John Chambers

Chairman and CEO
Cisco Systems

John Chambers has been CEO of Cisco Systems since early 1995, which is a lot of switches, routers and other Internet innards ago, and he was named chairman late last year. Prior to joining Cisco, he spent eight years at Wang Laboratories and six years with IBM. He holds a law degree and a bachelor of science/bachelor of arts degree in business from West Virginia University and he later received a master's of business administration degree in finance and management from Indiana University. While Cisco Systems–best known as an infrastructure equipment maker–might not seem like the sexiest of companies, it has been making aggressive moves of late in the consumer market, including its $3.2 billion bid for WebEx; a phone compatibility deal with Apple (Cisco owns the iPhone trademark); the building of Wi-Fi networks worldwide; and a focus on being a big player in home-entertainment networking gear (it owns wireless router Linksys and cable set-top box maker Scientific Atlanta).