John Chambers chairman and CEO Cisco

Chambers has been CEO of Cisco Systems since 1995. Although he s been talking about his retirement more now than he ever has, he s still running the company with all his might. He s trying to navigate Cisco past its roots as a network equipment company becoming a bigger IT company that competes with IBM and HP. He needs to succeed because new technologies called software defined networking threaten the way networks will be built and Cisco s stronghold on that market.