Members of the MBA and Doctoral Classes of 2025; esteemed Alumni Achievement Award recipients; families, friends and loved ones; faculty and staff of Harvard Business School: Welcome.
I am delighted to be with you on this joyous day. I speak on behalf of the entire HBS community when I say to our graduating students and Alumni Achievement Award recipients: Congratulations and well done!
I know how special today is to you, because I have seen your excitement building these last few days—as you show your family around campus, try out your regalia and maybe snap a photo or two at key landmarks on campus, and reminisce with one another as you prepare for what is next. I know the pride and joy all of you feel. As I look out over Baker Lawn it is a truly awe-inspiring sight and I am honored to be sharing in this celebration with you.
So, let’s begin.
To our graduating students: Now would be the perfect time to thank the many people who have supported you and made you who you are today. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives and partners and children, classmates and friends: They had your back. From where they are sitting, they still do! So please, stand up and turn around. Take a moment now to show everyone gathered here today how much their love mattered to you, and how much they mean to you. Please join me in a heartfelt round of applause.
I’ve had the privilege of watching a number of classes walk across this stage to receive their diplomas. Each is truly memorable—distinguished by some special aspect of their time on campus.
The Class of 2025 has been at the School during a period marked by extraordinary unrest and upheaval—from the turmoil at colleges and universities throughout the US following October 7, 2023, to the recent federal actions that challenge Harvard’s future.
Across the University and here at HBS, significant efforts have been made to acknowledge real shortcomings and to take accountability for—and correct—mistakes we have made. This has not been easy. I will always be deeply grateful for how you worked with us in a spirit of partnership to preserve the ties that bind our community together.
In the last month, the University has filed lawsuits against the federal government defending its academic freedom and its right to enroll foreign students. I believe it is vital for Harvard to prevail.
At Harvard Business School, our mission is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. This requires us to be open to the world and open-minded. Academic freedom, deliberation, debate, and discussion are core principles in the search for truth, or Veritas. They are also the key to innovation, a bedrock for building a better world.
Additionally, we simply cannot fulfill our mission without our international students—students who add immensely to our community and our classrooms. The experience, knowledge, and insights international students bring to case discussions enable all students, from the US and around the globe, to develop the knowledge, judgment, and skills that are needed to lead in a rapidly changing world. We are a much stronger institution and educate better leaders because of them... because of you.
Yet even as you faced challenges during your time at HBS, I am incredibly thankful that you helped us move forward with strategic priorities, including leveraging digital technologies and Generative AI tools to enhance teaching and learning. You stand on the cusp of what most acknowledge will be no less significant than the industrial revolution: a time when AI and machine learning will transform every aspect of our lives, from learning to how work gets done.
Today I’d like to offer some thoughts on how you approach both the opportunities and the challenges you’ll face as you begin your next chapters in your careers. Harvard Business School is itself amid its own transformation, so much of what I have to say comes from personal experiences and observations.
My thoughts focus on three qualities we should all seek to embody: curiosity, adaptability, and resilience.
First, curiosity. Curiosity is key to understanding the world around us. Curiosity keeps your mind active, impels you to learn new things, prompts you to do old things in new ways, prods you to ask questions others don’t think to ask, encourages you to challenge assumptions, and inspires you to seek out people with whom you disagree. If you stay curious, you will experience learning in every interaction and in every setting.
So how might you develop curiosity?
First, don’t hesitate to step out of your comfort zone and take paths less traveled. If you do, you will be much better prepared for changes that come your way—especially those you did not see coming. You can do this by broadening your knowledge and skills so you can draw on new information. It is easier to learn about AI agents and its impact on humanity and society if you already have some knowledge about GenAI. Similarly, you might think about applying knowledge from one area to another. For example, what could you learn from the service at Disney World to improve a retail bank’s operations?
Second, ask questions and learn to be comfortable with ambiguity. The range of answers you might get to your questions will help you appreciate different viewpoints—often yielding unexpected insights and giving you a better perspective about the future.
But beyond personal benefits, curiosity is a key leadership skill. The world is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. The pace of change is fast. Curiosity helps you think about and process what is happening rather than be overwhelmed by it; embrace change rather than wish it away; lean into challenges rather than fear them; and envision new opportunities and what is possible, rather than get swept up in constraints.
The best leaders of tomorrow will be curious learners. When things that worked well in the past don’t work now, they ask why. Their curiosity leads them to think about what they might do differently and how they might experiment and learn. They seek to understand what is happening while experiencing joy from the process of discovery. As my colleague Mike Tushman and his co-author Charles O’Reilly have written extensively about, they build organizations that encourage exploration. Some companies like Google, in fact, carve out time for employees to nurture their curiosity. Encouraging curiosity creates excitement and energy in organizations and teams.
Steve Jobs famously described curiosity as, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Jobs’ curiosity led him to imagine how advances in chip technology might enable personal computing, Michael Bloomberg’s curiosity about data and information revolutionized the way financial data is disseminated and used.
I hope that, for you, curiosity continues throughout your professional lives. I hope you are the type of person who’s excited by change, who enjoys collecting knowledge, who thrives on ambiguity, and who never stops asking questions.
Second, adaptability. While curiosity will help you embrace changes in your environment, your ability to react and respond to those changes requires adaptability. Charles Darwin’s work reminds us that the species most likely to survive are not necessarily the strongest or the most intelligent, but rather the most adaptable. The same is true of organizations in a rapidly changing world. Organizations will need to be agile and nimble to keep up with change.
No matter where your career takes you or what kind of organization you lead, you’ll need the ability to react, regroup, change your plan, ask hard questions, find new answers, and try another approach. As a leader, you will need to develop adaptive strategies so the organization is flexible and ready to recalibrate. At a recent HBS event, Arvind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine and chatbot company, said that his strategic planning horizon is just three months! Today, it seems, it simply is not possible to have a plan for a year or longer and just stick to it.
Adaptive organizations challenge the status quo, test new ideas, gather feedback, and learn. They manage conflict and team dynamics, create a vision for change, and a process to achieve it. The adaptive skills needed are very different from the finely tuned operational skills in most organizations. So, in many cases, it means reskilling the workforce or hiring new people. None of this is easy, but it is also why adaptive organizations survive and thrive. Whether one thinks of Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Samsung, or Toyota, the ability of these organizations to adapt is key to the long-term success they have enjoyed.
Why is it difficult for organizations to adapt and change? Besides the bias to maintain the status quo, organizations—particularly successful ones—do not see the cost of not adapting. Many people think about adaptability reactively: the ability to be responsive to a change in the environment. An example of this would be how quickly a traditional automobile manufacturer can respond to the introduction of electric vehicles. But I would encourage you to think about a different kind of adaptability: the proactive vision to anticipate changes before they happen, and the courage to act on that vision quickly.
Here, I might highlight as an example how Sal Khan of Khan Academy was among the first to see how digital technologies and AI might transform education. The first kind of adaptability comes out of necessity but can sometimes be too late. The second kind of adaptability creates greater opportunity but requires skilled leadership to execute. I would urge you to grow into this second kind of leader.
Third, resiliency. Resiliency is the ability to cope with failure. Some call it perseverance or grit.
The best way to navigate a volatile and uncertain world is to be curious and adaptable. Yet, things will not always go your way. What you do when that happens will define your career.
To quote Winston Churchill:
Success is not final, and failure is not fatal
It is the courage to continue that counts
Resilience will allow you to aim high, act boldly, and build the resolve to persevere when you fail. Of all the attributes I admire in leaders and entrepreneurs, resilience is very high on the list.
How can you cultivate resilience? I have two pieces of advice.
The first is to take the positives from a failed experience. Inside every failure is an opportunity to learn. As our Class Day speaker John Rice described: own your setbacks and refocus your efforts. Get back up and try again. Failure is a necessary part of the long journey toward success because you learn more from failure than from success.
Second, think about your broader purpose. Events will not always work out as you wish. That fact should in no way diminish the broader purpose of your life and career. Remind yourself about how the education you have been fortunate enough to receive enables you to dream big so you can leave the world in a better place than you found it. This is your purpose and your responsibility to society.
David Brooks, The New York Times columnist, offers this advice:
The people we admire for being resilient are not hard; they are ardent. They have a fervent commitment to some cause, some ideal, or some relationship. That higher yearning enables them to withstand setbacks, pain, and betrayal.
My own experiences in developing new courses in innovation and machine learning were challenging. But I learned from those experiences because I wanted to get it right for my students.
Many of the buildings around campus are a testament to the resiliency and spirit of the individuals after whom they are named.
Michael Bloomberg, of Baker Library | Bloomberg Center, created a revolutionary financial information business and served as the visionary mayor of New York. You may not know that earlier in his career, he was fired from his first big job at Salomon Brothers. He later wrote, “Getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. It opened the door to starting my own company, which I never would have done otherwise.”
Seth Klarman, benefactor of Klarman Hall, is a legendary value investor. You may not know how often his contrarian streak leads him to appear out-of-step with the market. Seth advises us what it means to be a resilient investor: "What happens when you are wrong is everything in investing. You must construct a portfolio to survive those times."
I know your time at Harvard Business School has prepared you to be curious, adaptable, and resilient. These are core ideals of the School.
The case method encourages you to look at problems in new ways, probe more deeply, ask more questions, step out of your comfort zone, and envision new solutions. This is the very essence of curiosity.
As alumni, you will gain access to what we are calling the Alumni Curriculum, a platform that will allow you to continue engaging with our coursework as a lifelong learner. I hope that amid the pressures of careers, families, and busy lives, you will continue to be curious, and engage with new content, new ideas, and new cases.
You have learned to be adaptable and tolerate ambiguity, knowing there is no single right answer. You have learned from others whose position you do not agree with, and you have had the courage to change your mind. This is a precious gift. Always engage in constructive dialogue and don’t be afraid to change your mind.
And you have learned to be resilient. I know things have not always worked out as you wished, whether it was a grade you received on an exam, the personal challenges you faced, or the hurdles we faced together during the year. But you showed resilience. You never lost sight of the greater purpose of why you were here. You showed a commitment to learning and sustained our community.
The five recipients of this year’s alumni achievement award—Bonnie Cohen, Vittorio Colao, Debrah Farrington, Jeremy Grantham, and John Rice—are terrific examples of individuals who embrace curiosity, adaptability, and resilience. As I read out their citations in just a moment, I encourage you to think about how their curiosity, adaptability, and resilience led them to have fantastic careers in the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors.
So Be Curious, Be Adaptable, Be Resilient, but remember that organizations can exemplify these characteristics, too. In this challenging time, we, at HBS, are leading with curiosity about what we can do better, adapting to the major shifts and uncertainty we are facing, and being resilient in pursuit of our mission. As you think about the leadership journeys ahead of you, I’d urge you to reflect on what you can do as a leader to infuse these qualities into the teams and organization you’ll be working to shape.
Let me end my remarks by returning to what I said when I first welcomed you to campus in Fall 2023. I hope you will never lose sight of the basics:
Act with integrity, empathy, and humility.
Treat those who you lead with respect.
Don’t forget to hold the door open for others.
Take every opportunity to create purpose and meaning—in your life, and for others.
And as Chris Hood reminded us so eloquently yesterday, spend time in reflection even as you live life to the fullest.
I know I speak on behalf of our entire community when I say how proud we are of you, and what high hopes we have for you. We offer you congratulations and our very best wishes. Thank you very much.