Sonoma State Executive MBA Graduation February 2020

I had the honor of giving the commencement address at Sonoma State's Executive MBA graduation this February. Here's what I had to say.

Here is a video link https://youtu.be/Qv2Wjv2ADZ4

I’d like to thank Sonoma State for this opportunity to speak to you. Congratulations to each of you on completing your MBA today!

I completed my MBA from Booth’s executive MBA program in Chicago when I was 30. Just like you I was working and going to school and stressed to the max. Now 25+ years later through talking to you today I kind of get to come back and give my younger self a little advice by telling you what I did with my MBA. 

Today’s talk is not about what I’ve accomplished but what you can accomplish.  It about what you are going to do with your MBA. As you listen to my story don’t think about me but about yourselves and what your story will be. Don’t be inspired to be like me – be inspired to be like you. 

As an undergrad at Indiana University I majored in accounting and then went on to work at E&Y. I got my MBA mainly just to get out of accounting and open up more career options for me. After I got my MBA I moved to Los Angeles to work as a brand manager for the Nestle Food Company. I think what you do before your MBA and right after your MBA and the MBA itself serves as the foundation for your entire career.

I am a B student, I don’t say this to be humble it’s just the facts, 3.0 in HS and 3.02 in college. I say this because I know you are all a lot smarter than me - so you can do a lot more than me. 

I got a good job out of college at E&Y but I was not that good at it, I was ok from a skills perspective but didn’t like it from a cultural perspective and surely was not passionate about it. I thought the answer was just to get out of accounting, that’s why I got my MBA. But there I was post MBA at Nestle in a new career in marketing and once again I was just doing ok at work and was not happy with the company’s culture and was not passionate about their products (except maybe Butterfingers)

By now I’m in my early 30’s and to the outside world it looked like I had a pretty successful career. But that was the last thing I felt. 

Then one day while living in LA I wandered into the 19th street natural foods coop in Santa Monica CA. I discovered a whole new world of healthy, organic, fair trade products from mission driven companies. I was in heaven and started consuming all kinds of new products. I became a vegetarian and very passionate about how the food we eat affects our environment. My Nestle peers started calling me the MBA granola head.

One day I took a few of my favorite healthy products from my cabinet and wrote a letter to each company’s CEO. The letter went something like this; I love your products, they’ve changed my life. I work at Nestle the world’s largest food company and we are very good at sales, marketing, manufacturing, and distribution but our product are marginal at best. Your products are outstanding in taste and healthiness and social responsibility and I bet you’re not so good at sales, marketing, manufacturing and distribution. Seven CEO’s agreed to see me and six of them ended up offering me a job – even though they had no openings. I took a 70% pay cut to work for Fantastic Foods a vegetarian food company in Petaluma. I was so damn excited I would have done it for free.  (The moral of that story is that if you are relatively smart and are willing to work for a really low wage there are lots of opportunities).    

What really happened was I finally found a job that I really loved with products I really believed in. And it was so much more than a job. I had found my purpose and my people. These natural foods companies are doing so much more than making food – they are changing agricultural practices, cooling the planet, paying fair wages, connecting people to where their food comes from and creating a new sustainable business model. I wanted to be part of that.   

After a few years at Fantastic Foods I started my own food company which was a great learning experience but a financial disaster. Licking my wounds, I took a short-term consulting project for a supplement company whose investors had just lost $9MM and they wanted to know where it went. At a board meeting presenting my findings I filled up a white board showing the board how they lost their $9MM dollars. They were stunned. I popped up and said “want to know what I would do if I were you?” I proceeded to fill up another white board with my ideas. A board member got up, drew a circle around my ideas and said “would you be CEO of this” And that’s how I became a CEO twenty-one years ago. (The moral of that story is that no CEO with any experience was going to take that job so they had to hire me.)

I went on to take two more CEO assignments for mission driven companies. Both were struggling companies that also had no choice but to hire an inexperienced CEO. Over that eight years of struggle I learned a ton but again had little to show for it financially. But even in that struggle I was fulfilled by the mission and values of the company.

I am currently CEO of Traditional Medicinals an herbal tea company here in Sonoma County. When I took this job I was in my late 40’s. About that time my wife said to me – you need to find an ATM machine that accepts education and work experience in exchange for some cash!

As luck would have it my education, and experience and mission focus all came together at TM. Until I took this job I had no idea just how much I had learned over the years. I came to TM and hired a new team with a new strategy for the company. Over the past decade we’ve quadrupled the size of the company and we’re now the 4th largest bagged tea company in the US.

We’re proud to be the #1 seller of organic tea in North America and the #1 seller of fair-trade tea as well. That’s thousands of acres of land with no pesticides and workers being paid a fair wage. The people growing our herbs are just as much a stakeholder as our investors. Over 1,000 kids in India, mostly children whose parents grow herbs for us, attend one of our 5 owned and operated primary schools.

We’re not making tea, we’re changing lives. And I actually get paid at this job!

Standing here before you 25 years later my natural foods career looks like it was a brilliantly laid plan to success. But nothing could be further from the truth. My first 15 years in the natural foods business were very hard -those companies had very little resources and I got little pay and worked long hours. But I was having the most fun and fulfillment of my life. 

When I told my dad I was quitting Nestle to sell veggie burgers I asked him for his advice. He said “son you’ve just quitting a better job than your dad ever had – you’re on your own now”. I was on my own – but it sure hasn’t all been easy. At age 37 I had to ask my parents for rent money one month - that was one of hardest things I have ever had to do. After I hung up the phone from that ask I sat in a chair in my crummy apartment in Oakland with my big fat MBA, and big fat CPA and had a big fat cry.

My MBA friends thought my journey was crazy. They as well as my family and spouse often advised me to get a real job at a real company. These people have a lot of influence on us and you can’t completely ignore them when you’re out there following your heart. 

But here’s the most beautiful thing about careers – no one can ever take from you your education or work experience. You can lose all your money but you can never lose any of your education or work experience. So just keep learning. Just keep trying. 

At each job you get two paychecks each week, one is experience and one is money. Always take the job with the biggest experience paycheck.

So how did I go from being a B student, and a marginal performer at E&Y and Nestle and unhappy in both those careers to someone who is energized and fulfilled and happy each day in their work life?

First, you have to determine what success means to you individually. If you don’t society will do it for you and that will be your benchmark and essentially be meaningless to you. Your MBA and current jobs and peer group only make it harder to not conform to societies definition of success. Please remember - only you can define your success.

At the vegetarian food company I felt fulfilled and successful for the first time in my career. But I had re-defined success for me to mean changing the world through the food we eat.

Armed with proper education and work experience then all you need is to have courage and conviction – in yourself. These qualities are not for the faint of heart. You need courage and conviction to become your best self. A lack of courage and conviction is the number one reason people never reach their full potential.   

What does Steph Curry do when he misses a few three pointers in a row, he just keeps shooting until he starts making them again – he knows himself well and he’s done all the proper training (the equivalent to your education and work experience). Most importantly – he has the courage and conviction to believe in himself. 

How do you get from today to where you really want to be?

First of all, if we all knew our futures we wouldn’t even get out of bed in the morning.

Way leads to way. Just take the first step in the right direction for you. Each step leads you down a path and each path leads to another path. This is exactly how both life and careers work. I never had anything all figured out but I knew myself and what I was passionate about so I starting taking steps in that direction. After each step the paths forward are all different and the next step will reveal itself.

Life, luck, and love are always out there hiding in plain sight. The more you look for them the more you will find them. BUT importantly, when you do you have to have the courage to act. Most of my career choices were quite random but I saw them and I acted on them.

It is our choices that reveal who we are and determine where you are going. Talking about it is not going to get you anywhere. 

Today is a big step toward the self-direction of your life and career.   

Inertia is a powerful force - inside us and inside our companies. Staying in the Midwest in accounting was a powerful force. But I would have never been able to be my best self. I felt like I was drowning. I was able to make a break for the surface and when I got there, I started swimming like mad toward my best self and I’ve never stopped and hopefully never will. 

If you’re not happy and fulfilled you’ve got to break out - burst up to the surface and start swimming like mad. Don’t end up like so many MBAs that are super smart but only ever developed into an okay version of themselves and never reached their full potential. It’s not about titles or pay - it’s about finding your why and your purpose and putting it to use and growing and discovering all at the same time.

Mark Twain once said the two most import days of your life are the day you are born and the day you figure out why. Finding your why is a powerful, liberating, exhilarating journey. You’ve all put a ton of time and energy into your careers and education. Put that same effort into mastering yourself. You need to continually work on being your very best self.   

Completing your MBA is a perfect time to be self-reflective and in turn become more self-directive. 

Life is pretty much all about us and all under our control until we’re about 30. We get good grades in HS so we can get into a good college. We get good grades in college so we can get a good job out of college. We do well at that job so we can get promoted. But soon enough we’ll all become managers and then everything changes. Your career almost instantly changes from being all about you and your subject matter expertise to being all about what you can get done through others. That takes emotional intelligence and leadership skills – neither of which are typically taught at school or the workplace. This is a huge paradigm shift for everyone but an especially difficult transition for really smart subject matter experts. Because their whole life and career success to date has been based on their individual performance. 

Everything before you become a leader is about growing yourself, once you are a leader it is all about growing others. 

Leadership and emotional intelligence will get you farther than subject matter expertise ever will. 

Emotional Intelligence and Leadership

Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to recognize and regulate emotions in ourselves and others and to use that information to guide our actions and thinking. Pretty heady stuff but this is literally the key to success in managing others.

In organizations, emotionally intelligent leaders motivate and inspire employees, build strong relationships with customers, and make better business decisions.

Emotional Intelligence can’t be taught but you can learn it. A measure of how much you are learning is your levels of increased humility and vulnerability. Contrary to everything you have learned humility and vulnerability are a leader’s great strength. Those are the qualities that best enable you to connect with others.

Management is critical to running a company, budgets, personnel, kpi’s, and work processes are important. But they are not leadership. You can’t get promoted to being a leader or apply for a leadership position – leadership has to come from inside you.

Leadership is about helping people be better at life. To be their best self. When people know the person they work for cares about them they will bring their best self to work and do amazing things.  Leadership takes emotional intelligence.

Leaders exist at all levels of all organizations. You don’t need to be a CEO to be a leader. There is a need everywhere for leadership, in the workplace, in our communities and our families. Very few organizations have sufficient leadership, but there are plenty of over managed organizations

Get yourself in an organization that allows for you to be your true self.  If you can’t be yourself you will never be authentic and authenticity is essential to leadership. There are as many leadership styles as there are people and your leadership style has to be unique to you – so start by being your true self and quit reading those 300,000 leadership books on Amazon about how people that are totally different from you lead. 

Use your MBA to do good

Armed with your degree today, plus getting to know yourself, and emotional intelligence, and leadership skills, and courage - you can accomplish anything you set out to do in life.

The two greatest issues you will hear discussed in your lifetime are climate change and income inequality.  

Business caused these problems and business is the best vehicle for addressing both of these issues and making real change. 

With your degrees today you are now equipped more than ever to participate in this paradigm shift in business models. Companies need courageous, transparent leaders who are willing to tackle the tough issues and push their organizations to do more good. This is where you come in.

MY FINAL ADVICE

We get one shot at this life. Each day when you wake up - your entire life has prepared you for that day. As Bill Murray says in the movie Groundhog day – what if there is no tomorrow? Make the most of every day and every one of your talents. You didn’t wake up today to be an ok version of yourself.

Go out there and find yourself and spend the rest of your life perfecting your best self.

The beauty of life is in the struggle not in the rewards. Don’t focus on the end goal and miss all the joy that can be had along the journey. (This is my biggest regret).

Happiness leads to success – it is not the other way around. Don’t spend your entire career trying to be successful only to find out it did not lead to happiness. 

Be present, especially with loved ones – there is a time for work and a time not to work – find that balance and don’t alienate your loved ones in pursuit of your career goals.

Life is short, yes, but careers are long. Find something you like to do. You will always be best at doing something you love.

More than ever - Be kind, be grateful, be humble

Your values and your dreams are your anchors. They are a pole you can never let go of – the rains will come and the winds will blow you sideways, but never let go - eventually the sun will shine and you’ll still be holding onto your values and have been true to yourself.

Your learning does not stop at this graduation. Life is an exercise in continuous learning. Never lose your enthusiasm or curiosity for learning new things or you will become stale – personally and professionally. Continuous learners are the happiest people on earth.

You have everything you need inside you today to achieve all your dreams. The only thing between me standing here and you standing here one day is the courage to act – the courage to believe and trust in yourself.      

These things I’ve talked about today are what really matter. You really matter. And what you do with your life really matters. Put your talents to use making positive social change through the businesses you work for. The rewards of living a purposeful life are amazing.  

At the end of the day I’m just an over achieving B student from Indiana who followed his heart and found his purpose. You’re all a lot smarter than me and can surely accomplish a lot more than me.

Please feel free to contact me for advice – you can find me on Linked-In or go to Traditional Medicinals website and send an email to “contact us” and say you’re looking for me. I would enjoy nothing more than helping you align your passions with your career.

Every generation is sure the generation after them is lazy or soft and wouldn’t know a hard day’s work if it fell on their head. Yet every generation plows over the generations before then and reinvents everything. You are the most educated and most tech savvy generation to ever live. I suggest you each get on your bulldozers and in the nicest, kindest, most respectful way plow over my generation and create a path to a sustainable world for you and future generations.

Speaking to you today has been one of the great honors of my life. Thank you for this opportunity to be part of your special day!

Congratulations to each of you – you’re all awesome!