How to think about growth in an era of accelerated disruption
For most companies, once they create their growth strategy, they limit their execution levers to a simple build vs. buy decision. I get why. It’s clean, it’s decisive, and it fits neatly into a board presentation.
But that binary decision limits optionality and undervalues leveraging the ecosystem around us as an extension of internal innovation.
What an enterprise needs is a system of complementary levers, each with its own logic and moment — all serving to accelerate growth, innovation and time to market.
At Cisco, we think across several growth levers: build, buy, partner, invest, and incubate. Increasingly, companies that develop the muscle to think holistically and zero in on which lever to pull, and when, will set themselves apart.
A holistic approach is needed
Here’s something I’ve seen repeatedly: tech companies are rightfully proud of what their engineers can do. While that pride is usually earned, it can also create blind spots.
Teams often overestimate how fast they can internally build and underestimate how fast the market moves. It’s human nature. Teams also undervalue the experience a potential acquisition target has already accumulated — the failures, the pivots, and the hard lessons learned from grappling with a customer problem over time. When evaluating an acquisition, it’s tempting to focus on their current product. But that product is the output of a team’s accumulated knowledge, which if integrated properly, should accelerate time to market.
The job of strategy and corporate development teams is to push back on that bias — not to discourage internal innovation, but to make sure the comparison is realistic.
Multiple levers, one strategy
Companies need to build the institutional discipline to explore all available levers to pull across cycles, across market conditions, across leadership changes. Here’s how we think about each growth lever at Cisco — and what makes them distinct.
Build
Organic development is still the foundation. Most of Cisco’s innovation comes from within, and that’s intentional. It is also the preferred path to drive innovation for most tech companies.
Internal teams are optimists by nature. The honest question to ask here isn’t “Can we build it?” it’s “Can we build it and deliver it fast enough to matter?” Time to market is a real constraint. Being right but two years late is still a loss.
AI coding tools are clearly compressing development times significantly. But as adoption of these tools spreads, every competitor will benefit from the speed advantage which will only increase the urgency of faster time to market.
Buy
Once you’ve made the decision to enter a market or build a capability and have gone through the honest assessment of build vs. buy, you should make M&A part of your ongoing thinking. Don’t treat it as a one-time event. Oftentimes, the decision comes down to speed and capabilities. Leveraging the startup ecosystem as an extension of your internal R&D is essential to innovation.
But the acquisition is only the beginning. What separates a successful acquisition from an expensive experiment is clarity and alignment between the strategy, the M&A business case, and the integration plan. You need that clarity before the deal closes, not after.
Maintaining that alignment is harder than people think. I see it all the time: companies plan for extensive synergies in the business case, but then propose an integration plan that “leaves the target alone” so as not to distract them. This misalignment is a recipe for failure.
Partner
Customers want outcomes. When you’ve determined that a certain market or technology is not a core focus area for the company, partnering is a powerful way to build and go to market.
An open, thriving ecosystem is itself a competitive advantage — but you can’t fake being partner-friendly. It must be ingrained in the culture, with success defined as joint success. To unlock the full potential of your most strategic partnerships, you must apply a whole-company lens when building them: aligning your activities across product, go-to-market, and operations.
Invest
Corporate venture investment is the lever to deploy when you want to learn and keep tabs on a particular market or technology area.
But to get that benefit, you have to build the muscle to work alongside a startup, not just observe it. That means being willing to co-develop, share roadmap thinking, and engage commercially — even before you know whether the relationship will deepen. The companies that do this well treat their investment portfolio as a live market sensing engine. The ones that don’t end up with a collection of minority stakes and no real insight to show for it.
The best investments also provide optionality. They can stay as minority stakes, convert to deeper partnerships, or become acquisitions when the timing is right. That flexibility is valuable in a market that moves as fast as ours does.
Incubate
Incubation is how we develop what’s further out, the things that aren’t ready for the core organization, but are too important to ignore. The starting point is always the customer: what problems are showing up that are worth going after?
That means being honest about the type of risk involved. Technology risk means the problem is real but the solution isn’t proven yet — quantum networking is the right example here. We know it’s coming, but there are still hard, unsolved problems between where we are today and where the market will eventually land.
Market risk is different: the technology works, but the use cases and the size of the opportunity are still taking shape. Both are worth pursuing. They just require different assumptions and different patience.
At Cisco, we run this motion through Outshift, Cisco’s internal incubation team, chartered with exploring emerging technologies. The goal is to prove the technology, find early product-market fit, and “graduate” it into Cisco’s broader engineering teams.
Questions every technology leader should be asking
If you’re working through a growth decision right now, here are some questions I’d start with:
- Does the team really understand the customer’s needs and the technology solution?
- Is the team being realistic about what they can build and the speed in which they can deliver?
- Do we need to own this technology, or are we better off partnering?
- Do we have a 360-degree view of what the partnership can bring?
- If we need to learn more, are there startups in the ecosystem we could invest in?
No single growth lever is a silver bullet, and none works in isolation. The discipline is in knowing when to build through investment, when to accelerate through acquisition, when to extend innovation through partnering, and when to protect long-term optionality through incubation.
Strategy isn’t a single decision. It’s a repeatable system. The companies that treat it that way will be the ones still leading when the next wave of disruption arrives.
