Graduation Address

" 'Life is a Complex Business…' Spring Convocation" (16 May 1980). (UA Case 67, Box 2)

Mr. Chancellor, Honoured Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen:

It would take a much more stoic person than I am, to accept this honour without being moved.

This is my home province, my roots are here and it means a great deal to me to be so richly rewarded by you.

When Dr. Condon first told me that I was to be so honoured, he suggested that success should be rewarded. His comment made me think hard about what success is and what it means. Is success just happiness – happiness success?

Somerset Maughan once said that success makes people humble, tolerant and kind; it is failure that makes people cruel and bitter. I would like to turn that around and say that what makes us humble, tolerant and kind makes us successful by definition.

Let us for the purposes of discussion define a successful life as one which in the perspective of later years pleases us. That’s a "real life" definition, simple and straightforward. What will we have to do to earn that kind of success? What are the keys to success if success is defined as a life which we later recognize as rich, rewarding and pleasing to us?

A man wise in the ways of the world and of people in the world has told us that there are six essential qualities which are the keys to a successful life. Dr. William Menninger listed those qualities as being sincerity, personal integrity, humility, courtesy, wisdom and charity.

None of them are qualities which can be taught though like those "rights" we keep hearing about, all can be acquired.

It is difficult for institutions of higher learning to see that students acquire such qualities. The difficulties involved in teaching them are immense.

It is our task as individuals to gain those qualities and to use them in our daily lives, knowing that no one can teach us such things unless we are ourselves eager and willing to learn them.

We have all encountered people from whom we have learned the value of such qualities. Sometimes we learn their worth simply by seeing what their absence does to a person: less often we see an outstanding example of how qualities like these can transform an individual’s personality.

Life is a complex business whether it is lived out in business, in public administration, in a learned profession – even in the home; and often our difficulties are defining what actions, what words best manifest that which we know we should feel and think. For Doctor Menninger’s list of qualities are manifestations of attitude rather than things in themselves.

So each of us is tested in the crucible of life to demonstrate what is meant when we speak of sincerity, integrity, humility, courtesy, wisdom and charity.

I am no more able than anyone else to teach these things, I can speak about the business world and leave it to your wisdom to discern whatever lessons there may be for you if you are going into some other field of endeavour. After all, business is not a way of living that is different from every other form of human endeavour. Business is simply people applying their skills to a particular task which has been organized to meet human needs just as public administration has been organized to meet other human needs.

The principle difference is that most businesses have been assembled in the context of a market and are conducted under the disciplines of the financial system which has evolved in this country.

That in itself does not make business as unique as some business people would like to think. Business is not a matter of grubbing for money. It is no less noble or more greedy than other fields. The one unique thing which sets business apart from public administration or the professions is that the success of a business organization can be measured by its profit when that profit is compared to other similar enterprises.

The main virtue of that yardstick is that it promotes efficiency which in turn should lead to the lowest economic prices for the consumers.

Every field of human endeavour poses challenges and people respond to those challenges in their own way. The challenges may be different, but the response will be what our character dictates.

It is governed by our commitment to sincerity and integrity, it is moulded by humility, courtesy, and wisdom. Our judgement is tempered by our capacity for charity in judging others.

One of the most important things we can do is to ask ourselves repeatedly how those qualities can help us and what we must do to put them into practice in the life we lead. Perhaps we should often ask about the ultimate goal of the activities we undertake. Occasional self-examination keeps the psychic weeds out of our mental garden!

For some people the only goal in life is to further their career. I advise caution about this. I have seen too many people for whom a career is sort of artifact, a totem – shall we say an icon which they carry around with them and by which they measure what they should do, to whom they should speak and what they should say.

A career is what happens to you in pursuit of goals – not something you carve out of society regardless of other purposes.

People who have been highly trained – as you are highly trained – ought not to pursue a career in that way. Your goal should be to work to the standards set by your skills; to use your skills for a purpose. Your goal should be to judge wisely and at the right time, say that which you have come to believe out of your experience and wisdom.

That is professionalism.

Professionalism in the service of something outside your personal career is more rewarding than pursuit of personal gain. Enough of those rewards will be financial. The important ones will be rather different.

I have been fortunate in that people have given me many opportunities to do things. I have been challenged to accomplish some things. In doing what I could, I have sometimes been surprised to find that I was rewarded beyond the internalized reward of knowing I had done something useful. I have never consciously pursued a career, which is one reason why my life’s work has been rewarding for me. Those rewards have been much greater than any material benefit could ever be.

The opportunity came to me to guide and direct one of Canada’s best known corporations. It is a company which has made a great contribution to Canada and has served Canadians well. When I became its Chief Executive Officer, it has been madly mauled by public events I need not go into. Staff confidence was faltering and public confidence had been severely strained.

But the great qualities that had made that company successful in the past were still there. There was a reservoir of capability, a virtual mother-load of loyalty waiting to be called forth.

Today the staff have self-confidence, faith in the company’s ability to meet and beat the competition which is very intense.

You all know that the company is operating profitably and renewing its fleet with an investment program of many billions of dollars. All those things were possible because the people who make up that company have committed themselves to something far beyond immediate rewards. After all it is a crown corporation. If it makes profits it is so it can renew itself and continue to serve its public. We have shown that when people are challenged, they respond.

At Air Canada we have six basic principles which are guides for senior executives. They are: professionalism, teamwork, integrity, candour, equality (by which we mean that we are concerned about the best interests of all employees and respect their personal dignity) and adaptability.

You will see at once that these are the practical expressions of the qualities Menninger defined as the ingredients of success.

It is no accident that the qualities that make for personal success and personal happiness should be those qualities which make a corporation prosper and thrive.

A corporation, being an impersonal entity, cannot in itself be happy. Yet any corporation which provides a worthy service assumes a corporate character of its own, an entity which goes beyond the assembly of people who work for it and make it function.

In this sense a corporation or any organization has some rights; some expectation of what those engaged in it owe to its posterity. We who manage today, are in that sense trustees for a future generation of managers. We owe the future something and we cannot pay that debt by maximizing our personal returns, whether those returns be expressed in vanity or finance.

That same concept is true for departments of government and it is true, too for the learned professions. What we can achieve to make our field of work better for those who follow us will, to a large extent, measure the worth of what we do: certainly it will measure it a great deal better than sums of money in the bank. This is because it will effectively measure our gains from what we do.

I suppose there are two ways of looking at life: one where we seek the financial rewards so that we can do what we really want to do and the other where we do what we really want to do and find ways of doing so that will be financially rewarding.

I am voting for the second way because it is the way I have lived. I am, I think, a typical New Brunswicker.

When I come back to New Brunswick and especially today I cannot avoid a deep consciousness of what New Brunswick life did to mould and shape me. I cannot define precisely what the forces were. Nor can I explain the subtleties of the way I was taught to look at life as I grew up in Salisbury.

I know from what I have learned in later life that we were rather poor financially and that we faced adversity.

I do not recommend adversity. I do not recommend that any of you go out looking for it at any rate. But if it should come, do not flinch or turn away, for in adversity we are tempered and develop those qualities of which I spoke at the beginning.

We learn to be sincere when we find that insincerity seldom deceives others and always deceives ourselves.

We learn the value of personal integrity when we find we have come through some trouble with our self-respect enhanced.

We learn humility when we over-reach ourselves and suffer the consequences.

We learn courtesy when we meet unkindness and feel how deeply it cuts into us.

We learn wisdom slowly. Aristotle makes the distinction between education, knowledge and wisdom. We cannot be wise without knowledge, we may acquire knowledge and enhance our ability to use it through education; but wisdom comes from living, from applying our skills and judging how well we have measured situations, from being open to the feelings of others and from giving them the courtesy of believing they feel as deeply as we do and may even have as much knowledge and education as we do.

Wisdom: How hard won a virtue!

Charity is something else. I am a practicing churchgoing person and charity means to me exactly what St. Paul said. Charity is love for our fellow human beings – a love that cannot be extinguished except if we ourselves choose to let it die in us.

We may have rivals for positions, for place, for someone’s affection. We do not need to hate them: we do not need to make enemies out of rivals. Nor need we return enmity if it should come our way.

If we can find within ourselves the ability to love, our own mind will not be encumbered with that most destructive emotion: hate.

We do ourselves some good that way.

If you would be successful in the way I define success, if you would lead a rich and rewarding life, you will be well advised to seek to accomplish something useful and you can do that in business, in public administration, in the arts, in a profession. But you will be wise to avoid doing things just for yourself because you will find you have not done very much at all.

If there is any good reason why I have been singled out and invited here today it must be that something I have done has been thought to be useful to others.

In that I find great contentment, great happiness: in that I find richer rewards than any other I have been given in my life – and it has not been unrewarding in the scale by which I measure such things.

If I have learned anything that is useful to others it is that simple, and perhaps, age-old concept that happiness comes from doing things for others.

If any of you find these remarks of mine useful, then I have accomplished something else today to add to my already very great sense of gratitude to all of you for hearing me speak.