 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.
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.
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.
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