Every year one of my blog posts is from the speech that I give to our Master of Engineering Management Students at graduation as they embark on the next phase of their careers. The post below is from our 2012 graduation ceremony that took place a few weeks ago. As I summarize my speech on this beautiful July 4 holiday, I am humbled by the incredible opportunities that I have each year to meet such exceptional people as our MEM students. It is hard to imagine that a brief speech or blog post can have much impact at such an auspicious time in their lives but here is my attempt…
Paraphrasing A. Whitney Griswold (great educator and former President of Yale):
Education is not a quantitative body of knowledge but rather it is a taste for knowledge, a capacity to explore, to question and to perceive.
My hope is that your time here has provided a platform for your future endeavors. It should have helped you begin to develop your intuition about business, organizations, management and leadership but more importantly, it should provide a base which gives you this capacity to explore and question and ultimately understand. And this understanding will provide the foundation for your decisions and choices.
The reason this is my hope and I start this brief speech in this way is because; and this is the theme of my speech:
“You can’t predict the future”
It is said: Heroes are ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. They did not know it would happen to them.
“You can’t predict the future”
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm; Winston Churchill. We don’t generally expect failure but…
“You can’t predict the future”
George Bernard Shaw said: Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself –
“You can’t predict the future” but you do help create it.
And that is what you are doing here today and for the last 1, 2 or in some cases 3 years; creating your future. So what are the lessons for us in this simple phrase; “you can’t predict the future”?
- Validation – First, it validates the excellent, even courageous decision you have made to make the effort and take the time to further your education. There is no way to better prepare for an unpredictable future than to educate yourself.
- It’s the planning, not the plan – The planning process, not the plan itself, is what you should focus on as you embark on your journey. The process requires you to think through your options and prepare yourself for an unpredictable future more than the plan itself.
- Embrace change – you will make some decisions that you want to change. Expect that and change as needed when you do. In my experience, no decisions are stagnant. It may take time and will certainly take effort but you can change the future even if you cannot predict it.
- People evolve – When I first graduated with my PhD, there were two things I was sure of: I did not want to travel and I did not want to give public presentations. I did not realize that I actually liked travelling and presenting; it was the fear leading up to them that I did not like. But with a bit of experience and a bit of time, that fear subsided. So test yourself over time, you are not static, don’t expect your preferences and skills to be.
- Focus on the little things – You cannot predict the future so big decisions are not the issue. They are easy to analyze and get as close as possible to a “good” decision without actually knowing what the future holds. It is the choices you make every day that really build the platform that determines your life! How much time do I spend at work, with my family, with myself? What are my priorities? Who do I choose as my confidants? What challenges will I take on today? And the list goes on…
- Keep your mind open – I constantly hear from Alumni and our industrial advisory board stories about the fortuitous opportunity that came their way. In fact, it is well beyond that – it includes the unpredictable reaction they had to a project or an assignment. They go through a large fraction of their career thinking, even telling people – I don’t want to do XYZ. But lo and behold, they are asked to do it anyway and they love it! Don’t discount opportunities too early. One of our Pratt alums and a former Officer of a fortune 100 company in charge of their Global Supply Chain of 10’s of thousands of products, tells a great story about his own career. He did not want to take an overseas assignment. It was simply something he was sure he would not like. When told that he was desperately needed in Europe after the passing of a colleague, he reluctantly agreed on the condition it was a short term assignment. After a year or two, he did not want to come back! He loved his new location and was ready to stay there for the rest of his career. A decade later, the only way the company got him back to the US was by explaining that he could not become an Officer of the organization and take over the very top job in Global Supply Chain if he did not return to the US! And of course, without the international experience he obtained, and found he loved, that opportunity would have been unlikely!
Those are just some of the lessons I think we can all learn from the fundamental fact that we do not know what the future holds. In closing, please remember what Newton Baker said (“The person who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after”) because…
…you simply can’t predict the future
