You
Control Your Own Destiny
BBA Fall Commencement Address
December 10, 2006
Stephan A. James,
Former Chief Operating Officer
Accenture
It is a pleasure to be with you today, and I want to congratulate you on
achieving this important milestone. This morning is the end of a
challenging and hopefully satisfying experience at the McCombs School.
Now you will begin a journey where you will not only have fun, but you
will make money doing it. You will continue to learn but at an
accelerated pace. Learning never ends, but you will find as I did, that
it is a lot easier to learn when you are getting paid!
What UT and the McCombs School of Business Means
You will be awarded a BBA degree from the McCombs School today. I received mine over 35 years ago and loved every minute of it. When you look back on today you will be very proud that this school is on your resume. The school’s reputation, which is one of the best in the U.S., continues to expand and being a graduate will open doors for you in the future.
Your degree from here is an asset and you should nurture that asset by staying close to the school and your professors, and maintaining a network of friends you made here. I can assure you that maintaining an association with the school will pay significant dividends for you over time.
You are in Total Control of Your Business Career
I’ve had a lot of success and a few failures in my career and learned several lessons along the way. The comments I have for you today are based on my experiences, and I hope you can take advantage of them as you embark on your journey. My primary message is that nothing stands in your way of achieving business success and enjoyment except you.
You say, “Okay, I’ll listen to you since you have been around longer than me! But there are a lot of things that happened that I cannot control and these can easily derail my career.” It’s true that there a lot of uncontrollable events that will affect you, but in my experience, those things really don’t matter in achieving success. Let me take you back over the last few decades and we will see that there were literally dozens of uncontrollable events that could derail a person’s career aspirations. Some of the big ones include:
1) The Vietnam War and the uncertainty it caused. 2) The energy crisis in the 70s and early 80s that were very disruptive to the economies of the world. 3) The stagnation of the stock markets, beginning in 1969 and lasting over 15 years. During this time the economy was stagnate and not much wealth was created by anyone. 4) The inflation and interest rates climbed way over 12 percent, thereby choking off low cost funds for business initiatives in the 80s. 5) The deregulation of airlines, utilities and financial institutions, including the stock markets that caused major economic disruptions and many failed businesses during the transitions. 6) The significant growth in the Internet that changed the way people work and live. This was great for some people and potentially disastrous to others.
These major disruptions, good and bad, don’t even address the things that can affect your career most directly like a company’s business failure or dumb strategic and tactical business decisions made by company management that directly affect a persons’ career.
Through all of this during my career, there have been many people that have effectively managed themselves and are considered very successful today.
So, what did these successful people do to manage through all of the turbulent events? Their success came from how they prepared themselves personally to deal with the opportunities and challenges. The determinate of their success was not the situation they were lucky enough to find themselves in, but it was the positive attitude and personal skills they developed, traits that allowed them to be successful.
There are five traits of successful people I have learned that make a significant difference in achieving success in a business career. I’ll spend a little time on each…
Trait 1: Positive Attitude in Times of Adversity
A positive attitude to all aspects of your work is critical to personal success. One way to exhibit a positive attitude is to look at every challenge that affects you or your company as an opportunity to change direction or leap forward. Some people become depressed and freeze when challenged. However, successful people see challenges as an opportunity to improve or out-flank the competition. I
In my career at Accenture, we have been through three global recessions that each lasted three to five years. In each recession, Accenture invested in their people and as the recession ran its course, Accenture changed its business model and gained market share as a result of investments in the downturns.
As I look at the landscape for your future business career, I do not know all of the changing business paradigms that will confront you, but certainly one will be the expanding globalization of the world economy. Globalization, based on significant differences in labor and infrastructure costs, is a logical economic evolution. There are many aspects of this trend, but for sure there will be more viable non-U.S. companies who can compete effectively globally.
This is a threat to current global companies (and strong national companies), but it also can be an opportunity for these companies since more customers on all continents are becoming accustomed to high quality goods and services. Successful business leaders, including you, will embrace globalization in positive manner and attack it as an opportunity.
Trait 2: Hard Work and Flexibility
There are no free lunches! You will have mentors that will help you, but no one will give you success. It is earned through very hard work. Successful business people have a strong work ethic and do not have a sense of entitlement: entitled to the right assignment, promotion, or salary. They are self confident, but by in large, humble. They know they work hard to make their breaks and they know they have to be flexible to meet the demands of customers, bosses and shareholders. This is an accepted principle to people that have been in the workforce for awhile, but sometimes is a surprise to those entering the workforce for the first time.
Trait 3: Cherish Your Customers
There are two things very important about your customers or clients. The first is obvious—nothing good happens in your company or your career without sales. Successful business people tend to be good at understanding their customers and are effective in selling, whether it is products or, as importantly, your ideas. Some of you may not like to sell, but all of you will need to be comfortable with selling.
The second thing is more personal. Customers are your best source of improvement ideas for your company and for you, personally. I was very lucky in my career to have two leaders of my clients become my mentor. They provided insight from a buyer’s perspective on what I needed to do to be a better business leader.
I was trained early in my career to never mistreat a customer no matter how difficult they were. Once they are mistreated, they will never return as a customer and they will alienate many others against you and your company. I recommend you invest heavily in knowing your customers, not from just a research standpoint, but on a personal level. Cherishing them will pay huge dividends over your career.
Trait 4: Caring for Your Coworkers
The people you work with are important to your success.
My dad told me as I was looking for a job at graduation to select a job where I liked the people. His philosophy was that 70 percent of my job satisfaction, and therefore my potential for success would be as much due to the people I worked with as the type of work. To my amazement, this proved to be true.
So, working effectively with co-workers is very important. Teamwork is essential, and to me teamwork means making the other member of the team successful. In addition, you must deal with people with transparency, honesty and compassion. This not natural sometimes, especially in competitive environments, but it is absolutely key to being respected as a leader.
Trait 5: Effective Communication
One of the biggest surprises to me on entering the workforce was how communicating with others was important to my success. I thought all I needed to do was work hard and use good judgment and things would go well. You can be the smartest person in the world, but if you cannot listen to others and use written and verbal methods to communicate your ideas well, it will not matter. Early in my career I was told I would not be promoted because of my weak written communication skills. I actually took an English grammar course to improve and I was promoted the next year.
There is a lot of technique training available to improve personal communication. The only one I will mention here is often overlooked by people in business. I have found over time that the most effective communicators are those that are good listeners. Listening to others and understanding what they are really saying is a prerequisite to being a good communicator. If you listen and react to people, indicating that you heard them, they will respect you, and you will be able to work with them more effectively.
Conclusion
These are five traits, when mastered, allow you to take control of your career and manage it for success. You want to try and control your destiny and these lessons can help.
As I close, I want to tell you about a conversation between my dad and me as I was graduating. I told him one day while in college that I did not know what to do with my career. I didn’t perceive there were any new ideas in the world and I was concerned about whether I could find a job where there was growth in opportunity, I could make a lot of money and have fun doing it. At that time, the jet plane, TV, space travel, simple computing and other things were becoming commonplace. He said to me— “There would be a million ways to make a million dollars (that is when $1 million was a lot of money!) And all of it would be driven by new innovations. I doubted him, but he was right. I have seen a lot of change in almost everything in my career, most of it brought on by innovation.
The same opportunities for innovation exist for graduates today, and they are even more plentiful. There will always be innovations—you just need to be one of the people doing the innovating.
Good luck to you from this day forward, this is a great society we live in, and it provides a lot of opportunity. You have selected an exciting course of study that allows you to take advantage of opportunities. The last part of the equation is how you take control to personally manage your success. I know you will take control and I look forward to watching you achieve success.
For information on speaking events at McCombs, contact Public Affairs Representative Gayle Hight, 512-475-6423, gayle.hight@mccombs.utexas.edu.
