December 11, 2005
What I Wished I Had Learned in Business School
Remarks by Scott McClelland, President of H.E.B. Houston, at
the undergraduate commencement exercise for BBA candidates
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I've stewed for weeks about what to talk to you about today.
Right now, I am the only thing standing between you and the rest
of your life—or at least a nice lunch with your parents after
graduation. And I have just a few minutes to try and say
something meaningful that will inspire and propel you into your
future. That’s a challenging task.
It’s now been 25 years since I graduated from college, and as I
reflect on it, I've come to realize that since I was where you
are today, I’ve never had to apply anything I learned in
calculus since I sold back my text book. As time has worn on I'm
a little hazy about where Prussia was, why Hannibal rode an
elephant and why Attila got up every day on the wrong side of
the bed. There’s a lot of stuff that I once memorized to pass a
test that I just haven’t needed to put to use since I graduated.
Now I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news as I realize that
today marks the culmination of a 17 year- or longer journey.
But it may be a little disheartening to have your keynote speaker stand up here and tell you that
some of what you’ve spent countless hours learning may not
matter.
The reality is that the college experience develops an essential
capacity for expanded thought and one of the most significant
benefits you get from graduating from college is the experience
you’ve had getting to graduation versus the tests that you’ve
taken. What’s been significant is the “you” that you’ve become,
inclusive of all you’ve learned that will lead you throughout
your life.
Now in addition to what you’ve learned here at UT, your future
success is dependent on all the things you need to know but were
never taught in college. So I thought I would share with you a
few of the things I wish I had learned in school—the things that would have made
things easier for me along the way if someone had told me about
them earlier.
First, I wish that someone had told me earlier in life not to be
afraid to fail.
Now, you’ve just spent a lot of time working hard NOT to fail so
this may seem a little counter intuitive. The fact is that at
some time over the course of your life, you are going to fail, and
frequently, you’ll fail miserably.
Often we don’t get things right the first time we try them.
Today
H-E-B, the company I lead in Houston, has 325 stores and is the
largest independent supermarket retailer in the United States.
We opened our first store in Kerrville, Texas 100 years
ago, but then the next five stores that were opened failed.
Thomas Edison tried 9,000 times before he got the light bulb
right. Colonel Sanders was told "no" more than 1,000 times before he
ever sold his first piece of chicken.
In life there’s a big difference in playing to win versus
playing not to lose. It has amazed me how many people choose to
play small because they are terrified of failure. It was Henry
Ford who said, "Failure is only an opportunity to begin again
more intelligently."
It hurts when you fall down—even when you’re 40 years old.
Yet,
you learn a lot about yourself when faced with failure. When you
get knocked down personally or professionally you’ve ultimately
got three choices:
1. quit
2. pout
3. dust yourself off and get back into play
Frankly, the first two aren’t particularly productive. I
wish someone had told me earlier not to obsess about my failures
and to view failing as an opportunity to change up my approach.
Second, ultimately, you have the final say in how you live your
life—no one else. Only you know what you want and only you
will be unhappy if you don’t get it. So, have a plan about how
you want to live your life.
I've come to realize that the two things in life we have to work
with are time and you. Any way you slice it, how you choose to
spend your time will dictate what you accomplish or don’t
accomplish; how much enjoyment you’ll have or how fulfilled
you’ll be. When I was your age I thought I knew all about time,
but I had to throw a lot of life away before I truly got this.
You see, it is within time that creation, action and outcomes
occur.
We all WANT to live full, enriched lives yet I’ve always
wondered why is it that some people pack so much more living
into life? Why do some people change the world while others sit
in their recliner in their boxer shorts watching The Jerry
Springer Show. In reality we all have a finite number of
heartbeats in our life and ultimately its US that decides what
we're going to do with them.
There was a wonderful cover story about Mack Brown in Sports
Illustrated two weeks ago. In it, Mack says (and I quote), "I was
too hard on my players and too hard on myself. For whatever
reason, I've always had this obsession with being perfect. I
wanted to win every game. I wanted to please everybody. And
that’s a pretty miserable existence." Mack was so consumed with
what everyone else thought that it dominated him. If you are
living your life for everyone else, you end up being a pack mule
for others and you lose sight of YOU. And a pack mule is simply
a beast of burden that carries stuff around for others.
Too often we focus on what we're doing as opposed to who we're
being. Now you’re probably sitting out there thinking, "Look,
I'm a business major, not a philosophy major," and the
distinction between what I want to do and who I want to be
sounds like semantics. So bear with me. I promise—there’s some
meat here.
The way life works for most of us is that we graduate, go to
work, get married, buy a house, try to move ahead, have kids,
work some more and eventually retire. It’s the life template.
Many people, regardless of their pay, live life aimlessly from
paycheck to paycheck, only to arrive at age 65 and wonder why
they didn’t accomplish more. And for others, the best they do is
to set some sort of goals about what they want to
accomplish—typically only around their profession and some job
or level they aspire to. As we do this we often lose sight of
who the complete person each of us is. You see, we aren’t just
one dimensional. As human beings, we have many different facets
to who we are and many different roles that we play:
• son/daughter
• friend
• humanitarian
• athlete
• spiritualist
That's in addition to employee. And if you don’t think about the
“holistic” you, the total you; if you don’t have a vision for
yourself, you lose out.
If I gave you $20 million to invest, my guess is that you’d do a
little due diligence before you decided what to do with the
money. You’d spend time getting details, exploring opportunities
and evaluating risk. But, generally, we never do this for
ourselves. But aren’t you more important than any monetary
investment?
Who you want to “be” deals with HOW you want to live your total
life and the kind of personal growth you are committed to. Have
you ever thought about who you are relative to:
• the kind of friend you want to be
• the type of relationship you want with your family
• your physical well being
• the spiritual you
• the type of people you choose to spend time with
We tend to never think about this, and as a result, we end up
where life takes us instead of guiding where we want life to go.
And we get bogged down by what others demand from us. In reality
though, everything in life is a choice. A choice you make.
By thinking about who you want to be, it can provide you with a
framework for life’s decisions and keep you on track for where
you want to go.
For instance, when I was 16, I took $3 out of my dad’s wallet.
What I didn’t know was that he counted his money every day. He
asked me if he could borrow a couple of bucks from me and when I
“lent” him back his money, I was busted and I decided right then
that I was going to be a person who never had to have my
integrity called into question. If you’re a person who says that
honesty is important and you go into a store and the clerk gives
you back too much change, do you call it to her attention or do
you let her bite it? It’s a question of who you are.
Or, have you met someone who talks incessantly about wanting to
lose weight? These people typically drift from one diet to
another all the while lamenting that they are overweight and
want to take two inches off their waist. The fact of the matter is that
until they start from a place of “I am a thin person” and begin
to live from that, they’ll always be in a position of wanting to
lose weight. But by “being” a thin person, you begin to make
decisions in support of who you say you are.
The same story could be told about who you choose to be (and the
commitment you choose to be) around being physically fit,
spiritually engaged, philanthropic or well read. This isn’t
about making mutually exclusive choices. Rather, it is about
finding a way to channel all of your greatness into having your
life be as full as you want it to be. I'm amazed by peoples’
personal capacity, but what you accomplish in life comes down to
a choice you make about how to spend your time.
Time and you. Each of us leaves some kind of legacy—some larger
than others. It’s never too early to begin to think about what
people will remember you for.
Finally, live generously.
Contrary to what most of us think, the world does not solely
revolve around us. Each of us can make a difference in the lives
of others and often we underestimate how much of an impact one
person can have. Someone previously has blazed the trail for all
of us.
There was a movie that came out a few years ago starring Kevin
Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joe Ozment called “Pay It Forward.”
If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. It’s a movie that
tells a story of a kid who does a good deed for three people
with the only obligation being to “pay the deed forward” to
three additional people. Three becomes nine. Nine becomes 27, and
so on, and so forth. It is the original multi-level marketing
program for making the world a better place to live.
We can each be a link in a “pay it forward” chain. And, frankly,
we need to think about this not so much as a responsibility but
as a right.
In Houston where I live, 55 percent of the households earn less than
$50,000, and it is the only segment of the population that is
growing. It’s indicative of the rest of the U.S. Many people
are poor. People are sick. People are lonely. People need
education. Even if you can't give money, you can give your time.
Someone has stepped up and been there for us or someone we
know.
Thomas Watson said, “Really big people are, above everything
else, courteous, considerate and generous—not just to some
people in some circumstances—but to everyone all the time."
My wife’s grandmother is a 105-year-old Greek woman and has
lived with us for the last 20 years. She always says to us, “do
good things and they will come back to you.” I really think
she’s right because in the times that I’ve given of myself to
others, I walk away feeling like I’ve received a gift myself.
A movement starts with a single person. We have the power to
leave the world a better place.
It’s a big world out there and it’s an exciting place. There is
a lot of room for each of you to make your mark in it. Our state
needs great leaders and so does our country. You follow an
impressive group of McCombs graduates who have set a high bar
for you to follow.
I know you are up to the task, and I wish you the best of luck.
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
