DAVOS, Switzerland — Cisco Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins won't be making any high-profile recession calls anytime soon.

"I don't want to see us talk ourselves into a recession, first of all, and I think people are a little too pessimistic," Robbins told Yahoo Finance Live on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (video above). "If you go back over the last several years, the challenges we have dealt with as a global society, we should have confidence we are going to deal with whatever comes our way. Whatever happens will likely be short-lived."

While Robbins injected a dose of much-needed hope into the meeting of power brokers, other titans of the C-suite are growing worried about a recession.

Many won't utter the word on the record, but the tone in their voices while discussing medium-term growth in sales and profits is markedly different than just three months ago. Some CEOs Yahoo Finance have talked to believe Europe is already in a recession, and those conditions may bring down the U.S.

The stock market, meanwhile, is increasingly pricing in higher odds of a recession while bad news from company's reporting earnings hits related companies hard.

Cisco's Robbins cautioned his fellow power brokers to be mindful in continuously discussing a recession: They actually have the power to perhaps trigger one.

"At a business level, if we all walk around here talking to one another and we are all talking recession, recession, recession as CEOs we actually define capital spending and operating expense spending in our organization," Robbins said. "So if we go back and say 'We think there will be a recession so slow down spending,' then that could ultimately lead to [a recession]. So I think we have to be cautious about it, take it a day at a time and see how things go."

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

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