Commencement speaker to grads: Humility is key to success as leader, in life

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Mitch (Purdue President Mitch Daniels) – thank you for your kind and generous introduction. Last January, when Mitch invited me to give your graduation address, COVID had not yet arrived in the United States. Or at least, we weren’t aware if it had. And we certainly didn’t know how long it would be with us. I looked forward to greeting each of you in the Hall of Music. I’d attended many events there as a student and, as a Purdue trustee, I’d sat on the stage for 10 years of commencement ceremonies. But I never imagined I’d be dressed in a cap and gown with nowhere to go! So, welcome to my home in Florida that with the magic of technology makes it look like I’m on the stage in the Elliott Hall of Music.  

Congratulations on this most happy of days to you, Purdue’s newest class of graduates, to your parents, siblings, grandparents and many others gathered around you to celebrate with you. This special day is surely a most unusual graduation at a most unusual time in the history of our country. You should be proud to receive your Purdue diploma, and I applaud you for the years of work it took for you to be here today at your graduation.  

And, as you know full well, this day would not have happened without the help of those gathered around you. I hope you have said thank you to each of them.

So, what is next for you? Given the economic difficulties we are in as a result of the COVID pandemic, it’s likely a number of you don’t yet know what is next for you. For those of you who don’t know what is next, you have something that gives you an edge in this very competitive world, your Purdue degree. Employers around the globe know the value of a Purdue education, and what you learned here will be of value to you for many years to come.  

I do not want to diminish in any way what this pandemic has done to the families of many in our country, but this will not be your last major challenge or likely even your most difficult one. By the time I graduated from Purdue, five of my high school classmates had been killed in Vietnam. Life is difficult.

Mitch asked me to discuss with you today some lessons I’ve learned that might be helpful to you as you begin your careers. So, let’s begin.

Many of you will likely end up in careers that have seemingly little to do with what you studied at Purdue. However, if you are a STEM major, you now understand and often have used the Scientific Method of Problem Solving. And guess what, it isn’t just for scientists or engineers, but is applicable to many problems you will encounter for the rest of your careers. And if you are not a STEM major, you surely had a philosophy course or two where the “art” of problem solving was discussed. But regardless of what you studied, it’s unlikely that you took a course in “listening” or “collaborative leadership,” both of which are now offered at Purdue. However, listening may be the most important skill you’ll need to learn to be successful in life.

Most of us arrive in our first full-time job having been trained to be an individual performer even though most work in the world is done by teams. The transformation from individual performer to team player and on to manager and leader was hard for me.    

At age 34, I was elected the chief financial officer of Northwest Airlines. I was the youngest CFO of any Fortune 500 company in America and was pretty full of myself. After a few months on the job, the CEO of Northwest walked into my office, closed the door and sat down. This was most unusual because every meeting we’d had before was in his office or his conference room. So I wondered what he wanted to talk about. He got right to the point. He said, “John, I know you want to be ‘head coach’ someday.” He played fullback at Notre Dame and liked the term head coach better than CEO. He went on to say that I was giving my direct reports too much direction too quickly and listening too little to what they had to say. He said it wasn’t my job to solve their problems, but to listen, to nudge and to explore with them what the best solutions might be, but to let them arrive at an answer without telling them explicitly what to do. I took his coaching to heart, but it was not easy for me to change as I’d always been that person in the classroom who wanted to come up with the answer first.  

Fast forward 10 years to 1994; I was then president of United Airlines. In that job, I typically traveled around 80 to 90 nights per year. For those of you who have traveled that much, you and your family know how difficult it is to “re-enter” family life after being gone so much. One night after having just arrived back from an overseas trip, I was having dinner with my family at home. After receiving some unsolicited advice from me, my oldest daughter blurted out, saying, “Just because you tell people what to do all day long at work doesn’t mean you get to tell us what to do when you get home.” I responded to her that I hardly ever told anybody what to do at work, and that was why when I got home from the office, I told them what to do. My three daughters were puzzled by that statement, so I explained to them that if I told people what to do all day long at United, that no one would want to work with me, let alone for me. My oldest daughter’s response was something like, “Well, duh?” I then went on to explain that parenting was quite different from being a company president. She now understands that a little better as she has a 12-year-old daughter.  

Experience had taught me and research has shown that most decisions reached by a group are better than those reached by one individual. Input from others helps. Listening to others helps. And brainstorming about options helps. Sometimes one person does have to make the decision, but I usually thought a decision reached by consensus turned out to be the better one.

Before I close, I want to add one final thought about listening. It’s likely and I hope true that you will have very successful careers. Most of my childhood was spent in a small town, and like many of you, I am a first-generation college grad. Sometimes, with some success, it begins to be easy to forget where you came from and what life is like for most of the world. You’ve forgotten that many others worked just as hard as you have and are just as smart and capable as you are. And you don’t acknowledge that timing, luck or maybe a mentor someone else didn’t have might have been big factors in your success. But most dangerous of all is that you might begin to believe you deserve the good things that happened to you. I’ve watched this happen to many people over my 50-year career.  

Thankfulness, humility and an awareness of how difficult life is for many people are important to be a good leader. From my standpoint, the best way for me to keep in touch with what I call the real world and to understand what life is like for many, many people was by doing “hands on” work with them in the community where they live, where they work, listening to their life stories and understanding what their struggles are. For me, this has included building Habitat for Humanity homes while working side by side with their prospective owners, serving as a night shift supervisor – really a bouncer – in an overnight homeless shelter, driving for 10 years the children of two families to visit their mothers, both of whom were in prison for murder. These and other volunteer activities helped remind me to be thankful and appreciative of my situation in life.  

Wanting my children to understand the world better, I asked them to accompany me in many of these activities except for one experience, which I’ll close with. One of the boys I was driving to prison lived with his grandmother. She called me to let me know that her grandson had joined a gang, moved out and was selling drugs on the street and that his best friend – they were both 16 – had been stabbed to death. He now wanted to get out of the gang, and she asked for my help. I was still president of United Airlines at the time and had good contacts in the city. In a few days I made contact with a law firm in Chicago that represented the gang he belonged to. They arranged a meeting for me with the leader of the Black P Stone Nation – at the time the largest and most fierce African American gang in Chicago. We met in the stairwell of an apartment complex alone and after a 30-minute discussion, he agreed to let the young boy out, but said he had to go through a de-initiation ritual, which would be brutal. Several days later a gaunt 16-year-old appeared, but he was a heavy drug user. He had a rough time for years and spent nearly five years in prison. However, at age 40, he is now married, is off hard drugs and has held the same job as an auto mechanic for 10 years. We had dinner together just three weeks ago. As we were leaving a restaurant where we’d first had dinner when he was 10, I held up my elbow to give him a COVID bump, but he threw his arms around me and gave me a hug. I cried part of the way home.  

There is a world not too far from where I live in a Chicago suburb and likely not too far from where many of you live and, possibly, right where some of you are now watching this video that is tough and difficult beyond the imagination of most of us. All of us need to understand the lack of hope, the desperation and even the physical hunger that many children experience while growing up in the most prosperous country in the world. It takes a lot more than any government can do — it takes committed people like each of you to lend a helping hand, to have an open ear, an understanding heart and some words of kindness and support to help change these situations. And doing that will keep you grounded, thankful and help you be a better leader.

In closing, I’ve been incredibly blessed to have the life I’ve had.

Congratulations to each of you!

And Hail Purdue!