President
Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the
Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty,
parents, and especially, the graduates:
I’ve been
waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back
and get my degree.”
I want to
thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year … and it
will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.
I applaud
the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my
part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has called me “Harvard’s most successful
dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class … I did
the best of everyone who failed.
But I
also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of
business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your
graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here
today.
Harvard
was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used
to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific.
I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in
my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t
worry about getting up in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of
the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our
rejection of all those social people.
Radcliffe
was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys
were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know
what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds
doesn’t guarantee success.
One of my
biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from
Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world’s
first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.
I worried
that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me.
Instead they said: “We’re not quite ready, come see us in a month,” which was a
good thing, because we hadn’t written the software yet. From that moment, I
worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of
my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.
What I
remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and
intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even
discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege – and though
I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made,
and the ideas I worked on.
But
taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.
I left
Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the
appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn
millions of people to lives of despair.
I learned
a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great
exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.
But
humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those
discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong
public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing
inequity is the highest human achievement.
I left
campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of
educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the
millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing
countries.
It took
me decades to find out.
You
graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world’s
inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you’ve
had a chance to think about how – in this age of accelerating technology – we
can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.
Imagine,
just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few
dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted to spend that time and
money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where
would you spend it?
For
Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for
the greatest number with the resources we have.
During
our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the
millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases
that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria,
pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of,
rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the
United States.
We were
shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they
could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the
medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were
interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.
If you
believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some
lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This
can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our
giving.”
So we
began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could
the world let these children die?”
The
answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of
these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died
because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice
in the system.
But you
and I have both.
We can
make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative
capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people
can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering
from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to
spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who
pay the taxes.
If we can
find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits
for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to
reduce inequity in the world.
This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to
answer this challenge will change the world.
I am
optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no
hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be
with us till the end – because people just … don’t … care.”
I completely disagree.
I believe
we have more caring than we know what to do with.
All of us
here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke
our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because we didn’t care, but because we
didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.
The
barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.
To turn
caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the
impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.
Even with
the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise
to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials
immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the
cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.
But if
the officials were brutally honest, they would say: “Of all the people in the
world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them
were on this plane. We’re determined to do everything possible to solve the
problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent.”
The
bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.
We don’t
read much about these deaths. The media covers what’s new – and millions of
people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it’s easier
to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it’s difficult to keep
our eyes on the problem. It’s hard to look at suffering if the situation is so
complex that we don’t know how to help. And so we look away.
If we can
really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step:
cutting through the complexity to find a solution.
Finding
solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have
clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks “How can I
help?,” then we can get action – and we can make sure that none of the caring
in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action
for everyone who cares — and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.
Cutting
through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages:
determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal
technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest
application of the technology that you already have — whether it’s something
sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.
The AIDS
epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease.
The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a
vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug
companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to
take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have
in hand – and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to
avoid risky behavior.
Pursuing
that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial
thing is to never stop thinking and working – and never do what we did with
malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century – which is to surrender to
complexity and quit.
The final
step – after seeing the problem and finding an approach – is to measure the
impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn
from your efforts.
You have
to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program
is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in
the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to
improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and
government.
But if
you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers;
you have to convey the human impact of the work – so people can feel what
saving a life means to the families affected.
I
remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel
that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the
thrill of saving just one person’s life – then multiply that by millions. … Yet
this was the most boring panel I’ve ever been on – ever. So boring even I
couldn’t bear it.
What made
that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event
where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had
people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited
about software – but why can’t we generate even more excitement for saving
lives?
You can’t
get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how
you do that – is a complex question.
Still,
I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we
have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new –
they can help us make the most of our caring – and that’s why the future can be
different from the past.
The
defining and ongoing innovations of this age – biotechnology, the computer, the
Internet – give us a chance we’ve never had before to end extreme poverty and
end death from preventable disease.
Sixty
years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to
assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: “I think one difficulty is that
the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts
presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for
the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is
virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of
the situation.”
Thirty
years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me,
technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more
visible, less distant.
The
emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that
has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.
The
magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and
makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of
brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem – and that
scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.
At the
same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology,
five people don’t. That means many creative minds are left out of this
discussion — smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience
who don’t have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas
to the world.
We need
as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these
advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one
another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for
universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see
problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address
the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago.
Members
of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of
intellectual talent in the world.
What for?
There is
no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of
Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around
the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving
the lives of people who will never even hear its name?
Let me
make a request of the deans and the professors – the intellectual leaders here
at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and
determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:
Should
our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?
Should
Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world’s worst inequities? Should
Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty … the prevalence of
world hunger … the scarcity of clean water …the girls kept out of school … the
children who die from diseases we can cure?
Should
the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s least
privileged?
These are
not rhetorical questions – you will answer with your policies.
My
mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here – never stopped
pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a
bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had
written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw
one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she
said: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”
When you
consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given – in talent,
privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limit to what the world has a
right to expect from us.
In line
with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to
take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist
on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But
you don’t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you
can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the
same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.
Don’t let
complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one
of the great experiences of your lives.
You
graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have
technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global
inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have
an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose
lives you could change with very little effort.
You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.
Knowing
what you know, how could you not?
And I
hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what
you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge
yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well
you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities … on how well you treated
people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.
Good
luck.
