What’s on Cisco CEO Robbins’ First 90-days To-Do List?

Every incoming chief executive wants to make an impact in the first 90 days, particularly if that initial quarter at the helm follows the departure of a long-standing, highly successful and iconic leader.

As it was with Microsoft’s (MSFT) transition from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella, incoming Cisco (CSCO) boss Chuck Robbins’ honeymoon will go by quickly, so it’s vital he communicates and executes. In a video posted on the vendor’s website, Robbins said he intends to talk to partners, customers and employees to test-market his ideas, put together a collaborative strategy and execute it.

“I come into this with very clear thoughts about what we should do,” Robbins said. “However, I think it would be irresponsible if I didn’t take some time to not only speak to our employees, our leadership team, our customers and our partners to just test my thoughts, get their ideas and then really aggregate all of that–and then bring our leadership team together, the team that’s going to help lead us in the next three-to-five years, to actually build a plan and then execute on that.”

What specifically is on Robbins’ 90-day to-do list out right of the gate?

On corporate culture:
“We’re going to double-down on our culture–we’re going to continue our commitment to our people and make sure that the great culture John’s (Chambers) created here continues in the future.”

On communication:
“I also believe in clarity–clear communication. So we’re going to focus on clearly articulating internally and externally our business strategy as well as our technology strategy. And, being the mathematician with a focus on numbers, we’re going to drive a level of operation rigor that maybe is a little tougher [than Chambers].”

On partners:
Robbins called Cisco’s partner network, which accounts for 80 percent of the vendor’s business, a “tremendous competitive advantage, which is actually the envy of all of tech–everybody would love to have our partner community.”

“There is an ecosystem that is necessary, particularly at the pace that we’re moving, and as this next wave of digitization occurs, there are different application players, there are software companies out there that will begin to write applications that will take advantage of [APIs] that we expose in the Cisco portfolio,” he said on a media conference call Monday.