Lee Stein Commencement Speech June 13, 2008, Santa Barbara, California Click here to see a video of Mr. Stein's commencement address.
Draft 7 (Note that Mr. Stein made changes to this address right up to the commencement event.) Thank you for inviting me to join you here today. It is a great honor. As I began to prepare for this moment, I asked myself the question: Is the world coming to an end, and should we talk about that? Are the predictions of environmental catastrophe the thing that we should talk about today or should we focus on the vast new emerging eco-entrepreneurial opportunities? As Charlie Rose has said, commencement begins the phase of the journey where each of you will begin to tell the greatest story that you will ever tell: The Story of your Life. I personally believe that today begins the phase of your journey where you are now the undisputed CEO of your life. You see, as the CEO of your life, you get to write the script. I did not want to focus on environmental calamity or some "follow your dreams" comments. Why waste time on that? Today I would like to focus on you being the CEO of your life. As such, we need to first focus on time. Time is a funny thing. One of your professors told me a story about the Honey Bee, the moral of which was that to the Honey Bee "time meant honey." From my personal perspective, time is everything. But not in the way our corporate world has conditioned us. I stand before you today known as a serial entrepreneur and as an environmentalist. I have had a remarkable journey. Eco-entrepreneurial opportunities abound. But, the story that I started writing at my commencement took a detour. I have had the rare pleasure to engage with TIME due to a medical situation that I would like to share today. I was faced with a life threatening situation in 1991 which can be found in the Journal of Surgical Neurology, the May 1997 edition. I had a cerebral aneurysm, blood leaked from my post communicating artery into my cerebral spinal fluid. Not good. I was on the table at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, and the doctors decided that it was safer to stop the procedure. Oddly, they felt I had more risk if they proceeded. The interesting part of the story was that they gave me odds, sort of an 85% chance of a morbid or mortal outcome at any second. This was the greatest experience of my life. I would not wish it on anyone, but I cherish the experience and lessons learned. What do you do if you know that you are on the one hand perfectly healthy and on the other hand you could die in the next second. Face to face with time, I realized that every single thought and action mattered. There was no longer time for lessons to be learned for the future. Immediately I adopted the attitude that my life was not a dress rehearsal. First my wife and I took time to do a formal ceremony to say goodbye to each other. I held my kids. This exercise of taking the time to say goodbye and reviewing how I had behaved, how others had treated me, was quite spiritual. I learned to live in the moment. Once I recuperated from the nerve damage, I slowly began to engage in the real world again. But whenever I spoke to someone I found myself wondering, if I were to die in the next second, would I want to be spending my last moment in life with this person? If not, I would, as politely as possible, just end the conversation mid-sentence. I never viewed it as judgmental. It was just reality. The quality of time mattered most. Knowing that each second was precious, for real, not some slogan on a poster, I made sure that I protected the quality of my time. I learned to become the CEO of my life. It became a great habit. Protect the quality of your time and treat each moment with integrity. Treat each moment as your last. It was a very powerful life lesson, for real. My aneurysm experience was a great gift. I applied a simple ratio to my life which applies to radio waves. Signal-to-noise ratio. How clear was the signal and how much noise was in any conversation? Was a relationship frictionless or was there a drama queen acting out? I could notice people who confused motion and progress. At first I refused to deal with any unnecessary motion. I wanted pure signal. I wanted to only be connected to great attitudes. Attitude determines signal. In talking about attitude I would like to take a moment to talk about shoes, Oddly, one of the least environmentally appropriate products on earth. That's right, shoes! A shoe company sent two executives to two different regions of Africa to evaluate the potential market. Upon their arrival the CEO received two emails: The first executive wrote: “Arrived Safely…BIG PROBLEM… Nobody wears shoes.” The second executive wrote: “Arrived Safely…HUGE OPPORTUNITY… Everybody needs shoes…” So I ask you, as the CEO of your life, which culture do you want to be part of: The culture who sees limitations or the culture who sees opportunity? Do you want to permit the circumstances to define you or do you want to be in charge and be the one to define your circumstances. Be assured, in this journey of life, you will be tested many times. And as the CEO of your life, you get to define the mental culture that you wish to live with. But realize there is more to this journey then work or financial success, International investor Steve Gilbert makes it a point to remind us that “You can never be happier than your least happy child.” He says, “You may have to be a husband, wife, father, mother, a son, a daughter, a nurse or a nursemaid during your lifetime. If you fail at any of these jobs, financial success will be meaningless.” My rule was to never miss a kids birthday, and never miss a significant kids sports event. This has served me well. I made a really serious mistake once trying to honor that rule. In the early days of my career, I was so excited to be asked to be the keynote speaker at an international technology conference in Berlin that I accepted without checking plane schedules. Well, when I started to book flights, I found that to get there in time, I would have to miss my son’s birthday. I called the organizer, Alex Vieu, to cancel. I will forever be grateful to him. After being quite frustrated with me and telling me that the materials had been printed and circulated, he paused and said, “Bring him, bring your son, I will make it special for him.” Of course, my immediate response was to list all the reason I could not take him out of school, etc. Alex persisted. I took my son to Berlin. As the conference began, with 800 people in the room, with translation ear-sets dispersed, Alex told the group that a young man of 10 years old was joining the conference. With a huge smile, my son hesitantly walked up on stage in his new suit and sneakers. Alex had the entire audience sing happy birthday. We still talk about that trip and the cities we visited. Put your family first. Always. Protect those last moments of your life, minimize the regrets. Periodically, I would meet someone who would introduce themselves by saying that they were in that audience and sang happy birthday. Corporate bonding, imagine that! On another occasion, my son's little league baseball team got into the championship. Playoffs happen at the last moment. If there had been Vegas odds at the beginning of the season, this team was not headed to any championship. Therefore, I had accepted an invitation to be in Cambridge, England, to speak, and the travel time did not permit me to attend both events. This time I called the organizer and explained that I had to deal with an OLTE, a once-in-a-lifetime-event in my son's life. I could hear the frustration in the organizer’s voice. He was gracious in that British sort of way, and then paused and said he admired my priorities. I sent a senior member of my staff. We paid a rush premium to a company to do an immediate run of 500 baseball caps with our logo on them. The presentation started with an apology to the audience as the baseball caps were handed out. Hundreds of people in England were wearing American baseball caps with our logo. Our executive was so enthused to be on that stage that the presentation was exceptional. A huge success, and I was able to watch my son's team win that championship world series game. The picture of the team hanging on the wall in our family room says so much to me. I can assure you when the doctor tells you that you might die in the next few minutes, that a forgotten presentation will not be a memory, but missing the baseball game of an 11-year-old might haunt you. So my advice is to only work in environments that permit you to place your families well being ahead of some transient assignment. Of course, work hard and sacrifice, invest in your career and in your company, but know, most of your customers will respect you and your company values. Just be honest. If someone does not want to do business with you because of family values, then eliminate them from your personal space. Find another client, find another employer. YES, Time is honey to a bee. Therefore, extricate yourself from bad situations. If we tolerate an inappropriate work or life situation we clutter our available time. If we tolerate bad environments, we do not leave space for good things to arrive. Again, work hard and sacrifice, invest in your career and in your company, but triage inappropriate relationships as soon as possible. This is really scary to do. If not, we inadvertently let fear of the unknown drive us to tolerate things that are not good. We revert to a mean instead of leading with quality. As the CEO writing your story, something quite important is to realize WHY your thoughts and attitudes matter. What do the following things have in common: Your gown, the chair that you are sitting on, and the fish on the pole in the courtyard? Think...OK...first, each item was created by humans, but here is the important point: Each item started out as a thought. It is the thought part that is relevant here. Everything that ever comes into existence by human beings starts with a thought. The fork you use, the shoes you wear, the computer you use. Everything starts as a thought, and, as CEO of your life, it is your job to control your thoughts. And I ask, what is an entrepreneur but someone who turns thoughts into value? Know that your thoughts are the vehicle to manifesting your outcomes. When things go wrong, when you are tested, Control your thoughts. Maintain that great attitude. In addition to controlling thoughts, I found that persistent determination and discipline are essential. I had a few trials along my journey that taught me that lesson. December 6th, 1997 I was on a road show for an IPO. As many of you will learn, those weeks of raising money for a public company are a blur. Multiple cities in a day, multiple meetings in each city. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner meetings. A different hotel each night. Well. this day was memorable. I finished a presentation and got back in the limo. The investment banker said, and I will never forget this, “Your deal is dead; we are going back to New York.” I was shocked. I responded, “What are you talking about, that pension fund had just bought?” Well, he said, “Alan Greenspan just gave a speech while you were selling. He used a phrase “irrational exuberance” to describe the market, and Wall Street tanked. We are going back to New York!” The next night, a Saturday night, I met with the CEO of Bear Stearns in his home on Park Avenue. By the end of the meeting he said, lets meet Monday morning with my team, I am willing to stand behind you. Get back on the road, if my team agrees, then I will buy what does not sell. I had great support from his staff. We IPO’ed 8 days later. Persistence. A few years later, I found myself in a horrible situation. My two largest board members, executives of large financial institutions, went to war, unrelated to my company, but war in their sector. Although I had made some strategic errors along the way, they were our distribution channels and we were marginalized. My stock dropped from near $10 to $0.75. We were running out of money, we actually had just days of payroll left. I made a choice to let every employee who wanted to know what was going on sit in on meetings or offer exit packages. 100% of the staff became insiders for SEC purposes. Total transparency. Total access and input for everyone. Not one employee quit. We immediately shifted to a new application. But, I prepared bankruptcy filings which I used to negotiate with lenders. Found a new investor who wanted our new application. We got to the point that we had about $17,000 in the bank, and then the next day we had $17 million in the bank. The stock then ran from $0.75 to $26. Yes, I have many scars on my back, I would not trade them. They are what permitted me to define my character. Persistence and determination and attitude matter. Lets look at the environment for a moment. I was invited to participate in Shell Oil energy scenarios. Sort of surreal to believe that an environmental early-stage eco-entrepreneur from the nation state of California would become enamored with an executive of a large oil company, but I value Jack Jacometti. I am proud of that work, which, in part, contributed to the Three Hard Truths speech recently given by the chairman of Shell. They are: First, demand for energy is accelerating; second, supply can't keep up; and third, we need to address global warming as a matter of urgency. Imagine your being the CEO of a major Oil company. You might have 100,000 employees, 40,000-plus retail locations doing 20 million transactions a day worldwide. You know that your inventory is running out, your company is about to be subjected to a new regulatory compliance regime called carbon, and everything has to change. Your current culture has been built on the premise that energy efficiency hurts sales, and the long term is in jeopardy. How will the case study be written by the Bren graduates of 2030 about the decisions made by management in 2008? Taking action is what I mean about being the CEO of your life. You get to write your script in this most complicated world where energy, the environment, the economy, and human population needs are colliding. This means that there are opportunities everywhere. All systems have to be retooled. There are some who are dire, as author Barbara Kingsolver recently noted, “We will not run out of oil. We just do not have enough time remaining to use it all.” The problem is that we are, by some estimates, using the resources of 1.4 planets. At least those are the theories, but we at Bren know there is a big difference between practice and theory. You see, the difference between practice and theory is much different in practice than it is in theory. As Bren graduates, it is time to employ the practice, not the theory. Opportunity everywhere. You are well equipped to commence and to be successful. But, as former Federal Judge and now Duke Law School Dean David Levy recently observed, “We all started knowing nothing and we all learned that we know nothing for certain!” He actually said it in a way that applied to me personally, and I quote, “I was totally incompetent to take every job I undertook, and remember, the guy ahead of you is just as incompetent as you are!” But know that all of the chasms that you will encounter as you write this great story of your life are gifts. And all are magnified or dismissed by your attitude. Control your attitude. Your thoughts create your value. Know that life now becomes your teacher. No more extra credit. Life is not a compassionate teacher. But life is wonderful. Opportunities everywhere. There are solutions to most of the problems. My favorite ones as of today are:
Everyone started with potential, nothing more. Bren students have more potential than most, and know that you can reach out to anyone on this planet, and know with the right phone call, the right email, that you can reach anyone. Don’t waste time, don’t be shy, don’t be reluctant. You are the CEO, and your life is not a dress rehearsal. Finally, lets now turn to this environmentalist word. Not all of your career focus has to do with business. Somebody that I respect tremendously, Rachel Kyte made a comment to me recently that resonates with me daily. Rachel is the Director of the Environment and Social Development Department at the of the IFC, the International Finance Corporation, the for-profit arm of the World Bank, a $ 24 billion environmental enterprise. She knows her stuff. I asked her what area of the world impacted her the most and she mentioned Cameroon. She went on to say that the gorilla population there had decreased from, and I believe the numbers were in the order of magnitude of 600 to 100 in the past, I believe she said 5 or so years. Her next statement has haunted me. Rachel said, “And the deterioration happened on our watch!” Those words have haunted me. These have been my most productive years, my years of greatest influence. The environmental problems happened during your parents and my watch. It is now up to you graduates to clean up the mess. We are here to help you. But we created this mess, and we need your to help fix it. Adopt the attitude that everyone needs shoes, and visualize the outcome that you want to manifest, because in the world of the environment everyone and every species does need shoes. Look at your actions through both a microscope and telescope. Have the courage to advocate a position. Then, demonstrate greater courage to modify your position after thoughtful reasoned arguments. I hope you always have more dreams then memories. The one place you never want to find yourself is when you have more memories then dreams. Keep an eye on that ratio as well. And a final personal comment regarding time: Never be late for a meeting! Bren graduates are prepared to be leaders in the world, best of breed. Enjoy the journey. I look forward to reading your story. And thank you for having me here today.
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