Commencement Address
George Washington University Undergraduate School of Business
The Honorable Cynthia A. Glassman, PhD
May 15, 2009
Congratulations to you, graduates, and to your families and friends – and to the faculty and staff who helped you get to this day. GW is a terrific business school. Thank you Dean Phillips for inviting me to speak at this wonderful occasion. It is an honor to be here.
Members of the class of 2009, you have spent the last 4 years taking classes to prepare you for the rest of your life. I would like to take just a few more moments of your time to share with you some lessons that you may not have learned in class.
I will start with ethics. I am sure you have had many discussions about ethics and doing the right thing, and I hope that you have taken them to heart. What you may not appreciate is how difficult it can be to hold on to your moral compass. As an SEC Commissioner, I voted on thousands of enforcement actions. In reviewing these cases, I often asked myself, “What were they thinking?” And it was usually apparent that they weren’t thinking – at least they weren’t thinking straight.
None of these cases was more heartbreaking than situations where someone got caught up in a fraud not of their making. There were a number of instances of accounting frauds in which senior management asked – or more likely – pushed an employee to make a small accounting adjustment to obscure a performance problem, with the promise that it could be reversed in the next quarter when performance improved. Of course, the next quarter required a little more adjustment, and this went on until the employee was in the middle of a major accounting fraud, and lost his or her job and reputation, and sometimes even went to jail. These cases reminded me of the story about frogs and boiling water. As the story goes, if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump right out, but if you put the frog in cold water and bring it slowly to a boil, it will just sit there and die. The lesson I took from those cases is that you should align yourself with people of integrity. Stay away from that hot pot. And if you do find yourself in a bad situation, be prepared to leave. Have an exit strategy. Save your money so you have a financial cushion, be flexible, and keep your options open.
Which brings me to my next point. Your first job won’t be your last job. Whatever it is – and however you feel about it – learn from it. You will spend the majority of your waking hours at your job. Make the most of it. If your careers are anything like mine, you will have many rewarding experiences, but some that are less fulfilling. You will have some wonderful bosses and mentors who will bring out the best in you, push you past your comfort zone, and expand your horizons – and you will have some that second-guess your every move. You will have great colleagues, but there will often be someone who undercuts you. You will have great relationships with your customers and clients, but –as I did – you will occasionally have the client from hell.
Appreciate the positives and learn from the negatives. Learn what you like to do and what you don’t; how you like to be treated and how you don’t. Use that knowledge throughout your career to do a better job; to be a better employee, colleague and boss; to refine your thinking about your next step. Respect yourself and others – at all levels. When I was a consultant hiring new college grads as research analysts, I learned a lot from how they treated the receptionist while they were waiting to be interviewed, and that weighed heavily in my decision to hire them or not.
This is a very scary time to be going out into the real world. The silver lining is that there is a good chance that this is the worst job market that you will encounter during your working life. It is going to shape your views.
A number of important lessons have emerged – or re-emerged - from the current economic downturn.
• As I said, it is critical to build a financial cushion to fall back on. Save your money and invest it well. Don’t be taken in by scams or get rich quick schemes. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. I recall an SEC enforcement case in which the perpetrators promised a 13,000% return. I am not making this up. They raised $12 million dollars. Both the scammers and the investors deserved to be punished! This, of course, pales in comparison to some of the recent schemes in the headlines.
• Flexibility is important, as is perseverance. Now is a good time to consider job opportunities that you may not have thought of. Since you are graduating from business school, I assume that you want to have a business career, but I urge you to consider public service at some point. I started my career in government and returned to it later in my career. Public service was for me – and can be for you - enormously rewarding. And… the government is hiring.
• Keep learning. One of the main differentiators between high and low income jobs – or between challenging and routine jobs—is education. Stay fresh. Continue to learn new skills.
• Finally, take risks, but make sure the risk /reward tradeoff is in your favor. Don’t risk what you can’t afford to lose – money, your reputation, your health, and your family.
I often hear graduates being told that they should have a plan for their career and even their life. I’m not so sure that a plan is necessary. My career certainly didn’t go according to plan. When I started college, I was going to major in math and be a high school math teacher. By sophomore year, I was majoring in economics and planning to be a computer programmer. By junior year, I had decided to get a PhD in economics – which I actually did do, but I thought I would be a macroeconomic forecaster in the private sector. Instead, I started out in the government as a microeconomist focusing on the financial services industry. At no time was being an SEC Commissioner on my radar screen – that is, until the minute after I got the phone call from the White House - and the idea of being Under Secretary of Commerce was just as remote.
My point is that it is ok if you don’t have a plan and, if you do have one, it is ok to change course. You can’t plan for the serendipitous event, but you can be ready, willing and able to recognize it and to take advantage of it.
As you leave here today, you may know how your career will begin, but you certainly don’t know how your career - and the rest of your life - will end up. But you do have some guideposts to hold on to as you get there – your moral compass, your work/life balance, and your health. And keeping your perspective and sense of humor will make the good times better and cushion the not so good times.
Graduates: Congratulations, good luck, and thank you!