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This week Mark Zuckerberg spoke to the latest class of Harvard graduates, offering advice about the future and inspiration to grow on. Among his ideas was the notion that universal basic income (UBI), a standard base “salary” for each member of society that can help meet our basic needs regardless of the work we do, is worth exploring.
While the successfulness of such initiatives can be analyzed several different ways, Zuckerberg emphasized to graduates the need for metrics that go deeper than standard economic measures — metrics that can help foster innovation.
“We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful,” Zuckerberg told the Harvard graduates and their guests. “We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.”
UBI pilot programs will hopefully show strengths and benefits of different strategies, and data from Alaska can suggest how such programs can survive the test of time. As pilot programs succeed — and early results seem to indicate that they will — expect more experts to endorse UBI.
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Here are six commencement speeches with the takeaway you can use to become as inspired as a new graduate.
Will Ferrell admitted to students at the University of Southern California that he wasn’t confident when he was going after his dream of being an actor. “I would think to myself, ‘Oh well, I can always be a substitute schoolteacher,'” he said. “I was afraid.”
Ferrell later realized that fear is a natural part of growth. “You’re never not afraid. I’m still afraid. I was afraid to write this speech,” he joked.
Instead of being controlled by fears, do it anyway. “My fear of failure never approached in magnitude my fear of what if. What if I never tried at all?” he said.
“Never give up your dreams” is common advice for graduates, but Adam Grant, Wharton School management professor and coauthor of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, told students at Utah State University that sometimes quitting is a virtue.
“Grit doesn’t mean ‘keep doing the thing that’s failing,'” he said. “It means, ‘Define your dreams broadly enough that you can find new ways to pursue them when your first and second plans fail.'”
It’s easy to get attached to big ideas and labels, like “Republican,” “Democrat,” “feminist,” or “engineer,” Stephanie Ruhle, anchor of MSNBC Live, told graduating students from Lehigh University. “We use these labels to find our tribes, get comfortable, and stick with them, and it is suffocating,” she said.
That’s because today’s world often promotes sameness. “We live surrounded by people who sound like us, vote like us, spend like us,” Ruhle said. “We get only the news we want to. And then scream into the social media echo chamber that is designed to serve us up information we already like.”
Instead, be willing to open your mind. “Just because something doesn’t confirm your existing beliefs does not mean it’s a hoax,” Ruhle said. “The smartest and most successful people I know are the people who are constantly evolving, always learning. It does not end with school. Seek out different perspectives. Maybe even change your mind.”
It’s natural to compare yourself to others, but it’s also dangerous, actress Octavia Spencer told the graduating class at Kent State University.
“Ignore the silly ’30-under-30′ list that the internet throws at you before you’ve even had your morning cup of coffee,” she said. “Those will be the bane of your existence post-graduation, trust me. Trust me. Comparing yourself to other’s success only slows you down from finding your own.”
As graduates head off to entry-level jobs, they’re likely to be the low person on the totem pole, but how you treat others as you rise in your career is important, said Dame Helen Mirren. The actress told the graduating class of Tulane University that one of her favorite life lessons was learned from another actress as they shared a ride in a car.
“She got her cigarettes out and before she lit up, she offered the driver one,” she said. “So simple, but, you know, thoughtful. To her, he wasn’t a ‘driver person,’ but a ‘person person’ who might want a smoke.”
Every single person, whether they have dominion over your life or not, deserves equal respect and generosity, Mirren said.
Howard Schultz said, “You can and you will make your mark on our country and our shared humanity. Dream big, and then dream bigger, a more innovative dream, a more inclusive dream.”
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Today’s scarcest resource is your human capital, as measured by the time, talent and energy of your workforce. Time, whether measured by hours in a day or days in a career, is finite. Difference-making talent is also scarce. The average company considers only about 15% of its employees to be difference makers. Finding, developing, and retaining this talent is hard — so much so that the business press refers to a “war” for talent. Energy, too, is difficult to come by. Though intangible, it can be measured by the number of inspired employees in your workforce. Based on our research, inspired employees are three times more productive than dissatisfied employees, but they are rare. For most organizations, only one out of eight employees is inspired.
How can we manage human capital better?
Measure it. As the adage goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. A veritable alphabet soup (ROA, RONA, ROIC, ROCE, IRR, MVA, APV, and the like) exists to measure our financial capital. To measure human capital, you can deploy metrics such as our productive power index, which looks at the cost of organizational drag and the benefits of effective talent and energy management on your overall productive power.
Invest human capital just like you invest financial capital. For financial capital, the business world has developed concepts such as the opportunity cost of capital, which is reflected in a company’s weighted average cost of capital. We measure the lifetime value of investments, and we establish hurdle rates before deploying a single dollar of capital. We run Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate various returns under uncertainty. For human capital, we need to start thinking about the opportunity cost of a lost hour. One way to do this is to measure the cost of meetings. My colleagues at Bain discovered that a weekly executive committee meeting at one company consumed 300,000 hours a year in support time from departments across the company.
Monitor it. Teams of financial planning and analysis professionals measure actual and expected results for financial capital. Investment management committees evaluate new investments. Capital expenditure plans are subjected to detailed board reviews. We all must submit capital approval requests to release funds. Similarly, for human capital we should do periodic reviews of how much controllable organizational drag we have in our organization and what actions we are taking to compress it.
Recognize and reward good management of time, talent, and energy. Historically, successful investment of financial capital can make someone’s career. Variable compensation is often tied to some measure of economic value added. Even though most companies no longer offer lifetime employment, they should still find a way to create a lifetime of assignments for their difference-making talent and work hard every day to re-recruit them by creating a working environment that is inspiring and results oriented.
Leaders should be measured and rewarded on their inspiration quotient. They should also be measured and rewarded for building a talent balance sheet: how many high-potential individuals they have recruited, developed, and retained, and what is the trade balance of talent — that is, the net imports of high-potential talent into their group minus exports. A company’s actual values, reads Netflix’s famous HR playbook, “are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.”
Time is finite. Talent is scarce and worth fighting for. Energy can be created and destroyed. The sooner we act on these beliefs, the sooner we will get the return on human capital that we deserve.
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