Keynote Address: INSEAD MBA December 2016 Graduation Ceremony

The following is the text of the keynote address that I gave at the INSEAD December 2016 MBA Graduation Ceremony, held at the Théâtre Municipale, Fontainebleau on December 21, 2016:

The Dean, Faculty, Most especially the Graduating Students, Ladies and Gentlemen, as they say in my home country, Nigeria: ‘all protocols observed’:

Twenty-one years ago, almost to the day, I was sitting where you are, listening to a speaker who stood between me and the after-graduation party I had planned with some friends.

Sadly, I can no longer remember who the speaker was or what he said.

So it was with some trepidation that I accepted the request to speak at today’s event.

What could I say that would add value to you? To be frank, having just completed the course, and given that memories fade, you know far more than me at this point in time, and your knowledge is obviously fresher than mine is.

I decided to accept the request when I realised the one thing that I have, that I can guarantee none of you has.

Experience. Twenty years, of post-MBA experience.

So I will share some of my experiences post INSEAD, what I have learned from them, how having an MBA from INSEAD has assisted me, and some thoughts on what you can do to maximise the return on your investment.

First of all, you are privileged and you need to think about how you will use that privilege.

To be sitting here about to graduate from an elite business school means that you are enormously privileged; You are by some measures part of a global 0.1%.

Sitting there with a pile of student debt, some of you not knowing what job you will be going into, it may not feel that way. But I can assure you that it is the case. You have just completed some of the best education that is on offer globally. You are part of a powerful global network, and you have an excellent brand on your CVs.

You should always remember this; and you should always strive to use this privilege to make the world a better place in whatever way, large or small, that you can.

Because, you can.

You should also look to give back in whatever way that you can. I am lucky that my job, which involves financing infrastructure projects across Africa, has some directly positive impacts. For example, we are in the process of setting up a power company that will provide reliable, efficient electricity to 30 million Africans. Over the years, we at the Africa Finance Corporation have provided some $4.5 billion of financing to projects in 26 African countries.

But some of my proudest achievements are not necessarily work related. Helping a friend set up an academy in Ghana to get girls into top science and technology programmes worldwide is one such recent achievement. There are now 25 gifted young ladies from about six African countries receiving such an education.

Which of these two examples will have the greater long-term impact? Only time will tell.

Speaking about being part of the global 0.1%, the current populist trend, as marked by the UK’s Brexit vote and the election of Trump in the US, is something to watch. This anti-establishment trend seems quite widespread — the vote against the peace deal with the FARC in Colombia and the, unusual, voting out of a sitting president last year in my native Nigeria are, perhaps, further examples of this wave. There are many reasons for this and many ways of analysing the trend.

But for us, who are part of a community that distinguishes itself by being Global — INSEAD is, after all, the “Business School for the World”, this is a particularly worrying trend as we know that there are immense benefits from globalisation, openness and working together. However, those benefits aren’t always evenly spread. As part of the so-called “mobile elite”, you are well placed to benefit. But in democratic settings — and the world is becoming increasingly democratic — those who feel that they do not benefit also have a say, and, as we have seen, often a large say. In fact, if you believe that we belong to the global 0.1%, they have 99.9% of the say. We therefore need to think of how to make growth more inclusive. And the benefits of globalisation more widespread.

The second thing I would like to talk about is change. In 1995 when I was doing my MBA we didn’t have a Singapore Campus, so we used to go on an “East Asia” trip. I went on the one that year. When we were in Shanghai we were taken to what was literally a shed in the middle of a rice field and shown the model of a new “city” that was to be built. That “city” is now a part of Shanghai called Pudong. And it is a huge place with several iconic buildings. Including the tallest building in China. In fact, when you see footage of Shanghai on the television, it is usually Pudong that is being shown.

Change is constant. Both on a macro scale, in society, and on a micro scale, within your own organizations and yourselves. It is something you are equipped to deal with, but it isn’t something that you will always be comfortable dealing with. When doing my MBA I, at times, wondered about how organisational behaviour was relevant, but I have since found it to be one of the most important subjects that I learned while I was here. Because at some level it deals with the human side of change: at the individual level and at the organisational level. And organisations can be businesses, political units or, even countries.

As you progress in your careers, you will find that leading change — both internally, in your organisations, and externally in your ecosystems will become an increasingly important part of what you do. Prepare yourselves for this.

One cannot speak about change and not mention technology. Technology is the leading source of change.

My first degree was in Electronics and Electrical Engineering. I remember that one of the projects I did was on solar power. Conclusion: solar power was so expensive that it was only good for very specialised niches like powering satellites. How wrong I was. Just the other week we were discussing investing in a 100-megawatt solar power plant in the Northern part of Nigeria. For those who aren’t familiar with power, this is enough electricity to power over 36,000 American homes, and up to 600,000 Nigerian ones. It is the least cost option for a part of the world where only 40%, or so, of people are connected to the grid. And the impact of bringing power to people who haven’t had it before is profound.

As an aside, it is interesting how technology originally aimed at, or adopted by, one group of people can benefit totally different groups. My early career was in London in the 1980s and early 1990s. In those days, the “car phone” and then the mobile phone was for rich yuppies. Those same phones and the related technologies have now had profoundly positive effects on some of the poorest people in the world. Fishermen in the Indian subcontinent, for example, who can find out where there is a market for their catch and plan where to land accordingly. It is interesting to note that the first phones owned by many of the poorest people on earth are mobile phones, once considered a luxury good.

However, while technology can create immense net gains, like most things, it creates winners and losers. Part of the rise of populism that I referred to earlier, for instance, can be attributed to technology and the impact that it has had on certain types of jobs. This is another type of change that needs to be considered and dealt with. Looking forward, the dilemmas that will be created by the rise of artificial intelligence could prove to be mind bending. Hopefully, it will be another generation that will have to deal with those conundrums. Reading Isaac Asimov books may help.

This change affects all of us. When I graduated, the most popular careers were in consulting and finance. Most of my promotion went into these fields. Last year, as we got together for our 20th reunion it struck me what a large portion of them have pivoted — to use that hackneyed word — into tech. My roommate — Gretchen — who worked in industrial gases and chemicals before INSEAD, spent much of her career in the white goods industry, a lot of that in Europe. She is now working for a “big data” tech start-up in Pittsburgh, having also worked In automotive coatings, Industrial metal working and wearable tech. I, by the way, am still, doggedly, clinging on to finance, the industry I entered after INSEAD, as a metier…I am not sure what that says about my message about embracing change…

What advice can I give you about this? I certainly cannot predict which way things will go. I would never have been able to forecast the rise of such services as UBER or BlaBlaCar.

What I can say is that you need to accept that such change is inevitable and prepare yourself for it. It is no surprise that one of INSEAD’s values is lifelong learning. Although you have just received some of the best education on earth and are on top of your game you need to realise that the learning process hasn’t ended. In fact, in some ways it has just started. Always strive to keep your skills up to date, and in doing so look to broaden them as well as deepen them — I went to learn about Design Thinking this past summer as I believe that we can benefit from new approaches to thinking about and designing solutions for clients. In this regard, I can tell you that INSEAD offers some excellent executive education courses. I have been on a few….

I also read a lot and as diversely as possible as that helps one to have an idea of what is going on and to be able to understand it to some extent as well.

You also need to think about how you can build resilience into your lives — both personal and organisational. To become what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls anti-fragile.

You cannot really predict what the future holds so you have to prepare yourselves to be able to adapt to anything — or to as many things as possible. This resilience could be in having appropriate financial buffers, it could be in ensuring that you have the skill sets to cope with different situations, or that you have the creativity and innovativeness to deal with the unexpected.

As future leaders, you not only have to prepare yourselves for the change that is coming, but you will have to prepare your organisations for this change too. That is a much more difficult task. All the lessons of OB change management, strategic analysis, plus working with talented and diverse teams will help.

By the way, speaking about working in diverse teams in an INSEAD setting always reminds me of Period One group work…but that’s a different story.

The final thing I would like to talk about is the fact that life is a journey.

The fact that you are sitting here having earned an MBA means that you are driven. That drive will lead you to your future successes in life whatever they may be or however you may define them. But remember, and I apologise for being morbid here, that the ultimate destination in life is death. When you reach whatever goal you set for yourself, your life will go on and you will need to do something else. You thus need to enjoy the journey. And in fact I have come to the point of view that true internal success is not about what you achieve, not about what you earn, not even about what, or who, you impact, but about how you experience the journey.

In this sense, although I may not be considered the most successful person in my promotion by various objective measures — and we have amongst ourselves — the youngest CFO of Daimler Benz, the person responsible for keeping the Swiss Railways on time, and various startup entrepreneurs — to give a few examples, I consider myself very successful as I figured this out early enough to have, mostly, enjoyed my journey.

I have been very fortunate that my journey after INSEAD has allowed me to travel far and wide, visit places that I have read and wondered about, and to be part of a number of really impactful and game changing things. I always make a point, especially when visiting a new city on a business trip, to take time out to visit a place of interest that I may have read about or want to see; or, even better, to take part in some local activity, whether it be opera in Vienna, tango in Buenos Aires, wine tasting in Cape Town, eating at a Singaporean hawker market or simply wandering around Paris admiring its magnificent architecture.

However, the most important part of this journey is the relationships that one makes on the way. Some of the most profound relationships I have were those I made at INSEAD or through INSEAD, and one tip that I have is that you should work hard to build and to maintain those relationships. Stay in touch with your colleagues here, go to the INSEAD alumni gatherings, and help to build the INSEAD community wherever you end up. You can do this by helping to form an alumni club if there isn’t one, offering to interview candidates for the MBA programme, and by always responding when alumni, potential candidates or people from the school get in touch with you.

Of course INSEAD relationships are not everything. My friends and family relationships, especially with my wife and my daughter, are my greatest source of strength.

So remember:

Your privilege and how you use it;

Change and how you manage it;

Your journey and how you take it.

I will sign off with a few lines from the poem “Ithaka” by CP Cavafry, which was, incidentally, introduced to me by Linda Brimm, one half of a superlative husband and wife OB professor team while I was here at INSEAD:

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon — don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.

I wish you all exciting and successful journeys.