 |
[PDF Download of Speech]
Commencement Address
Delivered at The Petroleum Institute
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
C. D. Mote, Jr.
President, University of Maryland
Glenn L. Martin Professor of Engineering
January 5, 2008
Your Excellency, Mr. Yousef Omair Bin Yousef, members of the platform party, members of the Board and faculty of the Petroleum Institute, graduates and their families, and ladies and gentlemen, it is my esteemed honor to offer remarks at today's commencement ceremonies. I would first like to offer my sincere congratulations to all the graduates of the Petroleum Institute as you pass this milestone in your lives on this very special day. You will always remember this commencement day, even if you do not remember most of what is said. I congratulate your families for supporting and encouraging your study and preparation for the future. Your education can never be taken from you. It will prepare you for the future and help you understand the past.
I would especially like to thank His Excellency Mr. Yousef Omair Bin Yousef, Secretary General of the Supreme Petroleum Council and Chief Executive Officer of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, and Dr. Michael Ohadi, Chief Academic Officer and Executive Director of the Petroleum Institute, for extending the invitation to me to speak on this important day. This is indeed a privilege that I will always remember.
The University of Maryland has been collaborating with the Petroleum Institute since 2006. Many of the Institute faculty have productive relationships with faculty at the University of Maryland. Together, our faculties are building laboratories, conducting experiments, and publishing papers. Representatives from the University of Maryland have made frequent trips to Abu Dhabi this past year including faculty from our mechanical, and civil and environmental engineering departments. And students and faculty from the Petroleum Institute have visited our campus in Maryland, too. Personal contacts are the keys to building trust and collaboration.
We have shared knowledge, strategies, and philosophies. It has been a valuable exchange for the University of Maryland and I trust that the Petroleum Institute has benefited equally. We at Maryland are enthusiastic about expanding our work together with the Petroleum Institute in current and new directions of interest to our two institutions. We have much to learn from each other and to learn together. We are off to a strong and inspiring start. Our partnership reflects much of what today's graduates will see in their wider world: international collaboration, continuous education, and global citizenship. Our collaboration is based on values that are of great importance to you graduates too: trust and integrity. No matter how much any of us can accomplish, we will not succeed without trust and integrity. Finally, our university collaborations and you graduates also share the critically important interest—energy, an issue with significant long-term, global implications.
And now to today's graduates. Some of you may see a secure future ahead of you because you see that it is tied to the enormous wealth of natural resources in your country. Others may see a future that is less secure because of the uncertainties around the world: global, political, technological, climatological, and competitiveness issues are just some examples. As I gaze into my side of the crystal ball, I am reminded of a quotation from the great physicist, Albert Einstein who said "I never make predictions, especially about the future." Nonetheless, we all need to plan for the future. In deference to Einstein, we make guesses in order to decide how to best invest ourselves. Your education here was based on such a consideration.
Twenty-five hundred years ago the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, "The only constant is change." And the world is changing. Heraclitus told us so; your parents have told you so; your grandparents told them so, and so it has been throughout history.
Change happens. Predictions of change that turn out to be inaccurate are usually predictions of things that will not happen. When I was in college my father predicted that no one would walk on the moon in my lifetime. Microsoft founder Bill Gates predicted that no one needed more than one-half a megabyte of digital memory. Sixty-five years ago IBM President Thomas J. Watson predicted that the world needed no more than five computers. There are about 900 million personal computers out there today. On the other hand, predictions about what will happen have a remarkable way of coming true even if the date when they happen is incorrect. Exploration of space, achievements in health sciences, changes to our environment, advances in communications provide many such examples that were once considered science fiction.
So what is new about change that I want you to think about on your graduation day? It is the rate of change. The rate of change is just a lot higher than it used to be. And it is getting larger all the time. The signs of accelerating change are everywhere around us. Our vocabulary has changed—the words "web, net, link, surf, spam and megs" have entered our vocabulary. Where and how we live, work and communicate have changed dramatically. Mega-cities are growing world wide. Employees increasingly do not have offices at all—every place is a workplace. Two billion people have text message capability. Think about this. Ninety percent of the products that Intel Corporation sells on Dec 31st did not even exist on January 1st of that year. Mega-changes to our environment, security and technology are accelerating. This is a very exciting, if not a little scary, time that we live in.
The major inventions of the early part of the last century all had essentially zero penetration into the American household market for over twenty years. Inventions like the telephone, VCR, microwave oven, radio, television and the automobile had zero market penetration for over two decades after they were invented. The invention of electricity had zero market penetration for thirty years. The invention of the airplane had zero market penetration for over forty years.
Engineering jobs in those days were stable and long term.
But today's accelerating change brings new ideas to market much faster. Technologies, like the personal computer, invented in the 1970s, had American household penetration within seven years and reached a quarter of all households in sixteen years. The cell phone introduced in the 1980s penetrated in four years and reached a quarter of all households in thirteen years. The Internet was brought to market in the 1990s, penetrated American households within one year and reached a quarter of all households in seven years. It took fifty-five years for the automobile to reach a quarter of American households.
Change creates change exponentially. We have passed a tipping point. Transformative new technologies support technological changes elsewhere. The Internet drives change faster. Seven years ago when the dot-com bubble burst, the world was searching for a way to "make money" using the Internet. That is when fledgling Google, Inc. received its first investment. Now Google is the sixth largest corporation in America, and the nineteenth largest worldwide. Google was co-founded by a University of Maryland graduate Sergey Brin. The point is that change is not constant, as Heraclitus stated, it is accelerating.
Accelerating change shortens horizons—all types of horizons. For instance, investors today expect quick payback. Few new ideas will be funded today that will require decades to develop or that require an entirely new national infrastructure to implement, such as those that were required for electricity, the automobile and the airplane. The U.S. National Academy of Engineering chose electricity, the automobile, and the airplane as the top three engineering achievements of the last century that most transformed our lives. Imagine how different living would be today without any one of these creations. This is a plug for engineers and engineering to be certain. But it also shows how the world has changed.
Accelerating change shortens the corporate horizon. Short-time horizons surge through corporate operations, planning and employees. Jobs and operations locate around the globe. The connections between people and the disassembly product lines are made via the Internet. With increasingly fewer exceptions people everywhere really can do the same work. Engineering is affected by these changes. You will have to know how to work, manage and collaborate with institutions and people around the world.
Global connectedness accelerates change. It creates opportunities for jobs, markets and new businesses. But global connectedness creates challenges, too, like control of disease transmission, ensuring security of your homeland and food supplies, providing access to energy supplies, and responding to accelerating environmental degradation. The dramatic rise in the seriousness of global sustainability over the past several years is an exemplar of the broadly accelerating change that we are experiencing. The engineers will develop technologies that will allow us to live in a sustainable world.
You will lead this rapidly changing world. But it will be a challenging one for people without the right training and insights on change. Fortunately, you have a first-class education, which is an important starting point. I would like to offer to you some thoughts on your way to taking up a leadership responsibility.
To prosper today you must be prepared to change with this changing world, to be flexible, and to accept the reality that the world sets its sights on short time horizons. The needs of this changing world will not adapt to your skills. This world will find the skills it needs wherever they are. These days the world is more likely to acquire skills than develop them, as it used to do. The shortened time horizon brings opportunities to those with the right skills and often, painful problems to those without them. Layoffs and recruitments to find people with the right skills will occur within the same field at the same time. And the capabilities that are in high demand today will often change abruptly.
For a happy and fulfilled life in the world before you, you will need to prepare yourself both professionally and emotionally for continuing large and rapid change. If you can, try to go with change—swim downstream if possible. You can go farther with the effort you expend if you adapt to change rather than fight against it. Swimming upstream against change is too exhausting to be sustained for very long. And you cannot get very far.
On occasion you may have to stand firmly, like a rock in the stream, on matters of principle, and you should never hesitate to do so. High personal integrity is your most important asset. You can never succeed without it. When lost, integrity may never be recovered. U.S. Senator Alan Simpson put it this way, "If you have integrity nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters."
In your preparation for change, remember that your education is a journey, not a destination. You have earned your degree but to remain prepared for change you will be on this education road from now on. If you stop along the way in this world, be prepared to be run over. The world will not stop with you.
Preparation for a changing world calls on you to be a citizen of the world—travel, learn and embrace differences of all types. You will be enlightened by your experiences and better prepared for change.
Graduates, your future is in your hands, and it will be a different one from those of earlier generations. I am confident that you will make the most of it for yourselves, your country and our world. A responsibility of great leadership is the passage of your knowledge and experiences to others. Take someone under your wing, as others have done for you. Wise counsel is offered in a quotation from a book titled "The Wisdom of the Arabs" by Professor Suheil Bushrui of the University of Maryland and a close personal friend. It says "The best of men is he who acquires learning, but better than him is the one that transmits it."
With that counsel I close my remarks and offer best wishes for your careers and lives ahead. You have good reason to be proud of your achievements. The faculty, the staff and the management at the Petroleum Institute have also contributed greatly to this day. This is also their celebration. We would not be here today without the visionaries who establish the Petroleum Institute; His Highness Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan authorized creation of the Petroleum Institute in 2001; His Excellency Yousef Omair Bin Yousef is steadfast in his leadership, devotion and stewardship of the Petroleum Institute; the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, along with BP, Shell, TOTAL, and JUDCO have been absolutely essential to the spectacular progress of the Institute; and the general managers of both the local industry and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company have inspired vital cooperative support.
To the graduates, faculty, and all of the players who have worked together so diligently, I congratulate you all. I do hope that your travels will bring you to Washington, D.C. The University of Maryland is located there and I would be pleased to open our doors to you. In this ever-shrinking world I bring congratulations from the University of Maryland to you and to the Petroleum Institute on the celebration of this momentous occasion.
 |
|
