to people. Deep down I love technology for technology’s sake. John comes at it for the other side. He loves technology for what it can do for business. That’s why it’s a nice partnership.
Jim, most CEOs conduct the entire presentation. Why does Chambers bring you on?
The core reason you do this is to provide the entertainment factor. When you have a talking head, it gets pretty boring quickly. By bringing someone else in, you’re re-engaging the audience. They’re saying to themselves, I should pay attention here because something is changing. We do this so the audience gets more out of the presentation. That’s the bottom line. An engaged audience will remember more of the key ideas. They’ll go in the hallway afterwards and talk about. They’ll say, Did you see what Cisco did? They brought a piano connected to the Internet. Isn’t that interesting? Why do you people like The Discovery Channel? Because it’s interesting and entertaining.
What is your role and John’s role in a demonstration? It seems to me that John adds color commentary. There’s very little dead air. While you’re demonstrating, John applies it to the audience.
You nailed it. I put together a briefing document that takes him through everything we’re doing to demonstrate: Pictures, screen shots, photos of sets, even the blocking, where we should stand. John studies the document and typically we go over it together. He adds color and makes the case for the business audience. He know what’s they’re looking for—practical applications. We don’t script it. We did a few times but it seems over-rehearsed. Now we have a flow and the humor comes on the fly.
I really liked the demo you and John did together at CES 2009. You make complicated technology easy to understand. What makes for an entertaining demo?
Number one, a high gee-whiz factor. You want people to say, ‘Oh my gosh, you can do that?’ For example, I told John that I had connected my piano to the Internet and he said everything is going to be connected to the Internet – thermostats, lights, etc. So we tried it on stage for the first time at CES in 1999. From a technology perspective, it wasn’t that complex but it had a high gee whiz factor. People in the audience were amazed that we connected a grand piano to the Internet and made it play.
Number two, it has to be funny. That’s why we work some humor into our act. Humor endears John to the audience. They see that he’s a regular guy, not just this business icon. He is the face of Cisco and we want people to like Cisco. John is a great guy and cares about everyone. He’ll even thank the sound guy at the end of rehearsal. It’s genuine. He understands the power of kindness and we want that to come across.
Number three, relevance. You want people to say, ‘I can use that. It would make my life much easier.’ Before we got into the business of more end point applications like Linksys, WebEx, and TelePresence, we made Internet plumbing. It’s not that interesting to see a router so we knew that we had to talk about what business processes the equipment would enable. I think that’s what set us apart from our competitors. When you sell the business process to a customer, you’re not talking about speeds and feeds. We would often get the business from a customer because we were selling them more than routers; we were selling them a better way to do business. We do the same today when talk how the internet facilitates collaboration.
Finally, demonstrations need the human element. For example, I’ll never forget the first demo we did together eleven years ago. It was for a health information show. We wanted to connect an ultrasound machine to the Internet. So what we did— and this was tastefully done—was to draw back the curtain to reveal a pregnant woman in a hospital bed being administered an ultrasound by a medical technician. We had to find a woman who was at the right number of weeks for the test to be done. John really turned on the charm. He walked over, started talking to the mom, it was great. Meanwhile, everyone saw the fetus on the screen and they loved it. We closed the curtains, walked over to a PC, and viewed the same images that we just saw live. We made the point that everything will be connected to the Internet and that it will change medicine.
Any other advice for presenters?
The most important thing is to be in the now and to just tell the story. You have to be comfortable with the story. Get out there, be well prepared, have a good time and tell the story.
You mentioned collaboration. That seems to the theme here at Cisco.
Yes, we’re selling collaboration. Few people have gotten the message that it has the potential to revolutionize the way people to do business. Decisions that used to be made by five or six people are now being made by hundreds of people around the world in the same organization.
It does sound exciting and perhaps a topic for another article. But I know you’re off to India for a presentation this weekend, so I’ll let you go. Thanks, Jim.
Thank you. It was fun.