One time, after performing his acrobatic landing, the handlebar of the trapeze, which was made of metal, swung back and clocked him on the side of the head.
Blood gushed.
He walked a half-mile back to his family’s cabin.
“I expected my mom to be very concerned and panicked,” Chambers said. “Instead, she just looked at me and said, ‘Oh, it’s a puncture wound.’ She took her hand, put pressure on it, stopped the bleeding and slapped on a few Band-Aids. She told me to go back out and play.”
As a Silicon Valley leader and Internet gamechanger, Chambers, BSBA ’71, JD ’74, seems to have inherited his mother’s level of calmness, even amid tough situations.
And now, he’s looking to stop a different kind of bleeding – the bleeding of talent of his native state.
West Virginia ranks dead last in many categories.
Politicians have promised to turn the state around, almost like a verbal tic, but it remains a challenge.
For years, West Virginia has consistently scraped near the bottom of quality of life rankings, whether in health or socioeconomics. And it’s been steadily losing population since 2012.
If anyone can help reverse the trend, perhaps it’s Chambers, the two-time West Virginia University alumnus and Charleston, W.Va., native who transformed the way the world works, lives, learns and plays through technology giant Cisco. There, Chambers served as CEO from 1995 to 2015 and oversaw Cisco’s emergence as the world’s most valuable company at $500 billion.
Chambers stepped away from Cisco in 2017, but he’s still busy as ever, finding ways to innovate and leave his imprint on the world by working with game-changing start-ups and encouraging the growth of start-ups across all geographies – including West Virginia.
It’s been a year since he announced his plan to invest his time, money and ideas in his alma mater in November 2018.
Since then, the business school has been renamed the John Chambers College of Business and Economics, which provides the University with significant financial and intellectual resources that support:

Additionally, Chambers is volunteering 5 percent of his time to provide expertise to WVU and the College, similar to arrangements he’s held with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron.

Chambers believes that these initiatives will help push West Virginia and WVU to “disrupt” themselves. As evidenced by his “disrupt, or be disrupted” mantra, he emphasizes that no city or state can be in a leading position when they are doing the right thing for too long. For example, he points at the fall of Boston’s Route 128, home to a cluster of technology companies.
“Boston Route 128 used to be the technology capital of the world from the 1960s to 1980s,” Chambers said. “Then, Silicon Valley came along and disrupted them. The three top companies in Boston lost 200,000 jobs.”
Likewise, West Virginia has been disrupted economically in recent decades, with the decline of traditional industries such as coal mining and chemical development.
“It’s been disrupted from this failure to evolve,” Chambers said. “At one time, we were living the American dream in West Virginia. But industries started to change, and while we felt those changes as a state, we didn’t do enough to get ahead of the market transition.”
Thinking creatively and executing strategies differently will lead to disruption, Chambers believes. He mentions his favorite NBA team, the Golden State Warriors, which have won three championships in the last five years. The Warriors have revolutionized basketball in the past decade with their up-tempo run-and-gun approach and propensity for firing away three-pointers. Head coach Steve Kerr boasts four principles that define his team: joy, mindfulness, compassion and competition.
“When you talk about disrupting, look at the Golden State Warriors,” Chambers said. “They disrupted the whole NBA with their style of play. Jerry West, a fellow West Virginia native and WVU grad, was an advisor to them and helped on their philosophy and unselfishness.”