"Engineering Management Thought of the Week" Jeff Glass

Dear Graduating MEMP Students,

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” George Bernard Shaw

It is graduation weekend at Duke and you have taken a big step toward fulfilling this poignant quote! You are creating yourselves through your educational choice of the MEM program as well as the numerous activities that you have undertaken while at Duke (and the list is very, very long!). One of the big questions I suspect is on your minds during this hopeful and bittersweet time is – “Am I prepared for what lies ahead?”

And I cannot help but think: Of course and of course not!

Of course, because of the wide variety of fantastic mentors you have studied under who have many years of business experience. They have imparted knowledge to you and provided you with applied, experiential learning. But of course not because we can always be more prepared! We must always strive to learn more each day and to apply what we have learned more effectively. Never, ever should you be satisfied with what you know!

Graduate School is all about transitioning from a close ended environment of learning and problem solving to the open ended environment where problem definition becomes as important as problem solving. This is particularly true in technology-based business studies where there are few black and white issues, and where everything is evolving.

Paraphrasing A. Whitney Griswold (great educator and former President of Yale): ‘Education is not a quantitative body of knowledge but rather it is a taste for knowledge… a capacity to explore, to question and to perceive.’

My hope is that your time in the MEMP at Duke has provided a platform for your future endeavors. It should have helped you begin to develop your intuition about business, organizations and management but more importantly, it should provide a base which gives you this capacity to explore, question and ultimately understand. And this understanding will provide the basis of your future decisions and choices. And I want to emphasize that the most important decisions and choices are NOT the big ones that happen every few years – the job change or the move to a new company. You cannot predict the future so big decisions like these are not the issue. If one turns out to be wrong for you, you just change it! Many of our most successful role models for the MEM program have told us about the times that they took on the wrong job or joined the wrong company and changed their direction. Or when they thought a decision to change jobs or locations was not going to be a very valuable experience and it actually propelled their career forward.

So instead of these big decisions, it is the decisions and choices you make every day that build the platform that determines the quality of your life! How you answer questions like: What issues and challenges do I take on this week? Where do I spend my precious time? Which colleagues do I spend time with to absorb their knowledge? What challenges do I take on? When/how will I approach my boss about this problem? How much time do I spend at work today? When do I take time off with my family? … etc. etc.

One of the most important of these questions is: What will I learn today? Do not ever let this question become: Will I learn something today? Continue the theme of lifelong learning and the initiative you have shown by coming here for the MEMP and you will always be prepared for what happens next.

We have given you all a parting gift to reinforce this concept of continuing to learn – the book “Predictably Irrational” by Daniel Ariely (who we are fortunate to have here at Duke on the faculty in the Fuqua School of Business and the Department of Economics). Absorbing this book will help you understand, and hopefully improve, these daily choices you make. It is a wonderful set of stories and experiments that open the door of understanding to some of the rather odd choices we make – odd when examined with the yardstick of logic and rationality but quite common when measured with our biases and, in general, our humanness.

Thank you for another great year in the MEM program. And I thank your families for the support they have given you to get here. I wish you an exciting, challenging, rewarding start to your career. Keep in touch and remember:

“The person who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after” – Newton D. Baker