Johnson, CEO of Juniper Networks, told analysts on Thursday that he tries to model his partnership with Juniper Chief Technical Officer Sindhu after those successful executive pairings at Microsoft and Apple. Their relationship is so central to Juniper that even major innovations such as QFabric, the network architecture at the heart of the company's future data-center strategy, come out of meetings between them. Johnson spoke at in San Francisco.

Juniper's management approach is far different from that of rival Cisco Systems, which is built around a plethora of councils and boards focused on particular areas of technology. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers , replacing what he called a "command and control" organization. Though they ultimately report to Chambers, the councils are responsible for finding potentially profitable new markets and carrying out initiatives to enter them. Cisco has entered more than 30 new adjacent markets in the past several years.

Granted, Juniper is a much smaller company than is Cisco. It reported just short of US$4.1 billion in revenue for the year ended Dec. 31, compared with Cisco's more than $40 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year, ending in July 2010. And unlike Cisco, Juniper has focused exclusively on networking rather than branching into other areas such as consumer electronics and computing systems. But the way the company addresses major technology issues is notable for its intimacy.

Working with the Office of the Chief Technical Officer, Sindhu identifies upcoming changes in the world of IT and conceptualizes ways to address them, Johnson said. Then, Johnson will get a call from his assistant that Sindhu wants to meet with him.

"Pradeep will come in, and we will sit in my office, [writing] on my whiteboard, and I will have a lecture on some new disruption that's possible," Johnson said. "I will ask a thousand questions." Then, he often asks Sindhu to write a white paper of one to three pages on the issue they had just discussed. Johnson keeps a portfolio of these papers.