June 13, 2015
“Your Long Strange Trip”
Clayton Rose
CONVOCATION
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
BOOTH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
JUNE 13, 2015
Thank you Stacey.
Let me begin by adding my congratulations. You’ve each worked incredibly hard over many years to be here this afternoon and this is a wonderful moment for you, worthy of much celebration. But, achievements like this rarely occur in isolation, and I hope you’ll take the time to acknowledge the support of your partners, family and friends, and the faculty and staff at Booth.
I am honored to be with you, and at an institution that changed my life. The University of Chicago, both Booth and The College, shaped me intellectually, helped me understand who I am, and gave me skills and tools that have allowed me to enjoy some success in several walks of life. In addition, and most importantly, while not one of the benefits described in the promotional literature for the business school, I met my wife here, sitting next to her in tax class. Very romantic. Julianne is here with us today.
Work with meaning and success on your terms.
Work that satisfies your passions, your curiosities, and that allows you to serve and make some difference, in ways that are important to you.
I’m not going to spend time on why I think it’s important to do work with meaning or have success on your terms, other to ask the simple and rhetorical question of why would you, or I, or anyone with all the advantages and privileges that come with your prior accomplishments and a Chicago education, why would you spend so many hours a day, so many weeks a year and so many years working hard and making sacrifices if that work didn’t have meaning? And why would you want to define your success from that work based on any yardstick other than your own?
The great American person of letters Henry David Thoreau warned us about this challenge over 170 years ago, and I am updating it.
The mass of men (and women) lead lives of quiet desperation.
While there’s certainly more to a happy and satisfied life than work, for most of us work will be an essential and dominant component of our lives and who we are. And work without meaning – work that doesn’t satisfies your passions, your curiosities, and that doesn’t allow you to serve and make some difference – is likely to set you on a course for Thoreau’s desperation.
But I know that you already know this. The question for you is not whether you should seek work with meaning and success on your terms. The question is “how?” “How do I do this?” And the “how” is hard. And it’s more than hard; making it happen will be really uncomfortable for you. But it can be done.
Let me step back to briefly to talk about my own journey as context for what’s to come. Or to put it another way, let me make it about me for a minute.
After leaving Chicago I went off to Wall Street and spent over 20 years at one firm and I was able to do some remarkable things. I worked in London, had a leading role in building a major business from scratch, I had a hand in transforming and leading the firm. And it was a firm that fit with my values – a premium on integrity, collegiality and intellectual honesty, which I know doesn’t really sound like Wall Street. That’s another story for another day.
The next chapter had me heading off to Penn to work towards a PhD in sociology and study issues of race in America. I had started teaching at this point, and the chapter following Penn was at Harvard Business School where I have been on the faculty for the last eight years, teaching and writing about the responsibilities of leadership, ethics, and the role of business in society.
And like you, I am now poised to begin my next chapter, and what is almost certain to be the most amazing opportunity I will ever have, to become part of the Bowdoin College community and serve as its 15th President, and to engage deeply in the liberal arts, one of the essential institutions of American society and culture.
34 years ago, as I collected my diploma, not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that any of this would be in store for me.
And as I’ve reflected on what has happened to me and what I hope happens for you, I keep returning to an iconic line written by Jerry Garcia. Garcia was the front man for The Grateful Dead and one of the most creative and talented guitarists and musicians of his generation.
That line, from his 1970 song Truckin, is “Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it’s been.” What I’ve learned is that work with meaning and success on our terms is necessarily a long strange trip. It can’t be planned, it can’t be over analyzed. But it can be great.
As I’ve said, I couldn’t have imagined this journey when I left campus, but if I am honest with myself and you, while it wasn’t planned it also didn’t happen by accident. It was guided by at least four principles. I suspect you’ve heard the first three, but they bear repeating because they matter.
The first is to put your family first. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be sacrifices, that you won’t work exceedingly hard, and that there will not be choices to make and costs to bear. You’ll face all of this, over and over. But you can’t think of your family as the path of least resistance as you do your work and make your professional choices. The decisions to sacrifice time with them and your attention to them should come deliberately and with mutual understanding. To do otherwise will diminish the meaning in your work and your success. This will be harder than you think.
Second, don’t do anything for the money. Now, I am, rather obviously, a capitalist. But, I’ve never done anything for the money – really and truly – and the material success I’ve enjoyed was some part luck (being in the right business in the right decade) and some part doing something I found to be deeply satisfying, where there was meaning. Let me suggest that the pursuit of money as the central goal, beyond a certain amount, is likely to be costly for you.
Many, perhaps most, of those folks that I’ve known who do what they do primarily for the money are just not that happy. I leave it to you to think about why that might be. It’s also a trap. If you do something for the money, without passion to drive you it’s quite likely you won’t be very good at it, and the money won’t be there. This isn’t always true, but it often is.
Third, infuse your work and your leadership with your values, and do not let others subvert who you are – and again this will be harder than you think. Work that isn’t aligned with who you are at your core will wear on you, will wear you down, and will make it difficult to find that meaning and success. Seek organizations and colleagues that share your values, your goals, your purpose. And I’d suggest that if you examine the leaders you really admire, to a person they lead with their values.
Each of these ideas is worthy of deeper exploration. But it’s the fourth observation that I want to dwell on for a minute. It is the least obvious, I think, and the one that’s taken me the longest to understand.
Frank Knight was a founder of the Chicago School of Economics, joining the faculty in 1929 and influencing such remarkable scholars and Noble Laureates as Milton Freidman, George Stigler and Ronald Coase.
In perhaps his seminal piece of work, Knight made the observation that while they were often used synonymously, there’s a basic difference between risk and uncertainty. In simple terms, risk is where sufficient information is available to calculate the odds of various outcomes and describe a decision or situation in probabilistic terms – there is an X% chance of this outcome and a Y% chance of that outcome. With uncertainty, on the other hand, there is simply not enough information available to establish the possible outcomes or calculate the odds.
As Chicago MBAs we’re steeped in the tools and mindset to deal with risk, and much of what you will likely do in your jobs will involve managing risk. However, the choices that you will make about your jobs – what you’ll do, where you’ll work, how you’ll work – they are all about uncertainty. For the most part you won’t be able to envision many of the possible outcomes or opportunities from the choices in front of you, or assign probabilities to the outcomes you might imagine.
Contending with this uncertainty is very hard. We’re dealing with the intersection of our skills, our passion, our curiosity, our desire to learn, and particular opportunities – all of which change over time. And we are dealing with our egos; the desire to be well-regarded in the eyes of others and not to be seen as failing. The stakes are high. And because we’re Chicago MBAs (among other analytical types) we’re ill-equipped to deal with this – trained to think more in terms of risk than uncertainty. All of this makes us uncomfortable; actually, it freaks us out.
And so what happens. We tend to the safe, to the predictable. We try to eliminate the uncertainty, or ignore it and hope it will go away. And the result? Often it’s work that doesn’t excite us and that loses its meaning, and there’s a tendency to measure success by the standards of others. More Henry David Thoreau than Jerry Garcia. Not really a long, strange trip. More like quiet desperation.
So what do you do in the face of the uncertainty that will present itself throughout your career? First, know this is what you are up against. Second, get over being freaked out and embrace it. Your decisions about professional choices can really only be guided by your instincts about what’s right for you, informed by your passions and curiosity. Be ready for the outcomes that are different from what you expect – good and bad. Know that you’ll fail along the way, which is ok; it will rarely be the case that you can’t maneuverer out of an unwanted or unpleasant place. Travel down paths that stretch you, push you, which you cannot see clearly, and that will likely challenge the way you think about yourself and your possibilities.
Search for those things that feed you passions, that make the personal sacrifices for you and those you love worthwhile. Be comfortable being uncomfortable.
My first professional chapter, in finance, was very satisfying – and I found in it work with meaning. But when we sold the firm in 2001, although I was given strong inducements to stay, my passion for the business and firm had been seriously dampened by the new culture at the place; it was time for me to move on. I left with literally no idea what I would do next.
It is easy, I suppose, to look back now and see PhD, Harvard and now Bowdoin as some sort of planned, logical linear career progression. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
I have always loved learning, ideas and questions, and I have deeply admired the work and mission of teachers and scholars. And once given the opportunity, I found I loved teaching and working with students. After much thought and discussion – and support from Julianne – I decided to apply at the age of 44 to PhD programs, filling out applications, writing essays, getting recommendations and, yes, taking the GREs.
I was deeply fortunate after my PhD at Penn to be offered a position at Harvard. But I didn’t go to Penn thinking I’d end up at Harvard, it literally never entered my mind. And I didn’t come to Harvard thinking about Bowdoin. At each stage these were thoughtful decisions, where I sought counsel and took my time, and made them based on my passions, curiosity, desire to serve, and a willingness to fail. But, I really had no idea what would happen and where each path would lead.
Now some among you may say, “Well, you had financial security before you made these kinds of decisions and really contended with uncertainty.” To this I would say three things. First, fair enough. I had some financial security when I left the corporate world, and for some financial necessity will constrain the choices.
Second, you’re missing the point. Work with meaning and success on your terms comes in every occupation – the very lucrative, the not so lucrative, and everything in between – in all kinds of endeavors, business, government, education, not-for profit. At big and little organizations. Don’t fall for the wrong-head notion that meaning and money are at odds; they are not. But it’s equally the case that money will not lead to meaning, success or professional happiness.
Which leads to my third point.
The discomfort from uncertainty in your career decisions will almost never come from the money issues, it will come from the emotional challenge of not knowing exactly where you are going. The inability to deal with this uncertainty is what will hold you back.
Your experiences, your skills, your drive and your education here at Booth will provide you with remarkable opportunities throughout your life. And you will do amazing things.
Embrace the uncertainty.
Begin your own long strange trip … today.
Thank you for the privilege of allowing me to share this day with you, and again my congratulations on the remarkable achievement of becoming University of Chicago MBAs.