Last week, Cisco’s president gave a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens and told him to go rewrite almost all of the company’s old software. Whether it works or not, the way that decision got made is a lesson in leadership trust, and it is the same rule I lived by in the SEAL Teams. Say yes first. Then let the plan decide.

What happened at Cisco

Fortune reported that Cisco President Jeetu Patel gave Padmanabhan “Paddy” Krishnamurthy, a 27-year-old engineer who came to Cisco when it bought his startup in 2025, unlimited AI tokens and told him to “go nuts” modernizing the company’s legacy code. The goal is to rewrite 98% of it in two years. Krishnamurthy gave himself four weeks and a team of two or three to prove the approach works. Notebookcheck has the details from the Fortune report.

When the story took off on LinkedIn, Patel answered it himself. He called it an experiment with no predetermined outcome. Nothing ships until the rewritten code passes rigorous tests. And he put the whole thing in one sentence: “Running an experiment and deploying its output are separate decisions.”

It is too early to call this a win. The four weeks are still running, and the answer may be no. I am not here to predict the result. I am here for how the decision got made.

Yes first: the SEAL default

In the Teams, the first answer to a hard ask was yes. Of course we can. Then we planned. The plan told us why yes was possible, or, once in a while, why it was not. We called it Yes first. It sounds reckless. It is the opposite. The yes was never the decision. It was permission to find out.

Most leaders run it backward. A big idea shows up from the edge of the organization, from someone three levels down, working on something else. The leader says, “convince me.” The idea dies in a meeting, not because it was bad, but because nobody was allowed to test it. The person who brought it learns the lesson, and the next idea never shows up at all.

How to build trust without betting the company

Look at the shape of what Patel did. He said yes to the attempt: unlimited tokens, no committee. Then he built a plan around the yes. Four weeks. Two or three people. One test. If it passes, the team that owns the code takes it from there. If it fails, they learn and try again. The experiment gets the yes. Deployment has to earn it.

That is leadership trust in practice. Not “I trust you, go do whatever.” Not “prove it to me first.” It is: I trust you enough to let you try, and I trust the plan enough to let it say no. Yes first is not yes forever. It is yes to the try, and the plan still gets the final vote on whether it ships.

I have written before about saying the standard out loud. This is the other half. Once the standard is clear, the people closest to the work will see things you cannot. Nelson briefed his captains on the intent and let them fight the plan without him. Patel, on a smaller stage, did a version of the same thing. He gave the intent, set the test, and got out of the way.

Employee empowerment is a plan, not a mood

Here is where it usually goes wrong. Leaders hear “empower your people” and either hand over the keys with no plan, which is abdication, or keep the keys and call the meeting empowerment. Neither one is trust. Trust has a structure. It has a deadline, a small team, and a test everyone agreed on before anyone was invested. Without those, a yes is just hope, and hope and assumptions have no place in the leadership equation.

Apply it this week

1. Find the idea. One idea from someone junior to you that has been sitting unanswered. You already know which one.
2. Say yes to a small version. Not the whole thing. The four-week version. Say it out loud, to them, today.
3. Write the plan around the yes. A deadline of two to four weeks. Two or three people. And the one test that decides whether it goes further, agreed on now, before anyone is invested. That last part is the Contingencies step, and it is the part people skip.

In four weeks, Cisco will know something it does not know today. That is the whole point. Leadership trust is not a feeling you have about your people. It is a yes you give them, with a plan attached that can tell you both the truth.

Keep your eyes on the target. — Errol