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Human Resources
GSB Report: John Gardner's Speech

Part 1: Speech by John W. Gardner

Stanford Graduate School of Business 1989 Reunion Event
"I once wrote a book called Self-Renewal that deals with the decay and renewal of
societies, organizations and individuals. I explored the question of why
civilizations die and how they sometimes renew themselves, and the puzzle of why
some men and women go to seed while others remain vital all of their lives. It's the
latter question that I shall deal with this morning. I know that you as an individual
are not going to seed. But the person seated on your right may be in fairly serious
danger.
Several years ago, I read a splendid article on barnacles. I don't want to give the
wrong impression of the focus of my reading interests. Sometimes weeks go by
without my reading about barnacles, much less remembering what I read. But this
article had an unforgettable opening paragraph. "The barnacle" the author
explained "is confronted with an existential decision about where it's going to live.
Once it decides, it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock." For
a good many of us, it comes to that.

We've all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with
responsible positions, who seem to run out of steam before they reach life's
halfway mark.
One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented
them with tougher problems than they could solve. It happens. Perhaps something
inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their pride. Perhaps they were
pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life,
sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilized the victim.
I'm not talking about people who fail to get to the top in achievement. We can't all
get to the top, and that isn't the point of life anyway. I'm talking about people who
have stopped learning or growing or trying. Perhaps they feel defeated, maybe
somewhat sour and cynical, maybe sore that they haven't gotten further. Many of
them are just plodding along, going through the motions. I don't deride that. Life is
hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage. But I do worry
about men and women functioning far bellow the level of their potential.
We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of work
are more bored than they could care to admit, and more stale than they know.
When someone asked Pope John XXIII how many people worked in the Vatican
he said "Oh, about half." John XIII was a Pope who liked to shake things up, so
perhaps that was more of a prod than a statistic. But speaking seriously, boredom
is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations. Logan Pearsall Smith said that
boredom can rise to the level of a mystical experience, and if that's true I know
some middle level executives who are among the great mystics of all time.
We can't write off the danger of staleness, complacency, growing rigidity,
imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions.
Look around you. How many people whom you know well are already trapped in
fixed attitudes and habit? A famous French writer said "There are people whose
clocks stop at a certain point in their lives." I could without any trouble name a
half dozen national figures resident in Washington, D.C., whom you would
recognize, and could tell you roughly the year their clock stopped.
My observations over a lifetime convince me that most people enjoy learning and
growing. And many are clearly troubled by the self-assessments of midcareer.
Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching, and I've watched a lot of
midcareer people.
Such self-assessments are no great problem when you're young and moving up.
The drama of your own rise is enough. But when you reach middle age, when your
energies aren't what they used to be, when it no longer occurs to you to check the
remaining acreage on Mount Rushmore, then you begin to wonder what it all
added up to -- you begin to look for the figure in the carpet of your life. I have
some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don't be too hard on
yourself. Look ahead. Someone said that "life is the art of drawing without an
eraser." And above all don't imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of
chapters. The story is still being written.
If we are conscious of the danger of going to seed, we can resort to countervailing
measures - at almost any age. You don't need to run down like an unwound clock.
And if your clock is unwound, you can wind it up again. You can stay alive in
every sense of the word until you fail physically.
The individual intent on self-renewal will have to deal with ghosts of the past - the
memory of earlier failures, the remnants of childhood dramas and rebellions,
accumulated grievances and resentments that have long outlived their cause.
Sometimes people cling to the ghosts with something almost approaching pleasure
- but the hampering effect on growth is inescapable. As Jim Whitaker, who
climbed Mount Everest, said "You never conquer the mountain. You only conquer
yourself."
The more I see of human lives, the more I believe the business of growing up is
much longer drawn out than we pretend. If we achieve it in our 30s, even our 40s,
we're doing well. To those of you who are parents of teenagers, I can only say
"Sorry about that."
There's a myth that learning is for young people. But as the proverb says, "It's
what you learn after you know it all that counts." The middle years are great, great
learning years. Most of you in this room are just coming into what can be your
best learning years.
Count everything as a learning experience. Learn from your failures. Learn from
your successes. When you hit a spell of trouble, ask "What is it trying to teach
me?"

Part 2: Speech by John W. Gardner

Stanford Graduate School of Business 1989 Reunion Event
The lessons aren't always happy ones, but they keep coming. We learn from our
jobs. We learn from our friends and families. We learn by accepting the
commitments of life, by playing the roles that life hands us (not necessarily the
roles we would have chosen), by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by
bearing with the things we can't change, by taking risks.
The things you learn in maturity are not simple things such as acquiring
information and skills. That's for kids. You learn not to engage in self-destructive
behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You lean to manage your
tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment
are among the most toxic of drugs. You learn that the world loves talent but pays
off on character.You learn that most people are neither for you nor against you,
they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how much you strive
to please, there are some people in this world who are not going to love you, a
lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.
You can even be unaffected - a quality that often takes years to acquire. You can
achieve the simplicity that lies beyond sophistication.
Those are things that are hard to learn early in life. As a rule you have to have
picked up some mileage and some dents in your fenders before you understand. As
Norman Douglas said "There are some things you can't learn from others. You
have to pass through the fire."
Of course failures are a part of the story too. Everyone fails. Joe Louis said
"Everyone has to figure to get beat some time." The question isn't did you fail but
did you pick yourself up and move ahead?
There is one other little question: Did you collaborate in your own defeat? A lot of
people do. Learn not to.
One of the enemies of sound, lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception
we have of the kind of tangible, concrete goal toward which all of our efforts
should drive us. We want to believe that there is a point at which we can feel that
we have arrived. We want a scoring system that tells us when we can count
ourselves successful.
So you scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal.
When you get to the top you stand up and look around and chances are you feel a
little empty. Maybe more than a little empty. You wonder whether you climbed
the wrong mountain.
But life isn't a mountain. It doesn't have a summit. Nor is it - as some suppose - a
riddle that has an answer. Nor a game that has a final score.
Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-
discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities
and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just
performance gifts but the full range of one's capacities for learning, sensing,
wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.
Perhaps you imagine that by age 45 or 55 you have explored those potentialities
pretty fully. Don't kid yourself!
The thing we have to understand is that the potentialities you actually develop to
the full come out as the result of a lifelong interplay between you and your
environment. Emergencies sometimes lead people to perform remarkable and
heroic tasks they wouldn't have guessed they were capable of. Life pulls things out
of you. So if you want to find out what's in you, expose yourself to unaccustomed
challenges.
I estimate that over your lifetime, even highly selected and privileged individuals
such as yourselves will make use of no more than half of the talent and energy that
is in you.
You know about some of those gifts that you have left undeveloped. Would you
believe that you have gifts and possibilities you don't even know about? It's true.
There are barriers that we are just beginning to understand. We are just beginning
to see that the individual's potentialities may be blighted by early discouragement,
by an early environment that diminishes the sense of self-worth, by excessive
pressures for conformity, by a lack of opportunities to grow. And we are just
beginning to recognize how even those who have had every advantage and
opportunity unconsciously put a ceiling on their own growth, underestimate their
potentialities or hide from the risk that growth involves.
There's something I know about you that you may or may not know about
yourself. You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been
tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength that has ever been
tested, more to give than you have ever given.
Now I've discussed renewal at some length, but it isn't possible to talk about
renewal without touching on the subject of motivation. Someone defined horse
sense as the good judgment horses have that prevents them from betting on people.
But we have to bet on people - and I have my bets more often on high motivation
than on any other quality except judgment. There is no perfection of techniques
that will substitute for the lift of spirit and heightened performance that comes
from strong motivation. The world is moved by highly motivated people, by
enthusiasts, by men and women who want something very much or believe very
much.
I'm not talking about anything as narrow as ambition. After all, ambition
eventually wears out and probably should. But you can keep your zest until the
day you die. If I may offer you a simple maxim, "Be interested." Everyone wants
to be interesting - but the vitalizing thing is to be interested.
Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things. Care. Risk failure. Reach out.
The nature of one's personal commitments is a powerful element in renewal, so let
me say a word on that subject.
I once lived in a house where I could look out a window as I worked at my desk
and observe a small herd of cattle browsing in a neighboring field. And I was
struck with a thought that must have occurred to the earliest herdsmen tens of
thousands of years ago. You never get the impression that a cow is about to have a
nervous breakdown -- or puzzling about the meaning of life.
Humans have never mastered that kind of complacency. We are worriers and
puzzlers, and we want meaning in our lives. I'm not speaking idealistically; I'm
stating a plainly observable fact about men and women. As Robert Louis
Stevenson said, "Old or young, we're on our last cruise." We want it to mean
something.
For many this life is a vale of tears; for no one is it free of pain. Every heart hath
its own ache, as the saying goes. But we are so designed that we can cope with it if
we can live in some context of meaning. Given that powerful help, we can draw on
the deep springs of the human spirit to see our suffering in the framework of all
human suffering, to accept the gifts of life with thanks and to endure life's
indignities with dignity.
In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent
community and traditionally-prescribed patterns of culture. On being born into the
society you were heir to a whole warehouse full of meanings. Today you can't
count on any such heritage. You have to build meaning into your life, and you
build it through your commitments - whether to your religion, to an ethical order
as you conceived it, to your life's work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans.
Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn't handed out free any
more - not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what
you've committed yourself to.
It may just mean doing a better job at whatever you're doing. There are men and
women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are. They
have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It matters very little
whether they're behind the wheel of a truck or running a country store or binging
up a family.
I must pause to say a word about my statement "There are men and women who
make the world better just by being the kind of people they are." I first wrote the
sentence some years ago and it has been widely quoted. One day I was looking
through a mail-order gift catalogue and it included some small ornamental bronze
plaques with brief sayings on them, and one of the sayings was the one I just read
to you, with my name as author. Well I was so overcome by the idea of a sentence
of mine being cast in bronze that I ordered it, but then couldn't figure out what in
the world to do with it. About four years ago, I finally sent it to my dear friends
Ernie and Kitty Arbuckle, whom most of you knew.
We tend to think of youth and the active middle years as the years of commitment.
As you get a little older, you're told you've earned the right to think about yourself.
But that's a deadly prescription. People of every age need commitments beyond
the self, need the meaning that commitments provide. Self-preoccupation is a
prison, as every self-absorbed person finally knows. Commitments to larger
purposes can get you out of prison.
Another significant ingredient in motivation is one's attitude toward the future.
Optimism is unfashionable today, particularly among intellectuals. Everyone
makes fun of it. Someone said "Pessimists got that way by financing optimists."
But I am not pessimistic and I advise you not to be. As the fellow said, "I 'd be a
pessimists but it would never work.
I can tell you that for renewal, a tough-minded optimism is best. The future is not
shaped by people who don't really believe in the future. Men and women of
vitality have always been prepared to bet their futures, even their lives, on ventures
of unknown outcome. If they had all looked before they leaped, we would still be
crouched in caves sketching animal pictures on the wall.
But I did say tough-minded optimism. High hopes that are dashed by the first
failure are precisely what we don't need. We have to believe in ourselves, but we
mustn't suppose that the path will be easy. It's tough. Life is painful, and rain falls
on the just, and Mr. Churchill was not being a pessimist when he said "I have
nothing to offer, but blood, toil, tears and sweat." He had a great deal more to
offer, but as a good leader he was saying its isn't going to be easy, and he was also
saying something that all great leaders say constantly - that failure is simply a
reason to strengthen resolve.
We cannot dream of a Utopia in which all arrangements are ideal and everyone is
flawless. Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle is fought and re-
fought. Life is tumultuous - an endless losing and regaining of balance, a
continuous struggle, never an assured victory. You may wonder if such a struggle -
endless and of uncertain outcome - isn't more than humans can bear. All of history
suggests that the human spirit is well fitted to cope with just that kind of the world.
I said earlier that life has a lot of chapters. Let me offer some examples. In a piece
I wrote for Reader's Digest not long ago I gave what seemed to me a particularly
interesting true example of renewal. The man in question was 53 years old. Most
of his adult life had been a losing struggle against debt and misfortune. In military
service he received a battlefield injury that denied him the use of his left arm. And
he was seized and held in captivity for five years. Later he held two government
jobs, succeeding at neither. At 53, he was in prison - and not for the first time.
There in prison, he decided to write a book, driven by Heaven knows what motive
- boredom, the hope of gain, emotional release, creative impulse, who can say?
And the book turned out to be one of the greatest ever written, a book that has
enthralled the world for over 350 years. The prisoner was Cervantes; the book Don
Quixote.
I've already mentioned Pope John XXIII, a serious man who found a lot to laugh
about. The son of peasant farmers, he once said "In Italy there are three roads to
poverty - drinking, gambling and farming. My family chose the slowest of the
three." He was 76 years old when he was elected Pope. Through a lifetime in the
bureaucracy, the spark of spirit and imagination had remained undimmed, and
when he reached the top he launched the most vigorous renewal that the Church
has known in this century.
Still another example is Winston Churchill. At age 25, as a correspondent in the
Boer War he became a prisoner of war and his dramatic escape made him a
national hero. Elected to Parliament at 26, he performed brilliantly, held high
cabinet posts with distinction and at 37 became First Lord of the Admiralty. Then
he was discredited, unjustly, I believe, by the Dardanelles expedition - the defeat
at Gallipoli - and lost his admiralty post. There followed 24 years of ups and
downs. All too often the verdict on him was "brilliant but erratic ... not steady, not
dependable." He had only himself to blame. A friend described him as a man who
jaywalked through life. He was 66 before his moment of flowering came.
Someone said "It's all right to be a late bloomer if you don't miss the flower
show." Churchill didn't miss it.
Well, I won't give you any more examples. From those I've given I hope it's clear
to you that the door of opportunity doesn't really close as long as you're reasonably
healthy. You just don't know what's ahead of you. You may - as Churchill did -
become the great leader of your country in time of crisis. You may - as Cervantes
did - go to jail and write a novel. You may become Pope.
Or if none of those outcomes appeal to you, remember the bronze plaque I sent to
Ernie and Kitty Arbuckle. "Some men and women make the world better just by
being the kind of people they are." To be that kind of person would be worth all
the years of living and learning."
Copyright John W. Gardner and Stanford Graduate School of Business