University of Illinois

President // Speeches and Statements

KEYNOTE REMARKS BY B. JOSEPH WHITE
Tri-Service Military Awards Ceremony
Foellinger Auditorium, Urbana Campus
April 14, 2007

 

Thank you for the honor of speaking to you this morning.

Congratulations to each of you on your membership in ROTC and on your achievements in leadership, discipline, academics, character and citizenship.

I wrote my recent book, “The Nature of Leadership,” for people exactly like you. On page 1, I say: “Leadership matters. We need people like you, our best and brightest, to aspire to great leadership. … The directions leaders set, the results they achieve, and the values and tone with which they imbue their organizations have a profound effect on the quality of our world and our individual lives.”

You here this morning are, truly, our best and our brightest. You are the young leaders on whom the world’s future depends. On behalf of the entire University of Illinois community, I want to express to you and your families our admiration for you and our appreciation of you.

Colonel Retallick asked me to speak with you this morning about my leadership philosophy. I think you’ll find that it is pretty straightforward.

Great leadership — the only kind worth aspiring to — is about making positive, consequential change in the results for which you are responsible.

For Lincoln, it was saving the Union and ending slavery.

For Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, it was bringing about a bloodless end to apartheid in South Africa.

For 20-year-old Wendy Kopp, a junior at Princeton, it was marrying up the talents of idealistic young college graduates and the crying needs of America’s children in underprivileged rural and urban areas through an organization she created called Teach for America. That was 20 years ago. Today, Teach for America is the largest single employer of new college graduates in our country.

For you, on military duty, leadership may be delivering freedom and security to people who are not free or not secure. That may involve securing a bridge or getting a balky logistics system to work or turning around the morale of men and women in your command.

From Lincoln to you, it’s really all the same leadership work: Making positive, consequential change in the results for which you are responsible.

For years, people have asked me: “How do you lead?” And I tell them, it’s simple:

-- Set high aspirations for yourself and your organization
-- Recruit great people to work with you, people who are capable of both individual excellence and superb teamwork.
-- Then, add the sweat. There’s no substitute for hard work, sustained effort and resilience in the face of adversity.

My favorite leadership story on this campus is about Tim Nugent, a man you’ve probably never heard of. Today, Tim is 84. He’s one of my heroes.

Why? Because anywhere in the world you see curb cuts, and access ramps, and handicap parking signs, and incredible athletes with disabilities playing nearly every sport — it’s mostly because of Tim Nugent.

Fifty years ago, parents with a child born with a disabling birth defect were told, “Put her in an institution, don’t let her exercise too much, and we’re sorry, she has little future.” But Tim Nugent didn’t buy it. Tim was a great leader; and he changed the world.

Tim set high aspirations. He believed that people in wheelchairs should have access to everything — education, jobs, athletic competition, art, love and marriage.

Tim gathered great people around him — people like Jean Driscoll, who graduated twice from the University of Illinois and in the 1990s won the Boston Marathon, Women’s Wheelchair Division, eight times.

By the way, one thing leaders have to be is demanding as well as supportive. When Tim and Jean and I met last week, he reminisced not only about her eight Boston Marathon wins but also about the two which, in his opinion, she should have won! Jean works for the University today, she’s a great friend to me, and I couldn’t admire her more.

And Tim worked like a dog. People told him he was nuts, that he was obsessed, that he needed to be more reasonable, to accept things as they were. He worked for years with no budget, just raising money from anyone who would listen, and putting every dollar to good use. He’s a modest man with a wonderful smile. But if you can get Tim talking about what it took to change the world — first at U of I and then beyond — it’s a reminder that nothing really good comes easily.

So now back to you. What is the mark you are going to make on our world? The military gives you the best opportunity of any organization I know to exercise leadership at a young age, discover your passions and learn how to be effective. History says that the combination of a U of I education and your military experience will put you on a path to high achievement for the rest of your life. Your job is to figure out what kind of achievement.

Perhaps the military will be your career. But most of you will ultimately make your mark in business or law or medicine, perhaps in journalism or academic life or something else. There’s plenty of time to figure that out.

Meanwhile, you already have and you continue to develop the habits of high achieving leaders. You’re disciplined, hard working and respectful of authority — but not in awe of it. You focus on results and you don’t make excuses — you know you’re accountable. You understand that respect for you as a leader can’t be granted; it has to be earned by serving others well and helping them achieve their goals.

Maybe this is a good time to interject a quick story. The best leaders are really good at understanding the dreams of their people, then helping them fulfill those dreams. For example, when Steve Jobs, the chairman of Apple, was recruiting John Sculley, then president of Pepsi, to become CEO of Apple, he got Sculley to say yes with the greatest recruiting line of all time. “Look John,” said Steve, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water or do you want to change the world?”

Understanding the dreams of your men and women is important for a leader, but it’s not always easy. This was brought home to me recently when my little grandson, Bernie, got the part of Joseph in his nursery school’s Christmas pageant. My wife and my son and daughter-in-law thought this was great — Joseph, after all, is one of the Big Three parts in the Christmas story. But my son, Brian, told us that Bernie was downcast for a couple of days after getting the part. Driving home from school one day, Brian asked him what the problem was. “Dad,” said Bernie, “I wanted to be the donkey!”

So, you have a lot of leadership challenges in front of you.

-- Like figuring out your people’s dreams and then helping make them come true.
-- Like being tough as nails and warm as toast, each as required.
-- Like making sure that your personal integrity is rock solid because as we see over and over again — now, by the way, with Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank — that when your integrity is tarnished, so is your authority and respect for you and, ultimately, your ability to lead.

You’re on a great trajectory, each and every one of you. You are smart, talented, well-educated and high achieving. You are simultaneously serving your nation and the cause of freedom while learning the leadership ropes.
Your University and I, as its president, couldn’t be prouder of you.

Congratulations and Godspeed to each of you.