On painting one’s life picture

By Peter Yates

The degree being conferred on you today is one of the most valuable tickets available for the journey of professional life. Right now, this professional life is a blank canvas of opportunity with a few titles added today to the frame. I ask each of you: how will you paint your picture?

Twenty-five years ago this December, I completed my Commerce degree. Along the way to being given this honour to share in your graduation ceremony, I have found some brush strokes and techniques that have helped paint my life picture.

I must confess, however, that when it was announced on Thursday that the Company I run, Allco Equity Partners would potentially become the largest shareholder in Qantas, I felt like a 44 Gallon drum of paint had suddenly been used!

But to some more intricate techniques you may find useful.

Be guided by your values

First, I encourage you to organise your life around values rather than feelings. Let me explain this internal ordering system. If you organise your actions in response to a feeling, there is danger in responding to those feelings too often. For example, the feeling of hunger motivates you to eat, yet you may become overweight and suffer poor health. If, however, you order your life around values and one of these is good health, then by acting on this value – even though you might feel hungry – you will less likely be overweight.

This simple paradigm of deciding how to order one’s life plays out in so many ways, particularly where our society is experiencing so much change. Managing change is not a value. In facing change, fear or excitement are feelings. Will you let that feeling determine your action when you next confront change or uncertainty? By holding core values and determining your actions from those values, you will see more clearly the signposts to deal with change.

Learn to overcome failure

Second, learn what it really means to take risk – and what I’m about to say may challenge some of you.

Today’s graduates are some of the most intellectually gifted people in our community. You excelled at school and received an extraordinary TER. You worked your guts out to achieve your degree (party’s aside). You have spent your life learning how to capture the rewards of a known system – the system of education and the methods through which it rewards.

Your next step may well be to join another institution with a known rewards system – a research institute, an investment bank, or a consulting firm. And you will have a very fulfilling and exciting career. And it is very easy to feel comforted by the boundaries of that professional system partly because it feels like the education system, in which you have become comfortable and achieved so spectacularly. But it is not the same. And herein lies the rub.

I expect many of you have not yet experienced failure. Experiencing failure is to have committed to put your heart and soul into an activity that you really believed would do well; to have then shared your dream with friends and family; and to have benefited from the encouragement and support for that activity from people whose opinion you respect. You may have even boasted about how well your dream was unfolding. And then, wham, it fails.

This failure is not like others you have experienced – it is not a failure handed to you by an education system because you did not meet the requirements for the next reward level. You have failed in your own activity; your dream has been rejected. You have failed because of you, not any external system.

To experience failure is one of the most critical rites of passage, leading to the most important skill in life: getting over failure. Science graduates are probably more experienced in failure than most commerce graduates, because by definition the evidentiary process, which is attached to the process of discovery, requires you to learn to manage failure.

Learning to experience failure has two particular benefits. First, it encourages you to take risks. Australia and all the countries from which our international graduates are drawn require that we expand the pool of business people who are prepared to take a risk.

Second, we need people who are prepared to accept failure, as the necessary escape valve for a system that has gone wrong. The comfortable shift from the system of education and its rewards into a business system is a cloak that can occasionally mask a dysfunctional organisation. A common theme found in some of our most spectacular business disasters was built around the exploitation of the human fear of failure. It is not uncommon for an investment bank to cajole its employees into giving up a sensible work-life balance by using the line, ‘Well, if we don’t promote you it will be seen as a failure for you, as it will mean you were not good enough for our organisation.’ At Enron, the fear of not being seen as ‘successful’ within the company or the fear of losing out on the financial privileges of their bonus system drove undesired behaviours, which blew up the company.

The sooner you experience ‘getting over failure’, the better. It will give you the freedom to make wider choices and the ability to conduct yourself properly under challenging circumstances.

Many of you know that three weeks after I became the CEO of Publishing Broadcasting Limited (PBL), One.Tel, the telephone company partly owned by PBL, was put into administration. James Packer was confronted with a failure. Because of his position, the media blew the One.Tel issue out of all proportion. It took James almost two years to get over the experience of failure – that he recovered in such a short time, despite the pressure put on him by the Australian media, is a tribute to his strength of character. He has now gone on to achieve even greater things for PBL.

Ironically, the higher up you are on the totem pole, the harder it becomes to experience your first real failure. Successful people spend their life avoiding failure. Accordingly it often comes too late and they are too senior to cope.

Learn to communicate well

The third brushstroke I recommend you use in painting your life’s picture is communication. This, of course requires you to both listen and speak. I highly recommend equal parts.

The ability to communicate well is probably the determining factor for success between two similarly qualified people. Because if you cannot communicate well, how can you deploy human capital?

Human capital does not respond to a computer program or a baseball bat. It listens, interprets, seeks clarification and then moves. The better you communicate, the greater the prospect of efficient deployment of human capital. We all know a person who makes almost no sense when they communicate.

I had the privilege of undertaking my masters at Stanford University, where the art of communication is a one-semester course involving weekly sessions of sharing how you feel about another class member’s communication skills. It involves the study of what is known as expanding Chori’s Window. The Chori Window is the gap between what a person thinks they are communicating and what the rest of the world thinks they are hearing. Like right now. I am thinking about this speech and seeking to communicate some congratulations as well as share some life experiences. You are the rest of the world and only after this degree ceremony when I check in with one or two of you will I know whether you heard what I thought I said. The course is designed to open one’s own communication window.

Another approach to opening this window is what I call the Kerry Packer approach. One evening not long after I joined PBL, Kerry asked me about my Stanford experience and what I had learned most.

I described Chori’s Window to him and drew the Harvard two-by-two box to explain the theory in more detail. When I had finished he said, ‘Well, son, that’s interesting, but tell me what it cost to do your masters at Stanford?’

I replied, ‘About $150,000.’

He then asked me how many employees I had working at PBL. Including the part-time croupiers at crown, we had about 11,000. His response: ‘Well, son, I can’t afford the $1.6 billion to send them all to Stanford, so you’re just going to have learn to do something really well. Just learn to listen!’

The art of communicating in business is essential for deploying capital. It is even more important in the field of science. Many people in our community are concerned that science is not well communicated, particularly that we have limited exposure to the information we need to assist us make decisions on important issues of science. Issues such as stem cell research and climate change involve non-scientists making decisions about either scientific processes or public policy decisions based on scientific research they do not understand.

Science is more difficult to communicate because as an information genre it has some peculiar features. Unlike politics or sport, which are two other information genres, scientific stories do not have a beginning or an end. Among scientists, the debate is not about the outcome, but rather the evidentiary process. This makes for challenging newspaper copy. Additionally, the field is often so specialised that, unlike a media debate on a football match where the information ‘exchange’ can fill up a Sunday Age Sport section and therefore create knowledge, in science there are often so few people who can debate the topic that there is no actual information ‘exchange’. As a result, whilst facts have been exchanged, knowledge is not created. The Australian Science Media Centre, which I chair, was set up one year ago by the Australian media and science industries in response to the adverse impact this lack of science in media is having on our community. I encourage the science graduates to take it upon themselves to develop their communication skills, speak openly and please congratulate those scientists who are prepared to be quoted in the press.

Seek out those smarter than you

And finally, may I share with you one more technique for your life’s painting. When I am among a group of people working toward a goal or a decision, I always ask myself, ‘Am I the smartest person in this room?’ Because if the answer is yes, then I get out. For I believe that either I must be kidding myself and have completely lost the plot or else everyone is relying on me. I know that is not a wise thing to do.

As you go out into the world and paint on your life’s canvas, framed with the degree you are being conferred today, I encourage you to order you life starting with values rather than feelings. Look into yourself to realise the golden opportunity you are seeking resides within. It is not in any system – feel liberated to take risk and do it soon. Encourage the art of communication because it is essential for the deployment of human capital and the dissemination of scientific knowledge in our community.

As you make the most of your own life, acquiring further knowledge and wisdom, you will have a greater opportunity to help those that follow you. I can also say without hesitation that effort spent constructively and sensitively helping people less fortunate than yourselves will bring you great personal rewards.

When I completed my degree twenty-five years ago, I graduated in absentia. It is a great honour to be able to share in your graduation today. As you go forward, I hope you will share your life’s painting with me.

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An edited excerpt of his Occasional Address delivered at the graduation on 16 December 2006.