Monday, June 12, 2023

LOOP NORTH NEWS

 




My advice to graduates: all bets are off


(Above) Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav delivers a commencement address met with boos, screams, and angry chants from students at Boston University on May 21 (AP Photo/Steven Senne).

Making graduation speeches used to be fairly conventional. But change is so rapid that the old rules no longer apply. Good luck, kids.

By Howard Tullman

12-Jun-23 – We’re now in the annual and painful ritual of graduation speeches which – as a parent, entrepreneur, employer, college president, speaker, author, and columnist – have been an essential and challenging part of my springtime for decades. Speechifying is both thrilling and thankless and gets tougher every year because so many of the previous pronouncements, truisms, and tropes that got us safely here simply don’t have much to do with where the next generation is headed.

All of the past guidance, along with the sum total of our experience, doesn’t help a whole lot when today’s graduates are setting out to do what’s never been done before. Uncertain times, uncharted waters, and a world in constant crisis that seems to regularly be on the verge of bursting into flames is, at best, a precarious platform for profundity.

The pressure in these instances to proffer astute and forward-looking suggestions and prescriptions in a “suitable” fashion while being bold, brave, and – above all – brief is intense and gets worse each year. The unwritten and often unspoken (until after the fact) ground rules, goal posts, and verboten topics for these talks continue to change and move in confusing and contrary directions.

Saying things no longer makes them so, even the firmest foundational concepts are now subject to challenge and criticism, and everyone’s a newly and self-anointed expert or an easily offended snowflake on virtually every subject. Protests are a prominent part of every graduation ceremony now as the recent blowback against Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zavalav at Boston University made clear. And he’s an alum.

And, of course, the accelerating rate of change, the massive shifts in our societal norms, objectives and expectations, and the growing and complex impacts of technology and social media make the whole attempt to suggest any specific directions or career decisions to any group of graduates a fool’s errand.


In my defense, I can at least solemnly attest to the fact that I’ve never been sucked into the unrewarding swamp of offering advice to the lovelorn, whether they be friends, family, or foolish strangers.

But, in defense of continuing to make the mid-year effort, I can say that preparing these pithy “words of wisdom“ has been a far more productive use of my time and a valuable opportunity for some modest reflection on important matters than any of the traditional December-January nostalgic, regretful, or cathartic compilations and trips down memory lane that regularly appear at year’s end. That being said, the real challenge is always coming up with something you’re comfortable saying and that is also worth listening to.

In preparing past presentations, I used to pull up a few prior examples and try to decide what content still made sense for a given audience; what needed to be added to or dropped to avoid merely repeating myself; where to remove any outdated references; and finally, how to add some new and hopefully valuable thoughts and information to the text. Some choice old wine in new bottles saves a lot of prep time.

But this year I’ve concluded that there needs to be a fairly substantial shift in the content of the conversation. I’ve written before about the frank new messages we need to be giving to our employees and to our kids. Stressing resilience, optionality, and admitted vulnerability turn out to be far more impactful than some of the more typical admonitions about hard work, etc. And it’s not too Darwinian to acknowledge that survival in the long term depends more on adaptability and the willingness to change than on simple strength or sheer intelligence. Flexibility and fluidity trumps fierce focus and single-mindedness in times of radical and rapid change.

Another shift in tone relates less to which particular journey is undertaken and more to the pain and perils of any journey. While you should never let anyone talk you out of your future, it’s essential to understand and appreciate that parts of everyone’s journey will be uphill; that things don’t typically improve or get better over time; instead you get better by forging the skill sets critical to success; and that, while both personal and familial sacrifices will be required and crucial, there are practical and philosophical limits and boundaries to the process.

You’re not required – regardless of what others may say – to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm. You can’t accomplish great things and end up feeling good about the process if you’re ultimately doing it for someone else. Let others worry about making their own dreams into reality.

Finally, for the graduates, there’s also the matter of their folks. There’s nothing more painful than being a parent – and that’s on a good day. Whatever hopes mom and dad may harbor in the vain belief that Junior will follow in their career footsteps, it’s becoming clearer all the time that the most valuable parental lessons to be learned by their offspring aren’t about the job choices they made, but rather about the examples they have set in their behaviors and the values they have shared with their kids.

The work may change, but the importance of empathy, honesty, and authenticity will never diminish. The key contributions are far more qualitative and subjective than specific and quantitative. The jobs parents may have held for decades, even if their descriptions survive mainly in name only, won’t be the same in terms of depth, function, and value to their organizations.

  And as hard as this may be to acknowledge and discuss, those jobs won’t really be worth having much longer.


The daily onslaught of A.I. is aggressively hollowing out millions of jobs and compressing entire tiers of middle management as routine procedures and repetitive activities are eliminated. Many of the new jobs, being created on the fly, will require far more in the way of people skills, creative problem solving, critical inquiry, and knowledge retrieval rather than technical or procedural abilities. Mom and dad have little detailed knowledge to add to the conversation about these new tasks; mastering them will be a matter of hands-on experience and OTJ training rather than traditional parental direction or academic instruction.

The future premiums will be paid to those who learn to master the overwhelming floods of available data – essentially the world’s aggregated knowledge – by asking the right questions so they can extract the correct answers. Employers will seek out graduates trained to ask the critical and difficult questions rather than those who think they’ve been taught all the right answers.

There’s no great prize for coming up with even the very best answer to the wrong question.


Howard Tullman is General Managing Partner for G2T3V, LLC – Investors in Disruptive Innovators, and for Chicago High Tech Investors, LLC. He is also the author of Words of Wisdom: A 60-year compilation.

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