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President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust,members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, membersof the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:
I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”
I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my jobnext year … and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on myresume.
I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route toyour degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has calledme “Harvard’s most successful dropout.” I guess that makes mevaledictorian of my own special class … I did the best of everyone whofailed.
But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer todrop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I wasinvited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at yourorientation, fewer of you might be here today.
Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life wasfascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signedup for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in CurrierHouse. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at nightdiscussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t worry about gettingup in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of theanti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating ourrejection of all those social people.
Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there,and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offeredme the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned thesad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.
One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I madea call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begunmaking the world’s first personal computers. I offered to sell themsoftware.
I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm andhang up on me. Instead they said: “We’re not quite ready, come see usin a month,” which was a good thing, because we hadn’t written thesoftware yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this littleextra credit project that marked the end of my college education andthe beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.
What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of somuch energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating,sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazingprivilege – and though I left early, I was transformed by my years atHarvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.
But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.
I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in theworld – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, andopportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.
I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics andpolitics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in thesciences.
But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but inhow those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether throughdemocracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broadeconomic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest humanachievement.
I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheatedout of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knewnothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty anddisease in developing countries.
It took me decades to find out.
You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more aboutthe world’s inequities than the classes that came before. In your yearshere, I hope you’ve had a chance to think about how – in this age ofaccelerating technology – we can finally take on these inequities, andwe can solve them.
Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours aweek and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted tospend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact insaving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do themost good for the greatest number with the resources we have.
During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an articleabout the millions of children who were dying every year in poorcountries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in thiscountry. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. Onedisease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half amillion kids each year – none of them in the United States.
We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children weredying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority todiscover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. Forunder a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives thatjust weren’t being delivered.
If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting tolearn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. Wesaid to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deservesto be the priority of our giving.”
So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let these children die?”
The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving thelives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So thechildren died because their mothers and their fathers had no power inthe market and no voice in the system.
But you and I have both.
We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop amore creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forcesso that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living,serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also canpress governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways thatbetter reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.
If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways thatgenerate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will havefound a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task isopen-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answerthis challenge will change the world.
I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claimthere is no hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us since thebeginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just …don’t … care.” I completely disagree.
I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.
All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen humantragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not becausewe didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had knownhow to help, we would have acted.
The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.
To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution,and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.
Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still acomplex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When anairplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. Theypromise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similarcrashes in the future.
But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: “Of all thepeople in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half ofone percent of them were on this plane. We’re determined to doeverything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the onehalf of one percent.”
The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.
We don’t read much about these deaths. The media covers what’s new –and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in thebackground, where it’s easier to ignore. But even when we do see it orread about it, it’s difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It’shard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don’tknow how to help. And so we look away.
If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to thesecond step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.
Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of ourcaring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization orindividual asks “How can I help?,” then we can get action – and we canmake sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. Butcomplexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone whocares — and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.
Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through fourpredictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverageapproach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in themeantime, make the smartest application of the technology that youalready have — whether it’s something sophisticated, like a drug, orsomething simpler, like a bednet.
The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is toend the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The idealtechnology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with asingle dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations fundvaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade,so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand – and thebest prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid riskybehavior.
Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is thepattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working – andnever do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century– which is to surrender to complexity and quit.
The final step – after seeing the problem and finding an approach – isto measure the impact of your work and share your successes andfailures so that others learn from your efforts.
You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to showthat a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to beable to show a decline in the number of children dying from thesediseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but alsoto help draw more investment from business and government.
But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show morethan numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work – sopeople can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.
I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a globalhealth panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives.Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person’s life – thenmultiply that by millions. … Yet this was the most boring panel I’veever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn’t bear it.
What made that experience especially striking was that I had just comefrom an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece ofsoftware, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. Ilove getting people excited about software – but why can’t we generateeven more excitement for saving lives?
You can’t get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that – is a complex question.
Still, I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but thenew tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with usforever. They are new – they can help us make the most of our caring –and that’s why the future can be different from the past.
The defining and ongoing innovations of this age – biotechnology, thecomputer, the Internet – give us a chance we’ve never had before to endextreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.
Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement andannounced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: “Ithink one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormouscomplexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by pressand radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street toreach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossibleat this distance to grasp at all the real significance of thesituation.”
Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduatedwithout me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller,more open, more visible, less distant.
The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerfulnetwork that has transformed opportunities for learning andcommunicating.
The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapsesdistance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramaticallyincreases the number of brilliant minds we can have working together onthe same problem – and that scales up the rate of innovation to astaggering degree.
At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to thistechnology, five people don’t. That means many creative minds are leftout of this discussion -- smart people with practical intelligence andrelevant experience who don’t have the technology to hone their talentsor contribute their ideas to the world.
We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology,because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beingscan do for one another. They are making it possible not just fornational governments, but for universities, corporations, smallerorganizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches,and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty,and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago.
Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world.
What for?
There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, andthe benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the livesof people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvarddedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will nevereven hear its name?
Let me make a request of the deans and the professors – theintellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, awardtenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, pleaseask yourselves:
Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?
Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world’s worstinequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of globalpoverty … the prevalence of world hunger … the scarcity of clean water…the girls kept out of school … the children who die from diseases wecan cure?
Should the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s least privileged?
These are not rhetorical questions – you will answer with your policies.
My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here –never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before mywedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letterabout marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very illwith cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliverher message, and at the close of the letter she said: “From those towhom much is given, much is expected.”
When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given –in talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limit towhat the world has a right to expect from us.
In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of thegraduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deepinequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus ofyour career, that would be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that tomake an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growingpower of the Internet to get informed, find others with the sameinterests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.
Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the biginequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.
You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leaveHarvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. Youhave awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with thatawareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that willtorment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could changewith very little effort. You have more than we had; you must startsooner, and carry on longer.
Knowing what you know, how could you not?
And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now andreflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hopeyou will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishmentsalone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepestinequities … on how well you treated people a world away who havenothing in common with you but their humanity. |
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