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Past Commencement Speeches 2001

• Richard McIntosh, December 2001
• Patricia Limerick, August 2001
• Jim Collins, May 2001

Commencement Address: This is an Exciting Day

Richard McIntosh

December 21, 2001

This is an exciting day. My most important message is to congratulate you who are graduating on what you have achieved. My next most important message is to congratulate you who have stood by these degree candidates, be you parents, spouses, or friends, and helped this day happen. Days like today are real milestones.

I remember my own college graduation all too well. I was far from a model student, so my undergraduate degree in physics was based on pretty poor grades: not much to brag about. This was trying for my parents, whose other four children had done fine. But my parents were impressively tolerant of their wayward son. Their tolerance was based, at least in part, on the realization that a good education has many parts, and that individuals need different things at different times. For this tolerance, I have long been grateful, because it gave me the room I needed to get my feet under me. As I look at today's world, though, I am deeply impressed with the general importance of tolerance in dealing with some of the hardest of our problems. Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East are poignant examples of the suffering that accompanies entrenched intolerance. Here tolerance is not a matter of political correctness, it is an issue of survival.

We can count ourselves lucky to live in a country whose problems are not at that level. In part this is a result of the fact that some kinds of religious and ethnic tolerance were built into American society from its beginning. Many of the settlers who first came from Europe to North America were fleeing a burning cauldron of religious hatred. In 17th century Europe, Presbyterians killed their cousins who supported the Episcopal Church; Baptist and Catholic neighbors might wind up on opposite sides of a battlefield. These and related experiences led directly to our Constitutional safeguards for religious and ethnic toleration and to our country's efforts to separate politics from religion.

In more recent times, our country's mixture of religions and ethnicities has gotten considerably more complex. Using religion as an example, the early Protestants and their descendants have been joined by 60 million Catholics, 5 million of the Eastern Orthodox faith, almost one million each of Hindus and Buddhists, 5 million Muslims, and 4 million Jews. Yet thanks to the wisdom of the people who laid down our country's governing principles, we can largely ignore the religious backgrounds of the people with whom we live and work; they are simply neighbors and colleagues. This situation has contributed to fact that despite continued examples of ethnic intolerance, the last 50 years have seen Americans living largely at peace with themselves and with their neighbors. This habit is one of the things that made the events of September 11 so powerful and disturbing.

I am happy to be able to say that tolerance is common in university communities, because it is so closely linked with education. Intolerance about a belief or person is often based on ignorance. Once you know something about a topic, or have met and talked with the people who are different from yourself, it is much harder to write them off as simply bad. It is no coincidence that during this fall, CU offered a series of presentations about Islam, the Taliban, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. During these presentations a significant range of viewpoints was aired, promoting a tolerance of diversity. Such tolerance has not, however, always easy to come by. During the 1920's, the Ku Klux Klan was politically powerful in the Colorado State Legislature. George Norlin, CU's president at that time, resisted pressure from the legislature to fire all of its Catholic and Jewish professors, so the government cut off financial support for a year. Fortunately, the faculty continued to teach and the University never shut down. Much more recently, that is, since September 11, we have seen new examples of religious and ethnic intolerance in the threatening messages that have been sent anonymously to some of our Muslim students and staff. Thus, even today, and at a university in the USA, toleration is something that requires thought and attention.

Tolerance about some issues is easy to agree on and will inspire almost universal approval; other issues are more difficult, personal, and controversial. For example, essentially everyone would agree that personal violence against individuals is intolerable. Violence between nations, on the other hand, whether it be outright war or unofficial acts by small groups, will be deemed tolerable by some, and even good, but others will see it as unacceptable. These disagreements are the grist of human discourse; they are situations about which reasonable people can disagree. But here one can see the critical importance for an overriding spirit of tolerance in the need for an atmosphere in which such things can be discussed, not fought over.

So you can see that only rarely will someone else be able to tell you whether a particular kind of tolerance is good or bad. Instead you must think for yourself about the aspects of human difference and disagreement that are acceptable, versus those that are not. Thinking about this issue is necessary because tolerance is not really all that natural. Many animals display a keen ability to detect "otherness;" this is often combined with behaviors that will keep the "others" at a wary distance. In humans, though, tolerance is just one step along a pathway that leads from understanding to acceptance, to sympathy, compassion and sometimes even to love. Obviously, the latter steps are not for every person or situation, but this pathway can help us to build a society in which we all work together for the common good.

So as you take your education out into a world where difficult decisions about tolerance will abound, I hope you will build on your university training and make humane judgments. In this way you will nudge the world towards being a better place in which to live.

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Commencement

Patricia Limerick

August 11, 2001

It is a great honor to be here on this fine day, and to have the occasion to congratulate you for the hard work and dedication that delivered you to this day of celebration and fresh starts. The privilege of being associated with the name Hazel Barnes is a great one; she represents the finest, most rigorous, and most spirited qualities of life at this University, and we are all uplifted by her example. At CU, I am lucky, as well, to be associated with the world's finest coworkers– students, staff,and and faculty — at the Center of the American West, and I am lucky to be affiliated with two departments, History and Environmental Studies, where the proportion of professors who care about teaching, and who work hard at teaching, is exceptionally high.

This speech will be short, six or seven minutes, which in the time scale of professors, is pretty much the same thing as fifteen seconds, but I hope in those minutes to tell you a story that will stick in your minds and give you courage on future occasions.

I got this story from a conflict and a rivalry. Many of you are familiar with the writer Larry McMurtry; in fact, given sales figures, there is a much greater chance that you are familiar with McMurtry than you are with most other writers about the American West, present company humbly included. A decade ago, Larry McMurtry and I publicly declared our assessment of each other's works; on one week in particular, he reviewed me in The New Republic, and I reviewed him in The Boston Globe. Even though these were not what one would call positive reviews, at the time I thought that he and I thought that he and I had said what we needed to say in order to become friends on a future occasion. In other words, he said I wrote well, and I said he wrote well, and then we went on to savage the contents of each other's fine writing.

Now, to leap ahead in time, a couple of years ago, Larry McMurtry and I had the occasion to write letters to each other, and we ended up having a very congenial correspondence (and a well-written one, too, I feel obligated to add!). When I proposed that we try to arrange a public debate some time, we were not able to identify any topic on which we disagreed strongly enough to provide the occasion for a debate. So we once wrangled over the West and its interpretation, and then something happened, and we both ended up agreeing that we would rather be allies than opponents. This is one of many such experiences I have been lucky to have. In truth, when I look at this group of graduating people, this would seem to be one of the best wishes I could make for you — that you will have hundreds of those extraordinary and lucky experiences in which an opponent is transformed into an ally.

Before I fell into congenial conversation with McMurtry, though, I had already profited from his experiences. Ten years ago, a mutual friend had suggested that I read the fine collection of McMurtry's essays, In a Narrow Grave, and when I took up that suggestion, I found an unforgettable story on the challenge of persuading people to break out of habits of timidity, caution, conformity, and unnecessary fear.

In one essay, McMurtry was writing about the odd process of watching his book, Horseman, Pass By being turned into the movie Hud. He arrived at the Texas Panhandle a week or so after filming had started, and he was particularly anxious to learn how the buzzard scene had gone. In that scene, Paul Newman was to ride up and discover a dead cow, look up at a tree branch lined with buzzards and, in his distress over the loss of the cow, fire his gun at one of the buzzards. At that moment, all the other buzzards were supposed to fly away into the blue Panhandle sky.

But when McMurtry asked people how the buzzard scene had gone, all he got, he said, were "stricken looks."

The first problem, it turned out, had to do with the quality of the available local buzzards — who proved to be an excessively scruffy group. This was, you must be thinking, quite a version of a casting call — you put out dead meat, and you see who shows up. But these first arrivals were ratty and thin and badly feathered, and so more appealing, more photogenic buzzards had to be flown in from some distance and at considerable expense.

But then came the second problem: how to keep the buzzards sitting on the tree branch until it was time for their cue to fly.

That seemed easy. Wire their feet to the branch, and then, after Paul Newman fires his shot, pull the wire, releasing their feet, thus allowing them to take off.

But, as McMurtry said in an important and memorable phrase, the film makers had not reckoned with the "mentality of buzzards." With their feet wired, the buzzards did not have enough mobility to fly. But they did have enough mobility to pitch forward.

So that's what they did: with their feet wired, they tried to fly, pitched forward, and hung upside down from the dead branch, with their wings flapping.

I had the good fortune a couple of years ago to meet a woman who had been an extra for this movie, and she added a detail that McMurtry left out of his essay: namely, the buzzard circulatory system does not work upside down, and so, after a moment or two of flapping, the buzzards passed out.

Twelve buzzards hanging upside down from a tree branch: this was not what Hollywood wanted from the West, but this is what Hollywood had produced.

And then we get to the second stage of buzzard psychology. After six or seven episodes of pitching forward, passing out, being revived, being replaced on the branch, and pitching forward again, the buzzards gave up. Now, when you pulled the wire and released their feet, they sat there, saying in clear, nonverbal terms: "We tried that before. It did not work. And we have absolutely no interest in trying it again." So now the film makers had to fly in a high-powered animal trainer to restore buzzard self-esteem. It was a big mess; Larry McMurtry got a wonderful story out of it; and we, in turn, get the best possible parable about the workings of habit and timidity.

How does the parable apply?

I bet you can figure this out!

In any and all disciplines, one unquestionably important reason to go to school and get a degree is to have your feet wired to the branch. There is nothing wrong with this process: educated people truly should have some common ground, share some background assumptions, hold some similar habits of mind, agree on some common standards for clear expression and reasoned discourse. Education gives you, quite literally, your footing.

And yet, in the process of getting your feet wired, you have some awkward moments which include the intellectual equivalent of pitching forward and hanging upside down. That experience — especially if you perform it in a public place like a lecture hall, asking an ill-informed question in front of many of your peers — well, pitching forward and hanging upside down, in front of an audience, provides no pleasure. Even doing it in private is considerably short of fun; maybe some of you have had that memorable experience of writing a paper ringing with conviction and right-minded emotion, and getting it back with a painful, reproachful one-word comment in red, "Evidence?"

One or two rounds of that humiliation, and the world can begin to seem like a very treacherous place. Under those circumstances, it can indeed seem to be the choice of wisdom to sit quietly on the branch, to sit without even the thought of flying, since even the thought might be sufficient to tilt the balance and set off another round of flapping, fainting, and embarrassment.

And yet, to a surprising degree, the world is about to present you with many occasions in which the wire will be truly pulled. After several rounds of the "dead tree branch" experience, it is a little hard to believe this could happen, but, in fact, the wire will get pulled; your feet will end up free; you will end up with choices and opportunities to get off dead tree branches and go places.

Yet by then, for way too many people, the second stage of buzzard psychology has taken hold, and they refuse to fly. The wire is pulled and yet the buzzards sit there, hunched and grumpy. If they see other buzzards take off from the branch, it is very unlikely that they will say, "Why, that is certainly an inspiration! Why don't we try that ourselves?" On the contrary, the response is more likely to be, "Well how come those buzzards get to fly!? Someone ought to make sure that they get escorted back to this branch and instructed to stay in their place!" And I suppose it is only fair to say what a number of the administrators on this platform can testify to: having to deal with a fully liberated professorial buzzard can give you some moments when you yearn for a spool of wire, and some trusty pliers.

So now you have heard the story that I would like you to remember. Here, with no subtlety, is the point of the parable: You have freedom. You have choice. Use it. Encourage others to get off the branch. Do put a little time and attention into looking where you're going. But then glide. Catch updrafts. Soar.

And now I myself will sit down so that, in a moment, Dean Williams can pull the wires.

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Good is the Enemy of Great

Jim Collins

May 12, 2001

First, I would like to offer my congratulations to the graduates and to your families. I would also like to congratulate the faculty for doing yet another superb job of infecting these young people with the sheer love of learning and helping to restore the congenital curiosity that so often gets beaten out of us as we grow up.

Good is the enemy of great

And that is one reason why we have so few things that become truly great.

We do not have great government or great governmental candidates because we have good government and good governmental candidates.

We do not have great high schools largely because we have good high schools.

Most companies fail to become great precisely because they are quite good – and that is their main problem.

And the sad truth is that the vast majority of people will look back from their later years and realize that they did not have a great life because it is just so easy – in this vast society of abundance that we call America – to settle for a good life.

A challenge

In the next ten minutes, I would like to issue each and every one of you a challenge

To not be one of the vast majority who settle only for good

It doesn't matter whether in the end you and your work become viewed by others as "great"

What matters is that you embrace the precept that good enough never is.

As I've studied great versus good – focusing principally on organizations, but interested in all walks of life – I've noticed that those who create great versus good are guided by three standards that infuse whatever they do: Excellence, Contribution, and Meaning.

1. Excellence.

Let me start with a story.

In 1985, my wife Joanne Ernst won the Hawaii Ironman triathlon world championship.

The Ironman is a 2.4 mile swim, followed immediately by a 112 mile bike race, capped off with a 26.2 mile marathon run – all on the searing Kona coast of Hawaii

Going into the race, she had struggled with a severe hamstring injury that limited her run training to a mere 17 miles a week.

At 17 miles into the run, her legs began to fail. She had to literally pound on her quadriceps with her fists to keep them going.

What was a ten minute lead with ten miles to go shrank mile by mile

Ten minutes … nine minutes … eight … five … three … two . . .

Somehow she held on and won by a little more than a minute.

When I asked her to explain what drove her through the suffering, what gave her the endurance to not let go on the lava fields, she said:

"As my body began to fall apart, the race changed. I decided that no matter what place I got – first or fifth or tenth – I wanted to be able to look myself in the mirror and know that I had not let up, that I had run the very best race I was capable of at that moment."

What was a race for first became instead a race for self-respect; win or lose, she wanted her self-respect intact.

And that is the essence of the excellence standard; it is an intrinsic standard.

First or fifth or tenth – only you know if you have delivered your very best effort you on any task on any given day. Only you know if you cut corners. Only you know if you let up, even just a bit. Only you know if you have the deepest respect for the effort given by the person who looks back at you from the mirror.

2. Contribution

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to meet David Packard, cofounder of Hewlett-Packard, shortly before his death.

He lived in the same house that he and his wife built for themselves in 1957.

It was modest, small, and understated – with the same linoleum on the floors – overlooking an orchard.

He was one of the first-ever technology billionaires to come out of Silicon Valley, yet I felt like I was meeting more of a rancher or farmer who preferred a simple life. As one of his friends said, "Dave's idea of a good time was to get together with his friends and string some barbed wire."

As we talked, he exhibited an incredible passion for HP and its contributions. He talked about the HP Way and its pioneering set of core values that put a stake in the ground about enlightened management decades before it was common to do so.

The core essence of David Packard – so foreign to the ‘Built to Flip'/get rich quick/"I'm entitled to be wealthy" mentality that infected our world over the past decade – was not what he "got" or "how much money" he made or "how famous" he was.

No, the core essence of David Packard was one thing above all others: CONTRIBUTION.

In the 1950s, he set forth a guiding principle: the ultimate purpose of his organization was not to make a profit, but to make a contribution – to technology, to its people and to the communities in which it operated.

HP as a company may have lost some of that spirit today, as it increasingly pays attention to the Tyranny of Wall Street.

But David Packard never forgot it.

He and his partner, Bill Hewlett, gave more money to Stanford than Jane and Leland Stanford (in inflation adjusted terms), yet never allowed their names to go on a building.

When he died – still living in that same modest house – he left nearly his entire estate, $6 Billion, to a charitable foundation.

Most of you are sitting here looking out at your future, worried about "success" and "achievement" … and that's fine.

But the key to doing your best work is to make the shift from "What can I achieve?" to "What can I contribute?"

3. Meaning

People who do their best work, engage in work they are truly passionate about, that they are genetically encoded for (they feel "made for it") and that brings them meaning – work that connects directly to their personal core values.

If you find yourself doing work that you are not passionate about or that you find meaningless, then stop doing it. For if you do such work too long, you will become competent at it and will suffer the curse of competence. Then you run the very real risk that your future opportunities will be offers to simply do more of what you are not passionate about – you will fall into a personal doom loop of doing more and more of what you don't love to do.

Better to find, or better still, create – something else to do. Life is too short to spend it doing work we're not passionate about or that does not connect to our genetically encoded talents.

But the real source of meaning comes not in "what" you do. It ultimately comes in who you do things with.

A brief story – my final one of the day.

A few years ago, I was stuck at a breakfast table at a conference with a group of business people who struck me as not the most exciting.

I thought to myself, "Well, maybe I can liven up this group a bit . . . "

But then I remembered a powerful lesson taught me a great teacher, John Gardner, author of Self Renewal and former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

"Don't try to be an interesting person," he admonished. "Try to be an interested person."

And so, I began asking questions – being interested rather than trying to be interesting – and, sure enough, the whole conversation became interesting.

It turns out that one of the people at the table had been on the TWA jet hijacked by Palestinian Guerillas – the one you saw on the cover of Time and Newsweek.

He had nothing to do except sit in an airplane seat for days, flying around the Middle East, thinking for sure that he would die.

I asked him what became clear over those terrifying days.

"I came to realize that far more important that all the 'whats' in my life – what car I drive, what job I have, what neighborhood I live in, and so forth – are insignificant compared to the 'whos' in my life. I came to see that my relationships are what matter most."

And indeed that is the number one secret to meaningful work and a meaningful life. Yes, "what" is important. But even more important is "who."

No matter what you do with your life, if you don't spend the majority of waking hours with people you love and respect – with the right people – you cannot have a great life, nor do your best work.

So, as you journey out, worrying about "What am I going to do with my life?" I encourage you to change the question from what to who.

Paint by Numbers Kit or a Masterpiece?

In closing, I'd like to suggest that there are two basic approaches to life:

One is the "paint by numbers kit" approach, where you take a traditional path, stay within the lines, and end up with a nice pretty picture.

The other is to throw out the paint by numbers kit and start with a blank canvas. It's riskier, but also perhaps the only way to paint a masterpiece.

Many of you will choose the paint by numbers kit, and end up with a good life.

But I hope that many more of you will carve your own path and turn your life into a unique work of art that you – and only you – could have lived.

Life is a terminal disease for which there is no cure – every day taken on the paint by numbers kit is a day stolen from painting a masterpiece. There is no better time to begin your own masterpiece than right now.

I wish you the best of luck.

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