>> Well come on in everybody let's gather together.
We'll get started and thank you again for your patience
in starting this Dean's Convocation a little late.
Have you enjoyed Business week thus far?
It's quite an experience and thanks to all of you
who've played such a vital and significant role in
the fundraising efforts and the activities that have gone on whether it be
the marathon dance that we had last Friday night or the sale of the t-shirts.
I see a lot of them here today The Game Day t-shirts.
The work that was done on the golf tournament
many many other activities and compliments to
Schuyler [inaudible] the Business Council and everybody involved in that.
We've had a wonderful intellectual experience this week as well.
We've had four really outstanding five really outstanding visits this week.
I'm sure there are more but those are the five
that I know about and had a chance to participate.
On Monday we had a great visit by Roger Martin,
Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and
Roger's speech on the design of business where he talked
about the power of moving mystery to heuristic and
heuristic to algorithms and the importance of
re-investing in the business of understanding mystery I thought was
fantastic and was full of tremendous practical advice.
The whole notion of the difference between analytical thinking and
intuitive thinking and the integration of those through design thinking is
very powerful and we're incorporating some of
those ideas in the new design a business course that we
are piloting this year under the leadership of Dr. Foster and Troy Oldham.
Then on Wednesday, some of you may have had the chance
to be involved in the networking dinner that took place over at Hamilton's.
Where we had Dave Finnegan,
who is the Chief Investment chief information officer
they call him the Chief Information bear.
At Build a Bear corporation come speak to us.
Dave is a graduate of Utah State University of
this business school and has done phenomena things.
He joined that company in 1998 a year after its founding he talked about the opening of
the seventh store and now Build a Bear has over 400 stores in over 30 countries.
So, it's an extraordinary story and really Dave's
a great model of what you can do with Utah State University education.
He made one comment that I thought was really very powerful.
I'd like to just share it with those of you who weren't able to be there.
He talked about the difference,
the magic that occurs when a kid,
a young person participates in the process of building
their own teddy bear or play dog or frog whatever it might be
take home the kit and get involved and help create this bear and
how much they own it and how magical that actually becomes for them.
He drew a distinction between going down to your local Walmart
and buying a bear right off the shelf and being involved in building a bear.
As soon as he made that observation,
it struck me immediately the parallel that exists between that idea and the idea of
owning your own education and building your own education being responsible for
your own education as opposed to just sourcing your education
like you would off the shelf at Walmart if you will.
Any school can do that.
University of Phoenix can do that.
But Utah State University creates another possibility for you and that's a possibility
of owning your own education and being a co-creator of that educational experience.
It's in that sense that I want to introduce my good friend Henry Eyring to you today.
Because Henry is one of the brightest minds that I know,
he is an extraordinary talent.
He is driven first and foremost by a deep sense of
personal purpose and passion in his life.
He graduated from BYU with an MBA and a JD and then went to work
for Monitor company the same company that Roger Martin co-lead back in Boston.
In fact Roger, very closely
associated with Henry during that time a great mentor to Henry.
I had the privilege of working with Roger and Henry as team on a client that I
had up in Canada you remember the [inaudible] and it was a powerful day,
very impressive work that Henry and Roger did together.
I think there was a $100 million dollar opportunity
that was missed on that particular day.
But Henry since mid 1990s
has been back in the State of Utah and now in Idaho,
he was the director of the MBA program at the BYU for awhile.
He joined the board of SkyWest of Peterson capital,
worked for Peterson Capital and in,
when was it Henry around 2000s that we were invited to do that study for the LDS church?
We had the opportunity to work together to design
a leadership development program for the employee leaders of the LDS church.
This is the managing directors and some managers in
the professional organization of the church in Salt Lake City in
that connection we had the opportunity to do a tremendous number of interviews
with church leaders both on
the Ecclesiastes side and on the professional side learned a lot,
designed a program and we were in the final stages of getting approval to
deliver the learning experience when Henry was called to be
mission president in the Tokyo North mission of the LDS church.
Which he did for three years in their final year that he was there in Tokyo,
He was invited by Kim Clark to join
him as a key transformation agent at BYU Idaho.
Kim Clark as many of you know was formally
Dean of the Harvard Business School and was asked in
2005 to become president BYU Idaho and Henry has been up since he returned from Tokyo,
in BYU Idaho in a process of
transformation that I think is truly breathtaking at that institution.
Today he's going to talk to us about the process of owning your own education.
What's involved in that?
How do you build a bear in the educational frame?
Many of you know he's written a new book called Major Decisions.
I could go on and on and on about Henry because I love him but I'm not going to.
I'm just going to turn the time over and ask you to welcome Henry Eyring.
>> I'm very grateful to be here with you today.
I can't believe you're here.
It's going to be 80 degrees this afternoon.
All the golf course is closed.
What's, why are you here I don't understand it.
But I'm grateful and I hope that we'll be blessed to
have this experience together today that will be useful to you.
Already just feeling the right spirit of this place has been a blessing to me.
Of course I can pay tribute to your dean just as he did to me.
Were it not for him, I would not have made the connection with
Kim Clark that has taken me to BYU Idaho and changed my life.
It is not too facetious to say President Clark and I met on the internet.
It was only because I didn't know him.
But Doug had prepared the way for me to send a message.
This may be of some interest and maybe even some help to you.
I'd never had a conversation with Kim Clark about what he was going to do at BYU Idaho.
I'll just give you a little bit of background.
This is in the spirit of the value of
mentors in your life so here's a fellow I didn't know,
I couldn't believe it.
I still remember getting the news that
the Dean of the Harvard Business School who'd served there
10 years and had been viewed as really effective there,
that he was going to go to this place BYU Idaho,
which I had last encountered as Rick's college.
I don't know if you remember those days,
Rick's college was this little place that I first saw as an eight year old.
My father had been a professor at Stanford,
and he was given the invitation to go preside over Rick's college.
It was literally the end of his academic career and so I'd seen this thing happen but
my father he was
a just tenured 38 year-old professor
at Stanford when he was invited to go to Rick's college.
That was not nearly such a stretch as inviting
the Dean of the Harvard Business School to go to BYU, Idaho.
But President Clark said, yes, and went and had been there for actually,
had not yet arrived at the time that Dean Anderson and I had a conversation at
his instigation about my working with Kim Clark and I was skeptical,
not of his talents but I was worried.
I was worried that the Dean of
the Harvard Business School would go to this new university,
this new four year university which had
no graduate programs and was doing no scholarship,
and I thought, "I'll bet he's going to try to make
it over into Harvard's image or at least Williams College or something."
More akin to what he'd experienced,
he had done, he was a Harvard undergraduate.
A Harvard graduate student.
He'd been at Harvard for coming up on 40 years,
I think, and I was really skeptical and
I did not want to be part of what I thought might happen.
I thought if he's going to try to turn this
into a real university, I don't want to be there.
I had experienced that,
I'd watched schools climbing what they call the carnegie ladder.
Where for the sake of prestige and frankly,
for the sake of faculty interests in scholarship,
you move up and you start to pay much more attention to
your personal scholarship and to the graduate students who
can help you with that scholarship than you do the students,
especially the undergraduate students.
So, those students get left behind and I didn't want to do that.
So, I'd learned enough to know that
if you're going to- if you're going to have a disagreement with a partner,
you want to have it really early on ideally before the partnership is formed.
So, I wrote a memo. We had never met.
The fellow never had a chance to test
my assumption about what he might do with the university,
but I wrote a six or seven-page memo saying
here's what I think you should do and here's what I think you should not do.
So, I just figured it, if this is going to be a pipe cleaner up his nose, I want it.
I want to put it up there right now.
We'll never have to talk again.
He'll just, he'll think I was really forward,
but we just won't- I'm not going to go to Rexburg, Idaho
and get trapped in part of implementing a strategy I don't believe in,
and I ran it by Doug and he encouraged me to send the memo and interestingly enough,
it turns out President Clark and I were on the same page.
Once I knew that, again,
I anticipated talking about this,
but this is significant for you in your career.
Once I knew that I didn't care about anything else.
In fact, we had several weeks worth of discussions where we just,
we got to know one another a little bit and then he gave me a phone call.
First time I ever heard his voice over the phone.
We just agreed that I was going to go to work for him.
I still had a fair amount of that mission to conclude,
we never discussed position, title or salary.
Just didn't care because I knew I had friends who knew Kim Clark well,
including brothers who said if you can do this,
you must do it.
This could be an unbelievable mentor and I
knew that we agreed on the strategy
for the university and I didn't care about anything else,
and I don't recall when I learned my salary.
I will tell you, I don't know whether you'll be impressed by this or not.
It was a five-figure salary.
It was the first five-figure salary I'd had since graduating from
the MBA program at BYU 15 years before.
But that didn't matter,
by the way, it hasn't gone up a lot.
I've been blessed largely through the goodness of the folks at SkyWest Airlines,
I became a director there and their stock did very, very well.
When I exercised those stock options that had been given to me,
I paid off the house and it was why I was able to
serve the mission and it was why when Kim Clark and I had that discussion.
By the way, he wasn't authorized to offer me anything.
In the LDS church,
you've got to go through these approval processes which,
among the steps in that process there was
my father and so we kept that on the QT for a long time.
He literally- we never had a job description.
I'm advancement Vice President,
I didn't even today know what that means.
But certainly, as you think about
the early jobs that you'll take as you complete your education,
you'll do so well to view it as post-graduate work.
So well to think of it in terms of mentors
who will- and so Dean Anderson talked
about the value of a place like Utah State University.
The value of the Utah State University over
some purely online university is that there are professors
here who if you play your cards right can become lifelong mentors to you.
Then, if you're wise,
what you'll do is you'll go out and your first job maybe your second job.
You can all the jobs thereafter,
you will choose people instead of positions.
You may even choose people over companies.
So, I'll give you, again,
I'll go back to this story of Roger Martin.
Roger Martin was the third of the three interviewers I met who hired me at
Monitor company and I liked the other two fellows all right.
They were a little younger and they were more skeptical of me and my BYU, MBA.
They'd never hired a BYU,
MBA and in those days Monitor was very much a Harvard.
Is very, very small they they were affiliated with Mike Porter,
who was hot, hot at
the business school there and almost everybody they hired was from Harvard,
but Roger Martin didn't care that I was from BYU,
and we made a connection and I could just tell this is the guy.
I'd been at another firm fancier than Monitor company, by the way,
Monitor has since passed through, I mean,
they were in technical bankruptcy as a result of the recent downturn.
They'd grown very aggressively overseas.
I have a little piece of equity in the firm.
I just got a k one that shows that that has all gone to zero this year.
But that doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter that the firm that I visited earlier in the morning has gone on
to great success was more prestigious at the time and has not gone bankrupt,
but I knew I wanted to be around guys like
Roger Martin and he was the one partner of the firm with whom I met and I thought,
I'll bet the other partners are like this guy and that proved to be the case,
and I had a marvelous education.
I wasn't there for a long time,
but as Dean Anderson pointed out I got the experience through Roger.
I went in one day and I said I'm quitting.
I didn't say it in exactly those terms,
but I'd worked for the firm for just shy of three years
and I got an assignment to lead a project for a firm called,
I guess I better be careful, anyway,
it was one of the larger computer companies in
the world at that time and it was going down.
They made a computer that was being tremendously
undercut by high-powered workstations and personal computers,
and they had lost in the quarter that we got hired to help them with their strategy.
They'd lost a billion dollars that quarter and
that was back when a billion dollars was a lot of money.
So, they were in desperation mode and I was leading a team,
and I just didn't know what the computer industry.
Well, I got to know it on that case,
but I was no specialist.
You could see quickly that the problems they
had actually didn't have to do with computers.
It had to do with a disruptive technology,
and they're having been over-built,
classic Clayton Christensen style stuff where
everything they did was designed to serve this super premium high-end user,
and that was really all they knew how to do.
We discovered they have some great technology.
If you could have pulled that technology out of
this multi-billion dollar firm with their salespeople,
non-commissioned salespeople, they were so confident of their ability to sell this iron.
They had salespeople making two and $300,000 a year flat rate.
If you could have pulled the technology out of that,
you could have created,
and that was part of the founders' problems,
it was a brilliant, brilliant guy who founded the company,
and he could see the technology,
and he says we're going to be okay because we've got that technology,
and he'd even pulled things like that off before where
the company looked like it was on the brink and the engineers saved it.
But they'd gotten so big that it wasn't enough to have the killer chip.
It really didn't have the killer chip.
Reduced instruction said computing.
Even I, as a non-technical guy,
even I could see the power of it but I could also see that
the organization was going to collapse under its own weight,
and it did, and it was acquired by a company which has since been acquired.
Anyway, that's the world of Clayton Christensen in disruptive innovation.
But all I knew was that it meant that during this period,
so I was meeting with the senior management team
every Tuesday and every Thursday of every single week,
is that we were going to fix the company in real-time,
and the fellow who had sold the project had gone.
He had a standing tradition, every spring,
he would do three weeks of sailboarding in the Caribbean,
and this was his three weeks.
I was left holding that bag and my wife had a baby,
and 10 days after the baby was born on a Mother's Day,
I was in the office trying to get ready for one of these Tuesday meetings,
and that was it.
I was just not going to do that anymore.
Later that week, I went in to see Roger Martin,
and I said "Roger,
I just don't think this is working out.
The lifestyle is killing me.
It's not what I really like doing,
and I think I'm probably going to be leaving the firm."
By the way, it was a terrible mistake on my part to have
drawn that conclusion and then shared it with him right up front.
Fortunately, it was Roger Martin.
Roger Martin is not only a very level head and a person who liked me,
but he is a master of inquiry and helping people figure out,
not just listening to what people say,
but helping them trying to figure out what they really mean,
better yet, what they really want.
It's a tremendous skill and Roger practiced it on me.
The first thing he said was, "Henry Eyring,
of all people, you're the last person I would have expected to come in and say this."
Part of that was that I did love the firm,
but part of it also was that I had my head down and I'd never complained,
until I made the mistake of it got to
the breaking point and I went into Roger and I said, "Roger,
I'm just, I'm done here."
Anybody else with any ego or
anybody who didn't love me as much as Roger did would have said "Okay,
fine," because people quit in those high powered,
high pressure environments all the time,
and there's always somebody new to replace them.
He could have let me go.
We started talking and he said "What kinds of things are you thinking about doing?"
I said "Well, I'm thinking I might go back and get a PhD.
I love teaching, I like writing,
and so I'm thinking maybe I'll go back and get the Harvard degree I've always wanted."
Roger very thoughtfully said the founder of our firm,
whom I'd met once but didn't know well at all,
he said is looking to do some writing and he connected the two of us,
and that put an extension on my career,
not just an extension on my career monitor,
but really changed the whole path of my career.
So, for what it's worth,
as you think about that first job,
if you can, there are certain things that are maybe top
of mind and if you can you want to try to suppress them.
One of them is prestige.
So, I'm very, very glad that I chose the
much less prestigious of the two firms that made me an offer.
The other was money.
I wasn't particularly concerned about what I was going to get paid.
Now, it did pay well.
But what I discovered was that the feeling I
had about Roger and that I extrapolated others in that interview,
that was the thing to go with,
and that really it was just a continuation of school and if you're lucky,
your career will always be a continuation of your schooling,
that you'll always be doing new stuff,
working with new ideas,
going places people haven't gone before,
and doing it with people you really like doing it with.
If you get into that sweet spot,
the money will come along. It really will.
If you try to optimize on the money,
the odds that you will have that kind of experience are very, very well.
One of the great mistakes is to say well,
I'll compartmentalize this, I'll sequence it.
I will go out and make
enough money that then I'll have the flexibility to do what I really want to do.
Now, there are two problems with that.
One of them is that it often doesn't work even on the front piece.
Making money is difficult.
I have a dear friend who's a billionaire and a fellow SkyWest Board Member,
and every quarter I'm on his jet and I'm reminded of who I'm not.
I look around at this,
and by the way, it fits him.
For some people Gulf Stream is a statement.
In this guy's case, it really fits him.
So it's just right for him.
But what I realize is this isn't me,
and part of the reason I know it isn't me because he said this is his phrase,
I'm not going to say it here because it involves a curse word and I will avoid that.
But he says "Getting rich is difficult," you fill in the blank.
"Getting rich is difficult.
If it weren't, everyone would do it."
That's what he says.
It's just sort of his warning to those of us who think, boy,
I'd love to have enough money but then I could do what I really want.
So, the first problem with that is it doesn't often work.
Very, very rare that you can get rich and it's
especially rare that you can get rich if you're doing it just for the money.
If you get the chance to meet rich people,
what you're going to find out is it's not about the money.
I mean, money may be a way of keeping score,
but they love the game and it happens to produce a lot of money.
So, it happens for some people,
but very rarely for folks like me anyway for whom
money is what I want to satisfy some of my monetary needs,
and then I'll go do what I want to do.
The other problem with that is that even if you got the money,
what you'd find out is that finding a passion and
connecting your personal passion with the career is pretty hard to do,
especially if you've start out on later in life where you've been this sort
of I'm going to be the tire-biting dog that just chases every car I can,
I'll get up the corporate ladder.
If that's been your mindset,
you're probably going to get to the point if
you're lucky enough to have this pile of money,
where you will not have the skills or
even the attitude to really figure out what is it I want to do.
Now, that brings us back to where we are today because my counsel to
you is start working on that problem now.
What is it I want to do?
You need a career dream.
By the way, it can be wrong.
That's okay. Because if you've got a career dream and you pursue it,
you're going to find out if you don't like it,
then you'll be able to switch and you'll
probably have gained some insight along the way that says,
boy, this particular career has got these qualities,
I actually don't like these qualities.
I'm not a numbers person or I'm not a people person,
and that will allow you on the next guess to guess better.
The really expensive path is no guess at all.
So, now we're talking about your major, for instance,
as well same thing with a career as a major.
You'll often find folks who will say especially at the fancier colleges,
they'll say, "Don't pick a major too quickly.
You need to explore your interests,
take all your general education."
By the way, do we have undergraduates here today or am I talking just?
Okay. Great, great, great.
Okay, I thought we're more graduate students.
So, if you're LDS, for instance,
it's fairly common to say "Well,
I'll go on my mission and then I'll come back and choose my major."
Probably the only thing you're going to learn on
your mission about your major is you don't like door-to-door sales.
Right.
So, if you find yourself thinking there's some point at which it will dawn on me.
What my majors should be,
I'd caution you on that and say better path is to pretend you know.
Just pretend, make your best guess.
Advice that my father got.
So, this is another story.
By the way, I did I was going to be very interactive today and I
promise we're going to get interactive but I keep thinking of stories to tell you.
My father was one of three sons of a very famous chemist at
the University of Utah and this chemist my grandfather had this deal.
You can live at my house while you go to college and I will pay for your tuition,
you can major in anything you want as long as it's physics.
So, he had three sons who majored in physics and
my father was probably the third best of them at physics.
One was very successful went on and
became a chemist and is still at the University of Utah,
but my father was not at the time he just didn't have
his heart in physics and that realization came to him one day.
What happened was he is a senior in high school.
He was a pretty good basketball player.
But he didn't get his full height and weight until he was a freshman in
college and he really came into his
own a little too late to play collegiate basketball but
he made up for it with a very heavy intramural schedule.
The intramural games were played
seven O'clock the pickup games and if you don't get there at
seven O'clock for the pick-up game you know what happens you can just sit there waiting
until till there's a slot if a slot ever does open up anyway.
So, his idea of getting homework done was it's got to be done by
seven and he would try to work with all the problems he could,
but when he got down to the wire and he didn't have some of his homework
done and we're approaching seven o'clock he would go to his father the math genius.
Our grandpa was a chemist but he was
a theoretical chemists are really good mathematician.
So, my father would go to his father and say, "Hey, I
just need help on a couple of these problems."
He was careful never to ask about anything he didn't
need help with because what he knew grandpa would do is grandpa would say,
"Wonderful, let's go down to the basement,"
and down in the basement is
an unfinished basement where they had nothing but a blackboard.
That was his idea of a game room, grandpas.
My father would say no I don't want to contend stairs please not down to the dungeon.
I just need, I can't figure out how this formula works.
This new formula if you're just should
tell me how the formula works I'll be fine and grandpa would say,
ah let's derive the formula from first principles.
So, a good mathematician and a good physicist knows that the most
specific and complex of equations rests upon the very basic ones.
Force equals mass times acceleration that stuff
and grandpa's feeling was you never wanted to be reliant on a textbook.
You didn't or somebody's formula because
other way if all you know is the formula you're the slave of the formula.
By the way this is a moment where I'm going to announce
that actually relates to the subject I plan to speak about.
So, we'll come back to that,
that you don't want to be a slave to the formula.
One of the reasons that true is because if all you know is
the formula guess what the computer knows the formula too.
So, think about that.
It goes back to this question of,
why does a pilot not make more money.
When the pilots got the passenger's life in
his hands but the executive can make 10 times more will come back to that.
Anyway so grandpa would say Howe you don't want to be dependent on the formula,
let's derive this from first principles.
If you can derive from the most basic equations whatever it
is you need you'll not only
never need a textbook you'll be able to go beyond the textbooks.
I think that made some sense to my father but the pickup games started at seven O'clock
and he didn't want to take the time to do that and on one of
these occasions when they're downstairs in the basement,
grandpa sits back and see how we worked a problem like this
just last week and you don't seem to have made much progress on.
Have you been working these problems and my father said,
"No, I haven't been working these problems," and again it was
a deeply reflective moment for
my grandfather a guy like Roger Martin who looked at his son and said,
"Howe, don't you think about this all
the time?" And my father said,
"No, I don't think about this except when I have to,"
and grandpa just couldn't figure that out.
He said, "Well, you mean, you don't
just naturally like when you're in the shower you don't think about this?"
and my father said, "No," and grandpa knew that the key to success
is to find the thing you think about when you don't have
to think and turn that into your career.
The thing you think about it in the shower.
So, he said, "Howe, I think you better get out of
physics and find something you really love."
Now, that is really powerful advice.
It's not easy by the way it took him a long time to do that.
He stumbled into the Harvard Business School.
Literally it was an air force colonel
who said, "Eyring, you ought to go to the Harvard Business School,
I'll write you the letter of recommendation that's going to get you there."
Notwithstanding a B average coming out of
the University of Utah and no prior business experience.
No leadership experience really but then he found the thing they're in
business school and by the way it had to do with the organizations and
people and especially it turned out universities,
colleges and he found that he
thought about those things when he didn't have to think about them.
I feel blessed this morning at six o'clock, I woke
up a little before the alarm and I couldn't go back to sleep and I didn't want to.
Again this is a little kind of personal autobiographical.
I just feel as though I walked into
Yankee Stadium by mistake and somebody put pin stripes on me.
I'm co-authoring a book with a guy named
Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School.
And of all things, it compares the evolution of two schools,
Harvard University and BYU-Idaho,
and uses the lens of disruptive innovation.
And Clayton and I had a conversation yesterday,
we're just about to the end,
but he could see something missing.
Came up with a brilliant framework for framing the whole book.
He explained it to me in 15 minutes.
I've been working on this manuscript for two years,
I thought, "Why didn't I think of that?"
And at six o'clock this morning, I just backed out.
Last night I had to turn my brain off because I wanted to think about that.
I said, "I need sleep."
I turned that off, six o'clock it came back on again.
And that's what, I think,
grandpa was talking about in the shower time.
And hard to find those things,
but the good news is you will know when you don't have it.
I got a law degree.
Dean Anderson mentioned I got a law degree,
mostly just because I felt the need to differentiate myself.
I didn't get into the Harvard Business School when I was 21 like I wanted to.
I was a geology major who had studied nothing but geology.
Oil was selling for $8 a barrel,
so I couldn't get a job in geology.
And the Harvard Business School said,
"You need full-time work experience."
I felt stuck. I went to BYU, did an MBA,
did the law degree to differentiate myself a little bit,
did one legal internship, and boy,
I will tell you, I figured out in a big hurry I was not a lawyer.
So, you'll know it when you see what it's not.
The only bad Major is undeclared.
Okay? The only really expensive decision is no decision.
When you're choosing a major,
when you're exploring a career,
you got to explore,
and the way you do it is you get into character.
You declare the major,
and you get in there and you act like you love it.
If it's political science,
you don't just study your political science homework,
you get a subscription to foreign affairs,
and you act like you're going to be in the CIA or you're going to be a senator,
and you put that on for size.
If it doesn't fit, you'll have learned something very important,
and you will walk away from that study with perspectives that will be valuable to you.
Geology has been valuable to me.
Law has been valuable to me in a funny sort of way.
Law is valuable to me because I actually know how much lawyers don't know.
Okay? What I know is,
with the exception of some narrow fields where they specialize,
a good lawyer has to do just what a law student has to do,
and that is figure out what the issue is and go do some research on it.
So now when I sit around
a boardroom table or if I get subpoenaed or if I have to give a deposition,
I'm not as scared as I would be otherwise because I know
that the lawyers have a way of thinking that I understand a little bit.
But there's not some mystery that I could never understand.
That's valuable to me.
It's valuable to think about,
to have a view of jurisprudence and to know how lucky we are to have laws.
What separates us from Russia or India is not natural resources.
It's not the natural industry of our people. It's the rule of law.
It's the idea that a contract is binding.
There's an economist, Francis Fukuyama,
who calls this the economics of trust.
We have the benefit of trust,
and we have that thanks to the laws of this land.
Now three years of law school was a pretty high price to pay to get that.
Put that insight.
But my point is to say that even the wrong
choice that you will make won't cost you as much as you think,
and it's probably going to teach you more than you think.
And if you are thoughtful about it,
you don't want to jump into something willy-nilly.
You want to make the best choice you possibly can.
Research it, and then keep your keep your antenna up.
If you are not going to like it,
you will find that out pretty quickly,
and then you want to boldly say, "Well,
this major is going to be my minor. I'm out of here."
And even if it's not your minor, that's okay.
What you want to do is you want to be out there sensing and experiencing,
and along the way,
you'll discover what you love.
And when that happens,
there will be enough money in it to make you happy.
Now, I'm going to stop here.
We are really going to go back,
and we're going to talk a little bit about that airline pilot and the executive,
because that should influence your career,
and your decisions and the way you build your major, your college education.
But I want to welcome, now,
questions or comments based upon what I've said.
If you're a lawyer,
throw something at me, I'm sorry.
Any thoughts about that? Have your parents ever given you advice, something like that?
>> Yeah, my dad has always told me it doesn't matter what I do as long as
I become a dentist because he's built a practice.
He's got a satellite office just waiting for me.
But I don't want to be elbow deep in somebody's business for the rest of my life.
>> Oh, okay.
>> I agree, and that's why I'm sitting here with the MBA students.
>> Super, good for you.
And you know what, your father is going to understand that.
>> He does now.
>> He does, yes. Let me just talk quickly about,
you, there's another hand,
yes, at the back.
>> I've always thought of the idea that you can learn to like whatever you want.
So I picked a major that I thought I could get a job in easily,
and now you've talked of going about a narrow step and trying to learn to like that.
Since then, it wasn't necessarily something that I thought of when I did on,
I think, back then, but I trained myself to do that.
What's your opinion on that?
>> Well, I think,
look, all jobs are difficult.
So part of what you've been told is true,
and that is part of liking something is deciding to and really getting into it.
Getting your heart into it.
I talked about how excited I am right
now with this manuscript I'm working on. It's fascinating.
If I put that down for two weeks and it goes cold,
I don't want to go back to it.
So there's something to be said for the attitude of being in it,
of getting into it.
On the other hand,
and this is a good segue into this little bit of discussion we'll
have of why people make the money they make.
So back to this question of can you like any career you choose?
There's a dimension of every career that requires you to just decide I like it.
And that attitude, by the way,
that's not lying to yourself.
That's getting your head in a position where you can enjoy what there is to be had.
You've got confidence.
You're thinking about it when you don't have to.
Let's go, this comes out of this little book that I have written.
It was an idea that came to me when I was reading one morning.
And I was thinking about,
as students you come to the university trusting,
and you ought to be trusting.
The faculty at a great place like this one really care about you.
They probably are here for you.
They're not here for the money.
Some are here for scholarship,
but you're going to find that a whole lot of them are here for you.
So you should be trusting.
But there's a challenge, and that is,
only you can figure out where you're headed.
And in fact, many of your faculty members will have come themselves,
their passion was academics,
and so they may not have experienced the type of world in which you'd like to head.
Then on top of that, it's funny, I mean,
I've kind of been out in the world of education and business for a long,
long time, and it just occurred to me one morning while I was reading.
I don't know why some people make more than other people make.
And the differentials can be pretty pronounced.
A pilot for a regional airline even after spending hundreds and hundreds,
maybe over a thousand hours in the air training,
can you guess what a regional airline will pay a brand new pilot?
>> $35,000.
>> $35,000. Anybody else.
>> $22,000.
>> You've actually-
>> I have a [inaudible] .
>> Yes, you.
>> [inaudible]
>> That's the number, $22,000.
Okay? But do you know how many,
do you know what that is on an hourly basis?
Okay, now I'm not talking about the hourly.
For the pilot, it's decent on an hourly basis,
but you don't get that many hours.
If you could find a $2,000, excuse me,
2,000 hours a year job,
okay, $15 an hour would get you $30,000.
Right? So think about that.
Think about the amount of time the pilot has spent training.
And in fact, what it turns out is,
you can't see it here,
I've got a baggage handler there and a flight attended there.
It turns out the pilot's compensation
and the flight attendant's compensation are not that different.
Now, the pilot with seniority,
thanks to the union,
is going to make more toward the end of the career.
But it's much closer than I ever would have thought.
Okay? Now, contrast that with the executive.
How much does a senior executive,
one of the named officers,
one of the top four or five people in an airline,
how much do you think they can make a year?
Millions. But why?
How do you explain that?
The pilot has the passengers lives in his hands literally.
Has spent tremendous, takes
more time to get your pilot's license than it does to get an MBA.
That's not true if you count the undergraduate degree,
but many of the pilots are going to have the undergraduate degree.
So how do you make sense of that?
It's important to know. Yes.
>> Does it have anything to do with fortune of how much money you're involved with.
That's part of it, like the pilot, it will only give two people [inaudible].
But the current management won't be able
to offer [inaudible] higher volume when there's a higher potential.
>> It's a fair point. Okay. It's a good point.
But how much does it cost to have someone die on your plan?
Do you know what it costs an airline when a plane goes down?
You can just imagine the lawyers lining up around that.
Especially if there's some suggestion of they weren't trained properly,
they weren't doing their jobs.
Well, that can cost you tens of millions of dollars.
So, their money is part of the answer.
But there's in addition something else.
>> He has to be innovative to the management and he has to make
new ideas where he estimates calls but he probably doesn't.
He just has to get on the plan,
fly the plans, drop off the people.
>> It turns out that's a big part of it.
It gets back to this idea of the formula.
It turns out that flying is pretty formulaic.
Okay. Even when things go wrong,
there are pretty standard procedures how you react,
and you can practice those procedures.
Actually, you don't these days even have to be in a real aircraft.
Okay? You can practice that by computer.
It's quite formulaic.
On top of that,
the computer actually, that runs the flight simulator,
it knows how to fly the plane too.
Pretty well. So, what you're finding is in
the old days you used to have three people in the cockpit.
Okay? A pilot, a co-pilot,
and a navigator. Now how many is it?
>> Two.
>> Two. Have you heard talk about they're going to one pilot?
It turns out that the computer is doing a fair amount of
the flying in a large aircraft already.
So, you find yourself saying I definitely want a backup.
I want the pilot there in case the computer gets it wrong,
and I want someone there to backup the pilot in case the pilot dies.
But the guy who runs Ryan Air is talking about
one pilot and maybe a flight attendant who's trained to be the pilot's backup.
Interesting. Okay? So, what's happening,
and anyway, this is the idea for what- I don't know what it's worth.
I don't get royalties on the book,
so, not worth any money to me.
I hope it's worth something to you.
What we've got is I've created this matrix.
What we have down here is a kind of job where the procedure is pretty standardized.
Okay. The baggage handler and the pilot
are both doing things where there's a pretty standard procedure.
This is what you do.
If you follow the rules,
you're by and large going to be all right.
Even when things go wrong,
the procedure to be followed in that case of
that emergency is pretty standardized. All right?
Contrast that, and by the way,
the pilot makes more than the baggage handler because
a lost bag is much less expensive than a lost life.
So, there's a premium represented in that.
But not nearly so great as the premium made by the Executive.
Interestingly, the flight attendant's pay is not that far off of the pilot's.
His or her job is different because it requires more judgment.
You can see that easily with the Executive.
What do you do when the Unions strikes?
What do you do when the price of oil triples and you didn't have your fuel hedged?
There is no standard procedure for that.
If you get it right,
it's worth a whole lot to the company.
If you get it wrong,
it can cost millions of dollars or billions of dollars.
The company can go out of business.
Flight attendant is actually the same way.
What do you do when a passenger gets
unruly and starts to threaten you and the fellow passengers?
There's some procedures for that,
but that's going to take thinking on your feet literally.
It's lower stakes and therefore a little lower pay.
I mean, those things don't come up very often
and usually you've got fellow passengers to help you deal with the problem.
Same thing, flight attendants do get
safety training how to get people off the plane if it crashes.
>> Let me ask. Just like this idea is very similar to
Roger Martin idea of the innovation front moving mystery to heuristic.
>> Interesting. Interesting.
>> Roger made the point on Monday that the reason why companies like GU get in
trouble is they have moved so far down that curve towards analog and then
the ultimate next step is code that you can essentially commoditize the business.
When it gets from analogue to code then you can let the folks in India and China do it.
>> Right on.
>> So, this principle is a principle
that is something that I hope you all take away from Business Week this week.
Look for stuff to do that others can't do.
If you are so fortunate enough to have earned a business on the basis of moving
from mystery to the heuristic or heuristic to analog,
take the gains associated with that and go solve another mystery.
>> Yeah. You want to be in the mystery business.
That's where the money is.
Now, by the way, money is not everything but it's something.
So, as you look at a career,
don't take for granted that it will be the same 10 years from now as it is today,
or it was when your parents thought it was a good thing to be doing.
If you're down here in this arena where the decisions matter quite a lot,
they're high-stakes so you got to get them right but they're procedural,
we can come up with machines to do that.
Even various expensive machines are less expensive than people.
Health care costs for machines don't increase all the time.
Okay? Benefit plans don't tank for the machine.
You don't have to go in and put a whole bunch of more money into
that contractual agreements you have to pay benefits for the person.
So, it's really remarkable.
You go to an automotive facility,
ever been to a auto assembly plant where they're welding cars together?
Anybody seen that? It's really amazing stuff.
Imagine, Jurassic Park with machines.
Okay? These pterodactyls just coming down and sparks literally flying, giant robots.
Must be terribly expensive.
But 15 seconds after they've started that car is done.
Completely done. No wage,
no health care to worry about, no defects.
It's done. So, it turns out that for stuff like this,
it's worth spending a lot of money on a machine.
If it can be computerized,
it will be computerized.
That's what's happening unfortunately to the pilots.
Okay, it's actually happening less to the baggage handlers because
baggage handling equipment is pretty expensive and these folks are still really cheap.
But the frightening thing is,
this is the box where you're more at risk.
If you're pretty well-paid and what you do can be computerized, look out.
You're going to actually going to be okay.
What we're showing here is your competitor down
here is probably someone who's uneducated,
may or may not be living in this country,
could be overseas, could be an immigrant who's willing to work for very very little.
That's your competition.
You're actually pretty safe there because you're not going to be undercut
a whole lot but your wage will be limited to what those folks are being paid.
The computer comes in and you may be just,
I mean, their job could literally go away.
Then, if it's a matter,
as Dean Anderson said,
"If it's a matter of it involves a judgment call but it's pretty low stakes,
they're probably going to outsource that and send it overseas."
Okay? So, when you need someone to troubleshoot your computer,
that requires some judgment.
But if they get it wrong,
it's not the end of the world.
Okay. That's going to go to a call center in the Philippines.
Someone who's got about the same amount of education
you guys do and is willing to work for less.
So, I call the realm you want to be in,
the realm of high-stakes judgment,
the realm of solving mysteries.
I would strongly encourage you to think about that as you look at a career.
Don't look at it through the rear view mirror of where it's been,
what people have made in the past doing that.
Look at it especially from the standpoint of
whether it involves high stakes judgment and mysteries.
Be careful if it looks like the kind of thing that
a computer could pick up or that could be outsourced
efficiently to someone overseas who's about as
smart and educated as you are but willing to work for a whole lot less.
Now, we're at the point where I think an angry mob is gathering outside the door.
Is there any question that I might address in conclusion. Yeah.
>> Just with your respect to your time in SkyWest Airlines,
they've been a very good profitable company over the years.
I've heard it from Jerry Atkin's side,
but from your point of view as a Director,
what are some key things that they have done that have helped them to be so successful.
>> You know, frankly a lot of it goes back to Jerry, if you know him.
This is a guy who lives up in that right hand quadrant.
He really really knows the business.
Interestingly, I think one of the things he does is he does
two things extraordinarily well you wouldn't think there that valuable.
One is he gets to know people and people get to know him.
The other is he doesn't make rash judgments.
When the airline goes or the stock does this,
and Jerry's just steady.
His emotions never get the better of him.
The combination of fundamentally knowing the business, loving the people,
keeping your cool, that's been worth a lot to SkyWest and its employees.
>> Henry, thanks so much. Please join me in thanking Henry Eyring.
