Steve is Cisco’s Chief Communications Officer. He began this role on January 5th, 2026 reporting to Cisco’s CEO as part of the Executive Leadership Team. He oversees a team of 200+ , who are charged with elevating Cisco’s narrative, transforming communications into a strategic growth function, and ensuring Cisco’s voice shapes the conversations defining the future of networking, security, and AI.
For over eighteen years, he has written a popular weekly newsletter titled “The Friday Thing” where he shares thought on leadership, culture, design, AI and more.
Previously, he was Microsoft’s Chief Storyteller and Vice President of Communications Strategy. He joined Microsoft in 1997 as a Systems Engineer - a role that involved explaining technology to big companies. He soon began to realize he could translate tech into something ‘non-geeks’ could understand. That took him around the world, talking to audiences large and small about the magic of technology.
When Steve discovered blogging, he setup “Geek in Disguise” - a blog to tell the story of Microsoft from where he sat - inside Microsoft. A few thousand posts and a few awards later, Steve was invited to bring that storytelling to Microsoft’s HQ near Seattle and take on the Chief Storyteller role. That's the abridged version of the story.
Steve was the architect of the acclaimed “88 Acres” story that heralded a new direction for Microsoft’s corporate storytelling. During his tenure at Microsoft, Steve and the teams he led have influenced everything from CEO keynotes, to coffee cups at Microsoft - all with a goal of transforming the culture of the company through storytelling. Steve led the Microsoft Public Affairs organization for two years, helping shape Microsoft’s policy and government relations as well as the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Steve’s work:
Steve hosts Satya Nadella’s first interview upon being announced as Microsoft CEO on February 4th, 2014.
Steve’s presentation at TEDx Liverpool in 2017
Steve delivers one of the first live demos of Skype Translator on stage with Satya Nadella at Microsoft’s 2014 Worldwide Partner Conference to an audience of 17,000.
Steve delivers a session at Microsoft Ignite in New Zealand about the power of storytelling.
BBC’s “Click” technology show looks at resurgence of Microsoft.
Steve visits Ferrari in Maranello, Italy to talk stories.
Ian Sanders and Steve Clayton on the power of storytelling.
PRE-MICROSOFT
Steve studied Information and Computing at Loughbourough University in England and graduated with a 1st Class Honors Degree. His final year dissertation on the impact of the Internet on education won the award for best dissertation of that year.
Days after graduating, he began work at Astra Zeneca Pharmaceuticals where he tried to code for a while and soon realized that HTML (not C++) was his lingua franca. He wrote an internal paper suggesting the company adopt web technology for internal communications - before the word Intranet has been coined. For the next few years, he and a small team helped to design and build a global intranet for the company.