May 19, 2007

President Shirley Ann Jackson: And now it is my privilege to formally introduce our commencement speaker.  Our speaker, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, is considered by many to be one of the wisest observers of the world stage.  A world-renowned author and journalist, Mr. Friedman joined the New York Times in 1981 as a financial reporter specializing in OPEC and oil-related news.  He has served as chief White House correspondent, chief economic correspondent in the Washington Bureau and became the paper’s foreign-affairs columnist in 1995.  A three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles reporting the Middle East conflict, the end of the Cold War, U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy, international economics, and the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat.  His New York Times foreign affairs column, which appears twice a week, is syndicated to 700 other newspapers worldwide. 

Over the years, Mr. Friedman has written numerous award-winning books.  From Beirut to Jerusalem won both the National Book- and the Overseas Press Club Awards in 1989 and was on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly 12 months.  The Lexus and the Olive Tree was one of the bestselling business books in 1999 and the winner of the 2000 Overseas Press Club Award for the best nonfiction book on foreign policy.  His most recent book, The World Is Flat, A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, describes the convergence of technological, political, and social shifts that, in his own words, have “accidentally made Beijing, Bangalore, and Bethesda next-door neighbors.”  He describes the effect of technologies and inter-linkages that have made geographically distant individuals able to collaborate and compete across national borders, across ethnicity and across cultures.  Mr. Friedman has described in his writing what I have called The Quiet Crisis, a looming shortage in the domestic science and technology workforce that could potentially deprive the U.S. of the discoverers, the creative problem solvers, and the gifted technological innovators that a sustainable future demands. 

It is my distinct pleasure to introduce to you our commencement speaker, Thomas L. Friedman.

Thomas L. Friedman: Thank you, Shirley.  I thought for a second I could see my breath.  So much for global warming.

It is a treat and a distinct honor to be here this morning.  I first want to pay tribute to my fellow honorees, Mae and Don.  Think for a moment of all the young boys and girls in this country who, the first time they think about a career in kindergarten or first grade they say, “I want to be an astronaut when I grow up.”  Mae, she made it.  She’s one in a million.  You should be honored by her presence here today.  Then think about all the TV shows that have been made, successful ones, unsuccessful ones, over the years.  And then think of the fact that there has been one TV show that’s been on your whole life, 60 Minutes.  And the guy who made that is sitting back there, Don Hewitt.  He’s one in a million.  You should be honored by his presence here. 

It’s always a struggle to figure out what to say to a graduating class.  Should I be brutally frank about the world you are about to enter or gently inspiring or lovingly sentimental?  Because this is my first visit to Rensselaer, I thought today that I’d better cover all my bases and give three speeches, one brutal, one inspiring, and one sentimental.  I can’t go wrong.

Let’s start with a dose of brutality.  Not being a particularly brutal person myself, I decided to borrow some in-your-face rules of life written by Charles Sykes, the author of Dumbing Down Our Kids.  He has many such rules.  I’ll just offer five to you as you leave these hallowed grounds for the real world. 

Rule One: If you think your teacher is tough, wait ’til you get a boss.  He doesn’t have tenure.

Rule Two: Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now.  They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes, and listening to you talk about how cool you are.  So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try cleaning the closet in your own room.

Rule Three: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not.  In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they will give you as many times as you want to get the right answer.  This does not bear the slightest resemblance to anything you will encounter in the real world.

Rule Four: The world won’t care about your self-esteem.  The world will actually expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

Rule Five: (And this one should at least make some people here happy) Be nice to nerds.  Chances are you will be working for one.

Okay, now that I’ve toughened you up a little it’s time to inspire you if I can.  On to speech number two.  When I told people I was going to be the graduation speaker at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, they usually asked two questions.  Why you?  Why there?  Now, why me is a very legitimate question.  As someone who barely cleared 600 on his math SATs, the honorary degree I have received here today is as close as I will ever get to a real science or technology or engineering or math degree.  So the true answer to why me probably has to do with my good judgment in going to a lecture four years ago in Washington, D.C., by President Shirley Ann Jackson about The Quiet Crisis in math and science education in our country and then putting her original thoughts into my book, The World Is Flat.  When President Jackson said to me a little over a year ago, “Now that I have given you my time, you will give me yours and be our graduation speaker,” I saluted and showed up here today. 

But, truth be told, I get many speaking requests so why here?  The short answer is because I think what is happening at places like Rensselaer, that is, our finest engineering and science schools, is vital to the future of our country.  So to inspire you, let me offer three simple messages: First, what you learned here really matters.  Second, what you learned to imagine here matters even more.  Third, how you implement, how you implement what you imagine is going to matter most of all.  Let me explain.

I read that this school was founded in 1824 by Stephen Van Rensselaer in order to instruct students “in the application of science to the common purposes of life.”  That application has always been important but it has never been more important than now.  When I think of the biggest challenge facing our society today, how do we maintain our standard of living so we can provide good jobs, good health care, a clean environment, and a good example of a thriving free society for the rest of the world, the answer always starts with developing more scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.  Yes, it would be great if we could all be hedge-fund managers, or at least paid like them, but we can’t.  And no doubt we could all survive at a lower standard of living by flipping each other hamburgers or serving each other Starbucks coffee.  But the only way a society advances is by inventing things that satisfy people’s existing wants and needs like a computer or a new form of energy or creating things that satisfy desires we never imagined needed satisfying like the desire to Google or to carry an iPod around with your whole music library on it and then selling those things around the world.  That will not happen without a new generation of math, science, and engineering students replacing the one that is now coming to retirement age.  So what you do with the skills you learn here, the small or big inventions you make, the businesses you start, the scientific or medical breakthroughs you contribute to, really matters. 

Yes, in today’s world more things will be designed as part of global 24/7 knowledge and innovation supply chains but our standard of living will depend directly on how many people we educate to contribute to those global supply chains.  Outsourcing is fine as long as the real value-added work starts here, the work of invention, design, and manufacture.  Where companies are headquartered still really matters.  That’s where the best jobs will be.  Yes, Google has people all over the world but its biggest concentration of good jobs is still in its home base in Mountain View, California.  What you do with what you learned here, though, is also going to determine the quality of our lives, not just our income levels.  Quite simply, in a world of rising population and rising energy demand and rising climate change, we will not remotely be able to enjoy the quality of life we have today if scientists and engineers cannot enable us to do more things with less stuff.  I'm sure you’ve noticed that 3 billion new consumers, called India, China and the former Soviet empire, just walked onto the global economic playing field, all with their own versions of the American dream: a house, a car, a toaster, a microwave, and a refrigerator.  China currently has only one car for every 100 people but as it reaches America’s income levels, if it copies our consumption, it will have three cars for every four people or 1.1 billion vehicles by the year 2030.  That is 300 million more cars than the total number of cars in the world today.  If we cannot find a way to fuel the dreams of developing countries in a cleaner, greener way, we are going to heat up, choke up, smoke up, and burn up this planet to a degree that will make Katrina look like a spring shower.  That is why what you do and what you learned here, how you contribute to enabling all of us to do more things with less stuff, less emissions, less pollution, less waste, and less energy really matters. 

Oh, yes, we need poets and writers.  We need singers and football players.  We need artists and we need philosophers.  And, in a minute, I will explain why.  But behind them we need people who can invent and make stuff that is relevant, as Stephen Van Rensselaer said, to the common purposes of our life.  But I hope you are leaving here not only with your mind sharpened; I hope you are also leaving here with your imagination enhanced.  What you imagine also really matters if you are, indeed, going to make the stuff the world needs and wants.  In fact, what you imagine today matters more than ever.  Why?  Because, again, the world is flat.  Yes, Mom and Dad, you paid tens of thousands of dollars to get your kid educated at Rensselaer only to have their graduation speaker tell them the world is flat.  By flat, of course, I mean that more people than ever can now plug and play, compete, connect and collaborate on the global economic playing field.  Innovation can, and increasingly is, coming from anywhere and everywhere.  It is going to spur an incredible era of invention.  The next great breakthrough in bioscience is going to come form a 15-year-old girl in Romania who downloads the human genome on her iPod.  But because so many people, so many individuals now have access to so much knowledge through Google, so much connectivity through the Internet, competition is changing.  In the past, we spoke about and measured competition between countries and countries.  We still do.  In the past, we measured competition between companies and companies.  We still do.  But in the future…  In the future, the most important competition is the one between you and your own imagination.  When the world is this flat, with this many distributed tools of innovation, what you imagine is going to matter so much more because you can now act on your imagination as individuals so much faster, farther, deeper, and cheaper.  The flattening of the world makes being an activist or an entrepreneur easier and less expensive than ever before.  You want to raise money for African poverty relief, for Darfur refugees, or to save the elephants of Sri Lanka, the Web will provide you a global platform and global audience.  You want to start a global business to make colored iPod earphones?  I can show you how to do it online.  You want to highlight environmental degradation in the Amazon or potholes in your neighborhood?  You can post the pictures on Flickr or upload your own documentary on YouTube.  If your arguments or video or photos or voice or business plan are compelling, you will eventually find an audience or it will find you.  But you can also be effective without the Web.  If you have an entrepreneurial bent, a passport, a little cash and a lot of gumption, you can now go off and start a small business in more places than ever.  In fact, this kind of activism and entrepreneurship is now so easy, so cheap, so readily available to even the smallest player that I would throw down this gauntlet to you, the Class of 2007: If it’s not happenin’, it’s because you’re not doin’ it.  There is no one else in the way.  If it’s not happenin’, it’s because you’re not doin’ it.  So remember the most important competition now is with yourself, making sure you’re always striving to get the most out of your own imagination and then acting on it. 

But where does imagination come from?  Ah, now we come back to the liberal arts.  My friend, Marc Tucker, who heads the National Center on Education and the Economy, answers the question this way: “One thing we know about creativity,” he says, “is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other.”  Intuitively you know this to be true.  Leonardo DaVinci, Tucker notes, was a great artist, scientist, and inventor and each of his specialties nourished the other.  He was a great lateral thinker but if you spend your whole life in one silo, you will never have either the knowledge or mental agility to do the synthesis, connect the dots, which is usually where the next great breakthrough can be found. 

So I don’t know how many art, music, or literature courses you have been able to take while you have been here but I hope it was more than zero and I hope even more that after you leave here today you will expose yourself to the richness of liberal arts because the imagination that gives birth to great ideas, products, designs, and intellectual breakthroughs often happens when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework of one to think about the other.  I learned that most from a geek, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer.  At his own graduation address at Stanford a couple of years ago, Steve told this story of how he went to Reed College, a radical liberal arts college in Oregon; that’s where he started.  He dropped out after one semester.  Here’s what he said.  “The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.  And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.  Let me give one example.  Reed College at the time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.  Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand calligraphed.  Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.  I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about the varying amount of space between different letter combinations and about what makes great typography great.  It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science cannot capture and I found it fascinating.  None of this had a hope, not a hope, of any practical application in my life but 10 years later, 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me and we designed it all into the first Mac.  It was the first computer with beautiful typography.  If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, this Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.  And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have had them.”  Steve had to get that in.  “If I hadn’t dropped out, I never would have dropped in on this calligraphy class and personal computers might not have ever had the wonderful typography they have today.”  So I’m glad that you did not drop out, you the Class of 2007, but I hope you will drop in on art, music, and literature.  You never know what it will spark when you combine it with your knowledge of computers, biology, or math.  It was not an accident that Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”  So I hope that I have convinced you that what you do matters and what you imagine matters even more. 

Now, let me make one last point.  How you do whatever you do…  How you do whatever you do is going to matter more than ever.  This is also because the world is flat.  As individuals are able to create more of their own content in digital form, and as search engines and computers get better at sifting and sorting all that digital content, the Internet will become a permanent record, an always-open book.  Every e-mail you send, every entry you make in Facebook or MySpace or YouTube is a digital footprint that will never be washed away by the sea.  Every sound you make will soon be recorded somewhere and that means that young people today not only have to be smart about how they navigate around the Web; they have to be smart about what they leave behind there as well.  In time, Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo will be able to turn over smaller and smaller rocks to find out smaller and smaller details about movie stars, scientific breakthroughs, crazy conspiracies and, yes, about you. 

My friend, Dov Seidman, a business ethicist, has just published a book called How: and it’s all about why how you do things will matter so much more in this increasingly wired and transparent world.  He uses the example of the personal resume, which college grads have used for years to apply for their first job and for jobs after that.  When I was sitting down there where you are today, the resume was a very efficient device that society created to enable people to judge other people.  You got to write your own resume, tell your own life story the way you wanted it told, and it was generally accepted on faith, unless proved otherwise, that what you said was honest and true.  Those days are over.  Now people can conduct their own X-ray of your life using Google and other search devices and if it’s easy today, imagine how much easier it will be in 10 years.  Now we can blow right past proxies like a resume, says Dov, and get direct insight into you.  Employers can go into your MySpace page and see how you write, get to know your friends, search the Web and see what you’ve done right and wrong or evaluate what you said about yourself in your online yearbook.  They can reconstruct these artifacts of your life even after you have tried to delete them.  Therefore, Dov says, if character is destiny and if strangers have so many more tools to look inside your character now, then you’d better start building a solid character early.  You will get fewer and fewer second chances in a flat world.  In this world, you had better do it right the first time; you don’t get to pick up and move to the next town to reinvent yourself so easily.  In a world where your history lives online forever, accessible to all, your reputation will follow you and precede you on your next stop.  So how we communicate, says Dov, how we write letters, how we put together a resume, how we say, “I’m sorry,” or don’t say, “I’m sorry,” how we engender trust or don’t, how well we collaborate and what percentage of our promises we keep, all matter now more than ever.  “Always tell the truth,” said Mark Twain.  “That way you won’t have to remember what you said.”  That is good advice.  Get your hows right because more people than ever will be able to detect when you don’t. 

Well, I’ve tried to frighten you, tried to inspire you.  Now let me appeal to your sentimental side for just one moment with a message that I include in every graduation address I give.  It’s a very simple message: Call your mother.  When you were just in elementary school, there was a legendary football coach at the University of Alabama named Bear Bryant and, late in his career after his mother died, Bell South Telephone Company asked Bear Bryant to do a TV commercial.  As best I can piece together from the news reports, the commercial was supposed to be very simple, just a little music and Coach Bear Bryant saying in his tough coach’s voice into the camera, “Have you called your mamma today?”  On the day of the filming, though, when it came time for Coach Bryant to recite his simple line, he decided to ad lib something.  His mother had recently died.  He looked into the camera and said, “Have you called your mamma today?  I sure wish I could call mine.”  That was how the commercial ran and it got a massive audience response.  My own father died when I was 19.  He never got to see me do what I love.  I sure wish I could call him.  My mom, though, is 87 years old and lives in a home for people with dementia.  She doesn’t remember so well anymore and hasn’t for quite some time.  But even as her memory failed, for years she remembered that my column ran twice a week in the New York Times.  She didn’t quite remember the days, though, so every day she went through the paper and if she found my column, she photocopied it and passed it out to the other dementia patients in her nursing home.  Now, they didn’t know my column from the crossword puzzle but, never mind, if you don’t think that was important to me to know that my mom was still passing around my column even to people who could no longer read it, well then, you don’t know what’s important.  Your parents love you more than you will ever know so if you take one message away from this talk, take this one: Call your mother.  Regularly.  And your father.  You will always be glad you did.

Well, Class of 2007, that about does it for me.  I’m fresh out of material.  I've tried in this short time to get in your face, to get in your head, and to get into your heart.  I didn’t really talk much about me but if you want to know what’s been the secret to my sauce, I guess the best way I can explain it is with this story.  I was in Israel a few years ago and invited to dinner with the editor of the Haaretz newspaper, which runs my column twice a week in Hebrew.  I asked him, “Why do you run my column?”  And he said, “Tom, you're the only optimist we have.”  There was an Israeli general at the dinner, Uzi Dayan, who then said, “Tom, I know why you’re an optimist.  It’s because you’re short and you can only see that part of the glass that’s half full.”  Well, truth be told, as you can see, I’m not that short but I do try to always see the glass half full.  For good reason.  Somebody much smarter than me once said that pessimists are usually right, optimists are usually wrong but all the great breakthroughs in history were done by optimists.  So that’s why I would prefer that the last words you hear from me as you leave here today are from Mark Twain, whose rich imagination left us a body of work we enjoy up to now.  Mark Twain understood so many things about the human spirit, most importantly the power of optimism, which may be why his most oft-quoted quote remains, “Always work like you don’t need the money, always fall in love like you’ve never been hurt, always sing like nobody’s listening and always, always live like it’s heaven on earth.” 

Thank you very much.  Godspeed.