The CEO's sidekick

All the world's a stage for demo guy Jim Grubb.

Cisco CEO John Chambers often gets topical during his trade show keynotes. At a recent event, he spent several minutes outlining a litany of IT headaches facing the U.S. healthcare industry, and of course, some of Cisco's high-tech aspirin.

"And now I'm going to ask Jim Grubb, my friend and business partner for many years, to come up here and show us, in less than 10 minutes, how all these technologies I've talked about today are going to solve all the problems in the healthcare industry."

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Cisco CEO John Chambers often gets topical during his trade show keynotes. At a recent event, he spent several minutes outlining a litany of IT headaches facing the U.S. healthcare industry, and of course, some of Cisco's high-tech aspirin.

"And now I'm going to ask Jim Grubb, my friend and business partner for many years, to come up here and show us, in less than 10 minutes, how all these technologies I've talked about today are going to solve all the problems in the healthcare industry."

Video: Jim Grubb on stage

Everyone's had a demanding boss at some point - but c'mon.

Anyone who has seen Chambers speak a few times knows the routine: part state-of-the-industry address, part sales pitch, part revival meeting. And then there's the product demo. This is what Grubb, Cisco's chief demonstration officer, has handled for the past eight years, at as many as 60 events per year.

Much of the schtick involves Grubb showing off new technology while Chambers comments and makes gibes:

"Are you nervous, Jim? You seem a little tense."

"This must not fail, Jim, because that'll be embarrassing for me and you."

"It's OK if you mess up . . . I'll just fire you."

Grubb, 43, always appearing on cue with an "Oh, gosh, me?" smile, fills the stage with his physical presence and contagious laugh. He says the jokes and big-bad-boss warnings are all part of the act.

Setting the scene

The demos usually involve Chambers and Grubb acting out a real-life scenario - a doctor's office, a retail store, a construction site - where Cisco technology is featured.

"We write jokes and certain lines," Grubb says. "But we don't hard-script most of it."

Grubb has demoed Cisco technology all over the world. Audiences have included Mikhail Gorbachev, former leader of the Soviet Union; former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; President Vicente Fox of Mexico; and former Vice President Al Gore.

Click to see: Jim Grubb and John Chambers

Tinkering and invention are also part of Grubb's background: his granduncle invented the lock boxes that real estate agents use to store house keys in homes, and his mother ran the family business, selling the devices part time when she wasn't teaching school. She purchased a Northstar Horizon PC, which Grubb used to teach himself programming, when he wasn't fooling around with his ham radio set.

After leaving college to start his own computer company, Grubb ended up working at Digital Equipment Corp., working his way up from order processing to systems engineering, giving product demos on sales calls. During a visit to the U.S. Postal Service, a major Digital account in the late 1980s, he discovered it was using routers "from this little company called Cisco" to tie together its VAX network.

This led Grubb to the West Coast and a consulting engineering job at Cisco. Eventually, he moved up to manage some product lines. In 1996, he did his first demo with Chambers: an IP video demonstration "that was incredibly complex, with a rotating stage, all these plasma screens - it was ridiculous, but we pulled it off."