My Advice to Graduates: All Bets Are Off
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, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH
INVESTORS@TULLMAN
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 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 singlemindedness 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.
