Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Jon Alger: Good afternoon everyone. Thank you. I'm Jon Alger, president of James Madison University and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this fifth event of the Madison Vision Series. Through the Madison Vision Fund we are proud to sponsor the Madison Vision Series and want to thank the series cosponsor, the office of Madison Institutes in Outreach and Engagement as well as all the supporters of the fund who have made this series possible. Our bold new vision statement talks about becoming the national model of the engaged university, engaged with ideas, and the world. This model of engagement has several facets in our strategic plan including engaged learning, community engagement and civic engagement. As a member of the James Madison University Board of Visitors, today's speaker has played an important role in the development of our strategic plan and in articulating the importance of these interrelated forms of engagement. It has a been a joy and a privilege to work with Carly Fiorina, a nationally renowned strategic thinker and supporter of higher education as we breathe life into this vision and strategic plan. Carly has brought a national perspective, a thoughtful and constructive critical thinking skills and a positive spirit to our discussions over the past year. So, who is Carly Fiorina? Probably most of you know that she's one of the world's leading business executives. The former CEO of Hewlett Packard, a high tech giant. Many of you may also know that she has run for the US Senate, that she's in high demand on the national television talk show circuit and is a cancer survivor. A few of you might even know that she briefly attended law school. As a recovering lawyer myself I will refrain from telling any lawyer jokes, but Carly I'll leave that to you, if you'd like. But, did you know that Carly launched her career from the foundation of a bachelor's degree from Stanford in medieval history and philosophy. Students, take heart, and take notice. Carly is a poster woman for the modern value and relevance of a liberal arts education. She exemplifies lifelong learning and her journey has not followed some cookie cutter model from a textbook. She has blazed her own path with hard work, determination, a resilient spirit and a can-do attitude. Among many other things Carly has been a role model for engaging women in leadership, and also for creative philanthropy that addresses urgent needs in the 21st Century. Carly currently chairs Good 360, the world's largest product philanthropy organization which helps companies donate excess merchandise to charities. She has also established Carly Fiorina Enterprises to focus on powerful levers for unlocking human potential, which include championing entrepreneurship and innovation and building leaders and organizational capacity. She's using her skills and experience to live out the JMU motto that calls for all of us to Be the Change we want to see in the world. Carly's presentation today, Foundations of Ethical Reasoning, builds on recent calls to action for American universities to return their focus to undergraduate education. The title should sound familiar as it echo's our own new signature initiative here, the Madison Collaborative, Ethical Reasoning in Action. We believe that the Madison Collaborative and our own strategic plan provide a powerful set of answers to the questions that many people are currently raising today as they call upon higher education to focus more on actual student learning outcomes and on preparing students to face real world problems and challenges. We're excited that Carly agreed to serve on JMU's Board of Visitors and are especially pleased that she has been willing to come to campus this week to share some of her own personal story, her perspectives and her passion. Please join me in welcoming Carly Fiorina to the stage today. [applause] Carly Fiorina: Well, good afternoon. I am delighted to be with you this afternoon and I must say that I'm honored as well to serve as a member of the Board of Visitors and so excited by the leadership that Dr. Alger is bringing to this wonderful university. I appreciate so much that very gracious introduction and whenever I'm given an introduction like that I always reflect on the fact that it sort of sounds so smooth. You know, well she had a degree in medieval history and then she became a CEO and the truth is no success story is without its setbacks; no one who has had triumphs has also avoided tragedies. I've had triumphs and tragedies, which I'll talk about successes and setbacks, but of course no one's life is as smooth as a gracious introduction would imply. Nor was mine. I grew up a middle child and as a middle child I was, I would say, probably kind of a dutiful daughter. I always felt somehow less everything, less intelligent, less gifted, less popular, less. And I remember when I was about eight years old my mother gave me a plaque at church and the plaque said: "What you are, is God's gift to you; what you make of yourself is your gift to God." And it became sort of a challenge for me, growing up. What are my gifts; what should I make of myself? But the truth is I really had no idea. I went off to Stanford as Dr. Alger said and because my parents were putting three kids through college at the same time and Stanford was a pretty expensive place to go to school, I had to work while I was going to school and so, thanks to my mother, who when I was in junior high insisted that I take typing lessons, I know those of you who are students here don't even know what I'm talking about probably, but we did in fact used to type on things called typewriters and so I put myself through school, help my parents put me through school by typing during college. I was what was called a Kelly Girl. Now the term Kelly Girl is politically incorrect these days; now I think they're called Kelly Temporary Personnel, but back then we were Kelly Girls. We were young women who would go into offices temporarily and type. And one of my very first jobs while I was a sophomore at Stanford was to type coincidentally bills of lading in the shipping department of Hewlett Packard. And I date myself because I remember very well as a very young woman who had no idea what I was going to do with my life, I remember interacting with my fellow workers, all women and at the time the big technology breakthrough -- now I'm really going to date myself -- the big technology breakthrough was the IBM Selectric typewriter. I know, really. Again, for you students, this is a lesson in ancient history but the IBM Selectric typewriter had this little ball with all the letters on it and when you typed it would spin around and it was just a breakthrough and so we would watch, literally, I remember sitting at our desks and watching the ball going around and 'round, wow was that an amazing innovation! There was another innovation that was really important back then because if you typed bills of lading you had eight copies with mimeograph paper in between. Sounds like I'm speaking in hieroglyphics but if you were a secretary typing eight bills of lading with mimeograph paper in between you really needed that little bottle of what was called White Out, which corrected all your mistakes. Okay, so here I am at Stanford and I decide to take a class, it was a graduate seminar, in medieval philosophy. I don't really know why I decided to do it other than I liked a challenge and perhaps, as is true for most of you, it was a really, really good professor and I had taken a course from him in sort of introduction to medieval history and he encouraged me to take this graduate seminar and in the seminar we had to read a work of medieval philosophy every week. And for any of you who've ever read medieval philosophy it's not light reading. Maimonides, Aquinas and they were kind of verbose guys, you know? These were hundreds and hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages; every week we had to read one of those works. And we had to turn into our professor a two page summary of that work. So you had to read it, I had to understand it and then I had to think about out of all those pages what two pages should I write? And the process for me was I would write twenty pages and then I would get it down to ten pages and down to five pages and finally I got it down to two pages. What I learned in the course of studying medieval history and philosophy, I was fascinated by the fact that you could see the human race learn. One generation after another. I began with introduction to philosophy with the Greek Aristotle, Plato. I became so fascinated by Aristotle and Plato that I decided to take classical Greek so that I could read them in their original language. None of this, by the way, was going to help me get a job. I actually wasn't thinking about that at the time. But I learned that the things that people rediscovered in the Renaissance, in the 14th and 15th Century had been learned earlier; had been built upon by the great foundations of reason and logic and ethics that began with Aristotle and Plato. I learned that as people could learn one generation to the next, that millennia over millennia people could build upon the knowledge that had come before them. I also learned that people could forget. And that when people forgot their foundations, they were lost in darkness. That's what the Middle Ages was, a period of forgetting. And becoming lost. And, of course the Renaissance was a period where people rediscovered. That perspective, that perspective that taught me as a young woman, you know all the questions that I have in my life, what's right, what's wrong, why are we here. I'm not the only one who has those questions. People hundreds of years ago had those questions and it wasn't easy to answer those questions, that's why they wrote pages and pages of philosophy trying to answer those questions. Perspective is about placing yourself in context. Knowing that while each of us have unique gifts, that all of us share a common experience. And that process of going through thousands of pages to twenty pages to ten pages to five to two, I was learning judgment, because what is judgment? Judgment is deciding what's important and what's not. Judgment is deciding, you know there's lots of information but this piece is really important, that piece not so much so. Of course I didn't know any of that at the time. I just thought it was a really fascinating class. And because I was a determined young woman, because I remembered that plaque, I worked hard at all my classes. Well now I graduate. I graduate in the middle of a recession; I'm a young woman with a degree in medieval history and philosophy and so frankly speaking I was all dressed up with nowhere to go. No one was going to hire me. And so I did, with apologies to any lawyers in the room, I did what a lot of people at that time with liberal arts degrees did, I went off to law school. That's what my dad wanted. He was a law professor who ultimately became a federal judge. I went off to law school. I discovered I hated it. I hated it. And I worried through that first semester of law school because I hated it so much but because I also thought I can't quit; I'm not a quitter and my mother and father are proud of me that I'm in law school. But ultimately at the end of three months I made what was for me at that time the most difficult decision of my young life. I decided to quit. And it was a difficult decision for me because I knew I was disappointing people. It was a difficult decision for me because I wasn't a quitter. Mostly it was a difficult decision for me because I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. And in fact, I went home, I sat down with my mother and father and I said, "Mom, Dad, I'm quitting. I hate it." My father said what all of us as children dread hearing from our parents, "Carly, I'm very disappointed in you." My mother said, "What are you going to do?" The answer I don't know. But I did know this: I knew somehow even at 23 years old, I knew that if I didn't love it I couldn't be good at it. And I didn't want to spend my life at it. So now I had to go to work. So what did I know how to do? I knew how to type. So I go to the want ads. I answer the first want ad that I see that is calling for someone with my skills. A little nine person company needed a receptionist and the receptionist needed to type and file and answer the phones. They offered me the job thank goodness and I took it. In one of those you know interesting ironies of life, the building that I had my first full time job in is one block from the headquarters of Hewlett Packard. I sat in that little building with those nine people, this was a commercial real estate brokerage company, and I typed and I filed and I answered the phones. I didn't think about my future. The only thing I thought about was "I'm going to do the best job I can." After about six months two men came to my desk and they said, "You know, we've been watching you and we think you could do more than type and file. Do you want to know what we do?" And that, ladies and gentlemen was my introduction to business. It had never occurred to me that I would be interested in business. I didn't even know what business was, really. Those two gentlemen taught me a very important lesson and that lesson was about leadership. Because, and I'll return to this, but those gentlemen saw possibilities in me and because they saw possibilities in me, I saw possibilities in myself. Because they saw possibilities that I hadn't imagined before, suddenly I was able to think about a whole different future. I learned something else really important in that job. I learned that anybody can make a difference. I was nobody. I typed. I filed. I answered the phones, but one day a gentleman, a client, a new client came in the front door and he said, "I've decided to bring my business to Marcus and Millichap." That was the name of the firm; they've since become hugely successful and are in many states across the country, but then they were only nine people. And he said, "I've decided I'm going to bring my business to Marcus and Millichap." And I said, "Well, that's wonderful sir, may I ask you why?" And he said, "Well, because of you." I said, "What do you mean because of me?" "Every time you answered the phone, you were knowledgeable, you were professional, you were caring about me, you were cheerful, I decided that's how this company is." I never forgot that. I never forgot, even when I became a CEO that anybody, no matter where they are in an organization, can make a difference. Well, before I buckled down and got an MBA I decided to run off to Italy to teach English for a year. You can imagine my parents were truly concerned now. "Mom, Dad, I'm heading off to Italy." I did. I taught English for a year. It was a wonderful experience and one of the things that I learned doing that was once again perspective. I had had the great fortune when I was a young woman, fifteen, my father who was a professor took a sabbatical and we lived for a time in London and we lived for a time in Ghana, in West Africa. And I remember knowing at fifteen, I remember knowing how remarkable it was that here I was with all these different people in these really different places. They sounded different from me; they looked different from me; they were different from me in many ways. In their habits, in their dress, in their language, in their culture and yet, I always found I had something in common with them. Somehow the fundamentals of humanity were always the same. And when I went back to Italy, now as a 24 year old I rediscovered that again. That there are many things that are different about us but the fundamentals, the things that those philosophers have written about for thousands of years, those things are the same. Finally I buckled down. I get my MBA and I go to work for AT&T in Washington DC. Except then it was the Bell System, again students here don't remember this but it used to be the Bell System; it was a million employees; it was a big, huge, complex bureaucracy. And I was hired as an account executive which was a high fallutin' for entry level salesperson. And I was sent off for nine weeks of sales school, which is a good thing because I didn't know anything about telecommunications and I didn't know anything about selling. And you learned about systems and then it came time to learn how to sell. And the way they did this back then at AT&T was you went through role playing exercises. And the first role playing exercise that I had to do was, called Making a Cold Call. Now for those of you who don't know the parlance of selling, a cold call is when you call someone you don't know, you've never spoken to before and somehow you have to convince them to get an appointment so that you can meet them. And in this particular case the cold call was being made to what was known as a "gatekeeper," that is a receptionist or a secretary. Someone, in other words, who answers the phone and has to decide whether to pass you on to the big boss who might buy what you're selling or not. Now the way the role play worked, I went into a little room, I had a phone in front of me and an instructor who I'd been working with for several weeks now went into another room, had a phone in front of him and I had to dial his phone and we played; we role played. He was the gatekeeper, the receptionist; I was the salesperson. Pretty basic. All I had to do was convince him, hey, give me an appointment. I was terrified. Terrified. I postponed the exercise eleven times. Finally the instructor said, "Carly, you have to do this. If you don't do this, you won't pass the course." So I did it. Why was I so scared? I was scared ... by the way, I'm pretty smart, I was a straight A student ... I was scared because it was new. I'd never done it before. I was afraid of looking foolish. I was afraid of making a mistake. I was afraid I wouldn't measure up. I made it through that class and I made it into AT&T. And I came to learn through many challenges; a lot of people didn't take me very seriously back in the early, early 80s. But I learned that I liked challenge and I also learned that everybody's afraid of something. Most people are afraid of looking foolish. Most people are afraid of trying something new. I learned that if somebody told me that can't be done, you can't do that, it was interesting to me. And so I kept taking jobs that people told me not to take. I learned that everywhere I went there were smart people. They might be afraid, but they were smart. And so not only did I learn over time how to overcome my own fear, but I also learned that I could tackle really difficult challenges because there were always people that I could collaborate with, who could help me figure it out. I learned the power of collaboration and the more I learned about the power of collaboration, the more confidant I became in taking on bigger and bigger challenges. Overcoming fear is like exercise. The more you do it, the more you want to do it. The more you do it, the more you can do it. And so I kept overcoming fear, different fears. And I learned that no matter what the challenge I could find people who were smart, who wanted to do something worthwhile and we could figure it out, if we would collaborate well. See the other thing I learned along the way is those gentleman I told you about, they saw potential in me, it turns out everybody has potential. Yes, everybody is afraid of something, but everyone has potential. And as a leader of organizations I have come to count on that. The truth is most people have potential they don't realize. Most people don't ever fully utilize their gifts. Maybe it's because they're afraid. Maybe it's because they're never adequately challenged. Maybe it's because no one ever asked them to collaborate in a truly meaningful way. I face new fears at HP. I wasn't afraid that we couldn't figure out what to do with the business; I knew we could figure out what to do with the business because there were lots of smart people at HP who cared deeply about the business, and we could and did collaborate to double the size of that business to almost 90 billion dollars and to generate eleven patents a day, but now I faced a new challenge, and that is everybody had something to say. Everybody had something to say. In fact, I was pretty famous and fame is a real two edged sword because all the good things sometimes people will say about you, well they'll also say really bad things about you. I once went to Oprah Winfrey to get advice. I said, "Oprah, how do you deal with the press?" Because she was going through a tough period of press. She gave me really good advice. She said, "You know, Carly, I don't read any of it. I don't listen to any of it. Because if I believe the good I have to believe the bad." And so, I overcame that fear, that you know, what people say isn't defining. What we do is defining. I was afraid again when I was diagnosed with cancer at that time of an unknown variety, most unexpectedly. I was afraid when we battled for our younger daughter's life. But in those very difficult times I learned also the kindness of strangers, the power and depth of friendship, the strength of our family's love and our faith. In other words, in tough times there are also great blessings and great lessons. People sometimes ask me what motivates me, and I'll tell you. There is a look, there is a look that people get when they achieve more than they thought was possible. Everybody, all over the world has that same look. I have seen that look in the eyes of women in desperate parts of the world, in utter destitution. I have seen that look in bright, young Turks in a technology business who accomplish something. I've seen it in my own family's eyes. People get a look when they accomplish something that they didn't think they could do. And that look, that look motivates me. Now I was talking about an IBM Selectric typewriter, those of you who are students here at JMU, you are growing up in a very different time. And I want to put the times that you are coming of age in, the times that we are all now living in, I want to put them in historical context because I think it's important. I think it's important. This is the first time in all of human history going back to millennia before Plato and Aristotle. This is the first time in all of human history that any person, anywhere can get any piece of information they want. This is the first time in human history where any person, anywhere can communicate with anyone they want. It has never happened before in human history. And lest we forget how new this is, we all have our smart phones? They're a decade old. It was not so long ago that the big companies that were going to rule the world were Microsoft, Blackberry. We now wonder whether Microsoft will continue to be relevant; they're huge; they generate enormous amounts of cash, but suddenly all the things that made them powerful in the past do not help them be powerful in the future. Blackberry, the CEO of Blackberry recently said, "We're still here." If your CEO has to say you're still here, it's not a good sign. This is the most complex time in human history because of the transformation that the combination of technology and a global economy has wrought. It is the most complex time in human history. There is no way anymore to wall off anything or anyone. Whether we want to be or not, every single institution, every single person is connected to others and in many cases connected to people they have never seen and will never meet, tens of thousands of miles away. It's an incredibly complex time, complicated time and it's also a time of unbelievable rapid change. And this too is worth putting into perspective. You know for millennia human history kind of went along, in terms of people's standards of living and the opportunities that were available to people. And it's only been, honestly, in the last 250 years that humankind has taken off. The data's clear. So you have to ask yourself, "why is that?" Why is that? Well, I think it is because, it's appropriate to talk about it since we are here at James Madison University, I think it's because about 250 years ago two powerful ideas came together. One idea, upon which our nation was founded, one idea was that everybody has potential. That everybody has potential. And that everybody should have the right to fulfill their potential. And that those rights of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, those rights, pursuit of happiness, that's what our founding fathers meant. You can fulfill your potential. That those rights came from God, not man. That was a radical, visionary idea at the time. And they went further and said, it doesn't really matter who you are. It doesn't matter what family you were born from. It doesn't matter what your last name is. It doesn't matter what you look like. All that matters is you have these rights and you have potential, and you can fulfill your potential. It is still true to this day; there is not another nation on the face of the earth that was founded on that idea. And it is still true to this day that only in this country could a young woman go from being a secretary to the chief executive of the largest technology company in the world. That is only true in this country. And that is because of that visionary founding idea. And that political idea was coupled with the concept of free markets; free markets where every participant is of equal stature. Where people ... I'm not talking about crony capitalism, I'm talking about free markets where every participant is of equal stature and each participant can choose of their own volition to collaborate, to compete, to create a better life for themselves and their families. Those two ideas came together and literally standards of living and the opportunities for humanity, if you looked at the graph, went like this. And I believe we are at a similar point now because of the incredible power of technology and an interconnected world. And yet, this incredible time that we're in, where literally more things are more possible for more people in more places than at any time in human history. This is also a time that if we are not careful we become superficial. Why? Because think about what that technology delivers to you every day. I mean, all of us are just in our devices. How much of what you get every day really matters? Do you think about what you get on your smart phone every day and compare it to that thousand page work of philosophy? How much of it really matters? How much would you keep if all you had was two pages? Not much of it actually. And I see people in all kinds of organizations: business, government, not for profits, who spend enormous amounts of time reacting to superficial stuff. Instead of having the judgment and the wisdom, the perspective to say, "This is wheat, this is chaff." And I think not only do we have, sadly too much opportunity for superficiality in this great new age, but we also have the opportunity to never really have to interact with people who are different than us. It's kind of ironic. I mean, here we have this world that is utterly interconnected and yet, where anybody can communicate with anyone else and yet this technology, this new world also allows us to find people who are just like us. If you want, you can watch a television station that you never disagree with. If you want, you can go find people, either online or literally in some kind of communion or community, who are just like you. And that's a danger. So here we are in this incredible time. A time of great complexity; a time of great challenge; a time of great opportunity but also a time of really difficult problems. And I think the things that Aristotle and Plato and Maimonides and Aquinas, all the people through the ages have struggled with, the most profoundly human elements are the most needed now. And I want to talk about what those are. Every complicated problem I have ever encountered in my life, whether it was figuring out my very first job or figuring out how to transform a company or figuring out how to deal with cancer, doesn't matter. Difficult challenges or big opportunities all require the same fundamentals. And I think those fundamentals are the foundation of ethical reasoning and in this most incredible time in human history never has ethical reasoning mattered more. So what are those things that I'm talking about? First, I think solving our problems, whether they're big or small, in this complicated, rapidly changing, interconnected world, solving our problems, capturing our opportunities requires first a profound respect for the capabilities and the potential of others. And the reason that profound respect is so important is because nothing happens with a single person acting alone. That has always been true, but it is especially true now. There is not success possible that is a solo story. There is no accomplishment possible that is a solo story. Everything requires tapping the potential, not only of yourself but of others and so to do that you must respect the capabilities of others, the potential of others, the perspective of others. Secondly, collaboration, real collaboration. If you have profound respect for the capabilities of others then you know it is worth your time to understand them. To pull from them their wisdom, their experience. But to do that you have to engage in a real process of collaboration. What is collaboration really mean? Well let me ask you to think about your own experience because you know it when you see it. How many of you have been in meetings or problem solving sessions, maybe it's a team study group, maybe it's a meeting at your place of work, but how many of you have been in those settings and you know, it's just one of these spirals down? I mean, it's deadly. You're not getting anywhere. You're talking past each other. You just feel it in the room. You feel that way because you're not collaborating; you're not problem solving; you're not getting any close to an answer. Now think about an experience where it's felt the opposite, and you've had those, where people start, what I would call spiraling up. Where people start to build on each other's thoughts and capabilities and at the end of a spiraling up collaboration session, you have accomplished something together that you would never have accomplished on your own. That kind of collaboration starts, as I've suggested, with a profound respect for the capabilities and the perspective of others, but it also means that every person, to collaborate you come into an opportunity like that prepared but open minded. And what I mean by that, prepared, prepared: knowledgeable, skillful, I have a point of view about this issue. In other words, you don't wing it. If you're talking about a difficult problem or you want a really focus on an opportunity you never wing it. You got to do your homework, you got to be prepared, but you also come in with an open mind. An open mind. To hear what others bring to the table. And one of the most effective tools I ever learned in order to produce collaboration and outcome is ask questions. You know, I went through a lot of different jobs when I was climbing the corporate ladder. I went from, you know, sales to finance to engineering to marketing and everything in between. I managed technical people and so when I would go into these new settings about the only way that I could figure out how to add value was to ask questions. Ask questions. Successful collaboration requires respectful questioning. Now in business as well as on college campuses, you know, one of the big buzz words of the day is diversity. Diversity. Let me give you the reason why that matters. If you go into a setting and everybody thinks alike, it's easy. It's easy to feel like you're collaborating and, you know, you all think alike, maybe you look alike, maybe you sound alike and guess what happens? Everybody starts finishing each other's sentences. "Yeah, yeah, what you said, right." There's only one problem with that approach: you'll probably get the wrong answer. You will miss something important. And so the reason it's vital to collaborate with people that are different than you is because you get to a better place. You get a better answer. Every difficult challenge I have encountered in my life got solved because if you ask the question of the right people you will come up with an answer. People generally know what's wrong; it's frequent that they're never asked. So profound respect for the capabilities of others, real collaboration. Third, and I've used this word a couple times already: judgment. Judgment. What is judgment? Judgment is knowing the difference between what's important and what's not. Any real problem or opportunity is never clear cut. Never. Any challenge you face in your life professional or personal is never clear cut. It's never black and white. It's never easy. And today you're inundated with information, some of it relevant, some of it not. Inundated with information. It is judgment that allows us to distinguish between what we should care about and what really isn't relevant. It is judgment that allows us to distinguish between this matters for this problem for this opportunity, this matters. And this doesn't. That philosophy course I told you about, what I was learning was the process of bringing something down to its essence. What really matters. And that judgment is vital in life. In problem solving, In progress. In success. Perspective. Perspective. How many times have you seen people make terrible mistakes because they think they're the only ones? They lack perspective. Want an example of this? Relatively recent? The Wall Street meltdown. The Wall Street meltdown. Yes, we can talk about Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac; we can talk about regulations or lack thereof, but I know these institutions, I know their leaders, fundamentally here's what happened: you had people -- it happened in the dot com boom by the way as well -- you had people who lost perspective. What I mean by that is they forgot that other people had been through boom and bust cycles before. They forgot that other people had said, "No no no, this isn't a bubble. This isn't a bubble. This one's different. This time prices really are going to go up forever and they will never come down." People convinced themselves of that. That's a failure of judgment. It's a failure of perspective. And also on Wall Street people convinced themselves this technology is telling me it's all okay. I have all these complicated technology models that are telling me it's all going to be okay and even though I don't understand them, it's going to be okay. It was a case where many people sort of suspended the human quality of judgment and perspective in favor of these models are going to tell me what to do. One of the things I've learned in my life is if someone can't explain something to me after four or five tries, they don't understand it. If someone can't explain something after four or five times, it's not because you don't get it, it's because they don't understand it. And of course, judgment, perspective, let's do it because everybody else is doing it. Chuck Prince famously said, "We all have to keep dancing 'til the music stops." People lost perspective that maybe the stock price next quarter wasn't actually the most important thing. And of course, ethics. Ethics, values, remembering the difference, knowing the difference between what's right and what's wrong. Perspective. You know maybe the stock price isn't actually the most important thing. Judgment to say, "Boy, that model is really complicated, but it simply cannot be the case that if prices go up they will never come down." And ethics. What's the right thing to do for our customers? By the way this happens all the time, sadly. People talk a lot about ethics and values and companies and institutions have value statements, you know, we all talk about highest standards of integrity. Walk into any institution, you'll see their statement of values on the wall. In this regard, I think anyone who's in an institution, you know, they look at the plaque, but basically people don't really listen to the talk on ethics and values. They watch the walk. How do people behave? What do people choose to do? If someone has violated the statement of ethics or the code of conduct, what happens to them? If the answer if nothing, then nobody believes the code of conduct is real. This is one from a long time ago, but remember Enron? Remember Enron? A shocking lapse of ethics. I knew the people at Enron. I knew their board members. Here's my sense of what happened at Enron: Enron had lots of pressure on the stock price and they had their statement of ethics. I don't think anybody set out to defraud anybody, just like I don't think people in Wall Street set out to crash the financial system. But in Enron, people understood the pressure. We've got to make the numbers. We got to make the stock price move. In one quarter, the pressure was really intense and somebody got a little close to the line and they made the numbers and the stock price went up. And nothing happened. And the next quarter the pressure got a little more intense and then they got a little closer to the line. Celebrations all around. Nothing happened. And then one day somebody walked over the line and nothing happened. And so people kept walking over the line. That's how it happens. Here's an easy test of, I think, what ethics and values are. Here's the real test of values. What do you do when no one is looking and you don't think anyone will ever find out? What do you do? So ethical reasoning, more necessary now then ever before starts with a profound respect for the capabilities of others. Real collaboration. Judgment. Perspective. Ethics. And of course, leadership. Why is it that most people don't fulfill their potential? Sometimes it's because they're afraid. But so frequently it's because there is an absence of leadership. I have pause and define leadership, because when I was a secretary, when I was starting out, I thought I understood what leadership was. Leadership was, you know, the person with the big office. Mostly they were guys back then, but the guy with the biggest office was the leader or the parking space or the perks or the budgets or the people who reported to them. Leadership, however, I came to learn has nothing to do with title or position. There are people with position and title who have never led a day in their lives. And there are people who have nothing, who lead every day of their lives. Because leadership is about unlocking potential in others. Leadership is about seeing possibilities. Leadership is about seizing possibilities. Leadership is about applying all the human potential that you have available to you through a process of ethical reasoning so that you can solve a problem or capture an opportunity and people get that look in their eyes. Yes, we did something meaningful, worthwhile. Everybody wants to do something meaningful and worthwhile. I have seen people, as I've said, in desperate circumstances, with nothing, nothing but their own capabilities. And the capabilities of others lead, because leadership is fundamentally about making a positive difference. In a business context I would explain it this way: management -- management is very important in any institution -- management is the production of acceptable results within known constraints and conditions. It's important to have good management; you've got to produce acceptable results whatever the setting is, academic, business, government. You've got to produce acceptable results within known constraints and conditions, but management is not leadership. Leadership changes constraints and conditions. Leadership changes the order of things. Leadership changes the world. I'm going to wrap up here in a minute or two so I can take your questions but you've all heard the expression: "There's no such thing as a free lunch"? Well there's no such thing as a free speech either so therefore at the end, those of you who are students here are going to have to suffer through my pieces of advice. Number one: everyone has gifts. Everyone has god given gifts. Everyone has potential. Find your gifts. Find your gifts whatever they are. And it may cause you to take a path that's a little more circuitous than maybe some would like. It might cause you to drop out of law school. It might cause you to run off to Italy. It might cause your parents some concern. But find your gifts. And have the courage to use your potential. Because all these things I've talked about? Respect for others and collaboration and judgment and perspective and ethics and especially leadership? Every one of them requires courage. Because frankly, people say less about you if you're just going along with the crowd. Find your gifts. Take the risks to understand your potential. Be prepared to make the mistakes that risk taking always requires. But find your gifts. Find what work brings you joy. Because if your work brings you joy then you will use all of your gifts. Second: do no let other define you. Do not let other define you by what they expect of you, by what they say about you, by what they convince you or to and convince you to do. Define yourself. Third: it's important to get a degree but it's far more important to get an education and you are here at an institution that believes in giving you and education. An education by requiring exposure to the great books and letters of human civilization. An education by engaging in the community around you, in the world around you, with people that are different than you. And education by having high expectations of you. Yes, the degree, the piece of paper matters, but the education matters so much more. Don't wait for the perfect job. I know there's high anxiety when you're finishing up with college or you're finishing up with your graduate degree, there is high anxiety and there's also a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure to get the right job, the perfect job, the job you can brag about. Don't wait for the perfect job, just get a job. Because every job, every job has possibilities. You will learn something in any job you take. There is no substitute for hard work. There is no substitute for the pursuit of excellence, but if you work hard and you pursue excellence in any job you have, someone will notice and when they do, when opportunity knocks, don't be afraid to walk through the door. You know there are people, I've managed a lot of people in my career and there are two kinds of people: there are people who see, who are in a situation, in a job and they see limitations, constraints. Those are the kinds of people who say to you, "I can't, I shouldn't. Well, we can't do this, we're limited by that, we shouldn't do that." They see limitations. Yes, every job has limitations. Every circumstance has limitations. Every job has possibilities. Every circumstance has possibilities. And there are people who say, "Yeah, but we could do this and we can do this and no one's telling us we shouldn't do that and it needs done." See the possibilities in any employment opportunity you have. Fifth: everyone is afraid. Everyone is afraid of something and most of us are afraid of all the same things I was afraid of, looking foolish, making a mistake, what people are going to say about you, what will happen to me or my daughter? We're all afraid of the same things; it is part of the human condition. The question is not are you afraid? The question is what do you do with your fear? Does your fear become a barrier? Does your fear hold you back or do you learn, systematically, time after time after time, to face your fears and overcome them and the more you do it the easier it will become. Sixth: the tough times will come. The tough times, maybe you've already had tough times. There are tough times in every life. It is part of life. And so when the tough times come, remember that in those tough times are the greatest of blessings and sometimes the most important lessons of all. In truth it is so often the tough times that make us who we are. So when your going gets tough, understand that you're not alone whatever you're going through, but understand as well that there is great, there is a great gift that will come out of that terrible tough time. Seven: we control nothing. That was a big one for me because I was a control freak. We control nothing but our own choices. We don't control those around us; we don't control when we live or die or who that we love may live or die. We don't control the circumstance we find ourselves in but we do control our choices. We control how we choose to respond, how we choose to see a situation, as full of possibility or full of limitation. We choose whether we collaborate with other. We choose whether we have profound respect for the capabilities of others. We choose to find a still moment within ourselves and say, "You know what, I must now think carefully, what does my judgment tell me? What does my perspective teach me? What, what does that still voice inside me say is the right or the wrong thing to do?" Those things we control. Those most profound of human things. And those things matter now more than ever before. And finally eight, if we control nothing but our choices I would urge you to choose to lead. Choose to make a positive difference. Choose to change the order of things. Choose, not only to find your own potential but to unlock potential in others. Choose to change the world. Thank you so very much. Thank you. And I think we are going to take some questions and there are roving mikes, so Andy's down here in front. We have another mike over here. Okay, it's always scary to ask the first question. This is a moment for courage. Yes? Man: Hello, Ms. Fiorina I just wanted to ask you ... CF: Carly's really okay. Man: Yes ma'am. [laughter] As we know the future as I guess the pressure, I've asked this of several of the speakers just with different perspectives. How do you get a great work/life balance? CF: The work/life balance question. Ah, it's very difficult. There is no silver bullet. Ah, it's something particularly difficult for women although it's difficult for men and women. I would say a couple things, first, it's all about how you choose to spend your time. That's a choice. People would ask me when I was a CEO what is the most difficult decision you make every day. And my answer always was how I spend my time. Because how we choose to spend our time becomes our life. If we spend our time reacting to and responding to a bunch a drivel that comes into our smart phone every day, it becomes way too much of our life. Only you can choose how you spend your time. I had to learn the hard way that no matter choice I made somebody would be unhappy. I mean, that's just true. Because people always want more of you. People expect that, your family may be pulling you at a particular point in time; your work may be pulling you at a particular point in time. You want to take the time to spend with your friends, or stay healthy. I mean, no matter what you choose, someone's going to be unhappy, which then says, you have to own those choices. You've got to own those choices. How you choose your time becomes your life. So choose wisely. Woman: Hi, my name is Ruth Farmer I'm with the National Center for Women in IT, so I'm very excited to see you here. Can you give us an example of a time when this lack of diversity among a team had a big impact, and in a work example that you had, and then how you, maybe, solved that later? CF: Yeah. Well, sure. There's so many examples I could give, but let me give one, because I talked about the smart phone. When the Apple phone first came out, you may have noticed this but men gravitated to the smart phone first and a lot of women, me included, were on our Blackberries. And in fact, I observed for quite a long time that it, men were the users of that phone. It turned out that the reason many women didn't like the first couple generations, was because the heat sensitive screen didn't pick up enough heat from women's hands. I mean, it's kind of basic and so it wouldn't respond to women. The screen wouldn't respond to women as well as it did to men. I know this because I happened to have, Steve Jobs was a wonderful and dear friend of mine, and I was meeting with his engineering team and I was talking about this phenomenon and I said, "Do you want women as clients?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." I said, "Well, do you know that this problem exists?" "Wow, we didn't know that." I said, "How many women are on your design team?" Answer, none. They'd missed something huge because they were lacking a perspective. All of us can come up with examples like that. When I was chairman and CEO of Hewlett Packard I found a executive team around me that was homogenous in another way, in a different way. Everybody, when I arrived at Hewlett Packard we had 87 different business units. This was in a time when customers expected us to put systems together for them, so we were really, really difficult to interact with. But, what was common among all those executives was their experience was very deep and very narrow. So they knew their business exceptionally well, but they didn't know really much of anything about the rest of the business. And so they couldn't respond when customers said, "Well, yeah, I get what you do, but I need help over here." And so, the way we had to deal with that was we took all those executives and we said, "You know what, we have to create a common perspective of the business. We have to see it the way a customer sees it." And so we spent three days learning the business together. It was great for me because I learned the business, but it was good for them because they learned the business. And then we began moving people around so that, in addition to their deep experience they gained broader perspective about the capabilities of the company that they were part of. I can't see very well up here, so you really gotta wave and hope the gentlemen with the mikes see you. Woman: Thank you for this, it's been really thought provoking. You said in your talk at one point ask questions to produce collaboration and outcome, it adds value. And adds value brings up things like return on investment, potentially, but you also talked about having values. I meet with students and talk to them about, sometimes, their concerns of adding value to their degrees. We talk sometimes about having values and of course, forums like this are promoting that context. What I'm wondering about with your corporate experience about, if you can talk a bit about the tensions between adding value and having values, how maybe that plays out as a gender question and how corporate environments are finding ways to merge what, at times, can be contradictory, if a goal is to add value, to get a return on investment and another goal is for the company to have values. CF: Okay, so there's a lot in that question. The first thing I would say is when I use the phrase "add value" what I meant in that context was, and frankly in any context, was I think any person when they go into a situation, in a business, in government, in a university, in a not-for-profit should be asking the question, how will I make a difference? How will I add value? So for example when I took my first job managing engineers; I was a young woman, I didn't have an engineering degree, I had a degree in medieval history and philosophy. And I was a managing a bunch of engineers and they were good engineers and they knew what they were doing. How was I going to add value? I couldn't add value by telling them how to be better engineers; I didn't know how to tell them to be better engineers. And so I asked them. I asked them, how can I make a difference? How can I make, help produce a better result? How can I help you? What isn't getting done? And it turned out, in that case, that we were getting billed, it doesn't matter how much, but it was worth millions, hundreds of millions of dollars and nobody knew what we were being billed. So there were tons of mistakes that were costing our return on investment. So we figured out how to fix that. I added value as an individual and we also added value in terms of the bottom line. The question you pose about the conflict sometimes between return on investment and values is obviously a very critical one and sometimes we wonder because, I mean I'm a business person, I despair sometimes of businesses. Because it seems to me they have forgotten why they are there. We have become so short term in our focus. I mean, literally, a quarterly stock price has become too important a metric for too many businesses. Actually if you look, the average stock is held far less than 90 days. I don't think a CEO's job, I don't think a business's job is to pay attention the quarterly stock price. I think a CEO's job is to create long-term sustainable value and the only way you create long-term sustainable value is you have to balance the requirements and the demands of four constituencies. One is shareholders, sure, they invest in your business, but they're not the only constituency. Of equal importance, if you're focused on long-term sustainable value, of equal importance are customers. Customers, because customers are why you're there. If you're government, you better be worried about citizens, that's why they're there. If you're a university, you better worry about students. If you're a not-for-profit you better worry about people in need. But, the point is, who are you there to serve? What's the purpose of the enterprise? Third, employees, because employees are the only people who are going to deliver the value to your customers, your citizens, your patients if you're in health care. And finally communities, communities are a constituent of equal importance to shareholders, to customers, to employees because communities have to know, if they are going to permit you to be a member of their community for the long-term, which is what sustainable value requires, they have to know that you're a partner for the long-term. And the reason it's difficult to sometimes balance the requirements of those constituencies is because shareholders want a stock price quick and customers want things cheaper and employees want whatever they want, maybe higher paychecks maybe more security, communities want more investment. It is a balancing act. In fact, I think to the point, I sometimes say leadership is all about balance. It's the art of balance, short-term and long-term, customers and employees, but here's the thing, the reason I gave you the Enron example, if you want to be an institution with values, then when you are confronted with that difficult situation where someone is producing results but violating your values, values have to trump results. And if they don't, then the values will be degraded. The hardest decision I ever made as a chief executive, I had someone who reported to me, I thought someday they would be my successor, a person of incredible talent, but he was engaged in activities, abuse of company resources that we would have fired a lower level employee for. And so, guess what? He had to go. The reason Enron got into trouble is because the results trumped the values. If values are going to matter, if you're going to focus on long-term sustainable value then values have to trump results, every time and that's what I meant when I said, people watch the walk. Andy Perrine: We have time for one more question that requires a little bit less complex of an answer. CF: Okay, so I'm being edited here. [laughter] Woman: I'm not sure if my question is one of those, but hopefully it can be. Hi Carly, thank you so much for speaking with us today. I'm a senior student here at JMU and I had a question for you, I had two, but I'll just narrow it to one. I wanted to know if you could speak about being a woman in the work place, what it's like, what it was like coming to your position, as well as what you think the differences between then and now and maybe some things that you think society needs to do overcome certain challenges that women face? CF: Okay, well now there's a simple question. Okay so, Andy will just bear with me here for a moment. Allow me to tell a story. How it was coming up in my business. I told you that I was hired on as an account executive, high falutin' title for entry level sales person, and when I went to work at AT&T I was asked to share accounts with a gentleman. I thought at the time, he was kind of long in the tooth, he was actually younger than I am now, but ... yeah. Anyway, he did not think much of working with a young woman. And so it came time to meet our clients and I was very excited to meet them and he decided that maybe that wasn't such a good idea and so he and our clients chose to have this first meeting in a strip joint. A strip joint that was famous for young women dressing in see-through negligees and dancing on top of the tables. It was a test. I hope that would not happen today. By the way, I went to that strip club. How many women here remember How to Dress for Success for Women? No, a few. Okay. Severe dark suits, shirt up to the throat, bow tie, so I dressed like that. I went. We became great partners later. When I became a manager for the first time my boss introduced me to my new subordinates as, "This is Carly; she's our token bimbo." I hope that would not happen today. But here's what still does happen today. By the way, all those guys who had opinions and attitudes about young women, in the end most of them changed their mind about me, because in the end people actually do want to do something worthwhile. I found I could work with virtually anyone, if we got focused on a worthy goal. The gentleman who took me to the strip club? We became great partners. Here's what's still true today: women or people who are different are perceived as greater risk. A young woman, or an older woman, a woman sometimes is not given the presumption of competence that a man might be given. If you look different, you're not given the presumption of competence and what that means is the burden of proof, let me prove that I am competent, that I can do this job, the burden of proof falls on the person who is different. So the burden is heavier. It is still true today that women are the most underutilized resource in the world. The most subjugated people in the world. Seventy percent of those who live on less than two dollars a day are women. And while we've made great, great, great progress it's still true that only 16% of corporate officers are women, so we have a long way to go. And I guess what I would say is, if people get focused on solving problems and capturing opportunities, then the only way to do that is to utilize every ounce of human potential that exists. It is simply dumb to leave half the population's potential lying by the wayside. People who want to produce results capture opportunities, solve problems, get all their human potential engaged and they realize that half of the time, most of the time people who are different have a different point of view and that's going to yield a better answer to the previous question. That was not a short answer; it was not a simple answer, thank you for bearing with me and thank you for having me this afternoon. [applause] JA: Wow, Carly, I don't know what else to say. What a phenomenal presentation you've given us today. You've given us so much to think about. You've stretched our minds and you've stretched our hearts as well with your inspirational life story and the lessons that you've learned, so thank you for sharing so much with us, not just today, you should all know that Carly will be spending the next couple of days with us here on campus, meeting with a lot of classes, students, faculty tomorrow, which we deeply appreciate, Carly. And, of course, we have a Board of Visitors' meeting on Friday and we are thrilled to have you serving in that capacity. So, please on behalf of the university accept this token of our appreciation and again, thank you so much. I'm tempted to just ask everybody to spend the next week just discussing, come back, write a paper, two pages, tell us what you learned. But this really will prompt a lot of discussion in our community. It's been so faithful to the whole intent of the Madison Vision Series to get us to think about the big challenges of our time and who better to help us to think about those than you, so thank you so much, Carly, for what you've done. [applause] So, again, thank you all so much for being here, we do have one more Madison Vision Series event this semester on April 30th, Christopher Phillips will be here. He's the author of a book called Socrates Café among others, and he's an expert on Socratic dialogue and civil discourse, which is certainly an important topic for our time. So, I hope you'll join us on April 30th and again, thank you all so much for coming. Have a great day.
B1 US carly people leadership judgment potential learned Carly Fiorina Lecture at JMU 9 0 波閎 posted on 2022/06/04 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary