Morgridge began looking for his successor by the time the company went public in 1990. Morgridge chose John Chambers, who was hired that year as SVP of U.S. operations with the understanding that he would eventually take over as CEO. Chambers, who earned a BA and JD from West Virginia University and an MBA from Indiana University, began his career in sales at IBM in 1976, where he spent six years and was consistently promoted. Despite his success, Chambers became disillusioned by the cautious IBM culture and found its highly structured sales system oppressive: “I learned an awful lot about what not to do. You could see management getting further and further from the customer, telling the customer that they knew what he needed better than the customer did.”3