Peter Booth
Ceremony: 16 October 2017, 2.00pm
Speech
Chancellor, deputy vice chancellors, Provost and Acting Vice Chancellor, members of the UTS Council, Chair of Academic Board, my colleagues, family, friends, and most importantly of all, today’s graduates. What a great occasion to see you here today. I’d also like at this point to acknowledge my wife, my mother and my brother who are here today, to [inaudible] becoming a UTS alumnus, and unfortunately my father, who was unwell and couldn’t make it today, and I want to thank them for their support and contribution for the work for which I’m being acknowledged. And I also pay my respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation on whose lands we meet today, and acknowledge their elders past and present as traditional custodians of knowledge for this place. A particular welcome to those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander persons here today.
Graduates, it was with some trepidation, even though I’ve sat through over 150 ceremonies over the last 20 years, and talked at many of those, to be asked to present a talk to you today, because I’ve seen some clangers [laughs] and I’ve seen some fantastic graduation speeches over that period. I hope to be in the top [inaudible] above the mean – that’s my aim for today. Most importantly, this is about you. You’ve achieved something that’s quite remarkable, whether this is your first or second degree, and I hope you realise the importance of what you’ve achieved.
As the Chancellor said, you’ve graduated from one of the finest business schools in the world, from one of the top echelon of universities in the world – in the top 2 per cent globally out of 10,000 institutions. It’s a pretty remarkable achievement. Your degrees, as the Chancellor mentioned, have enviable reputations, forged by the graduates who’ve gone before you out into the world, and created those reputations. You’ve inherited those reputations, and I have every confidence that you will go forth and recreate those reputations again.
So, and genuinely this, today, is about you, and I do want to say you have my sincere congratulations and best wishes. Family and friends, however, UTS is a rather young and brash institution in global terms. You’ve been very quiet today. Fantastic graduates here. I’m going to give you a chance to show what you really think of them. I’m going to count down from three – the tiles are very strong, okay? Three, two, one.
Okay! I’m supposed to stick to eight minutes, so you can’t go on too long,
And that’s for you – you deserve it. Hopefully you’re all going out tonight to celebrate your achievements with family and friends. I hope you have joyful events and a really great time celebrating. I do remind you, however, that you are UTS graduates, and appropriate decorum and behaviour must apply when you celebrate. You don’t want to see our institution’s name on the pages of the Daily Telegraph tomorrow. If, however, you fail to live up to my expectations tonight, just drop the Technology bit.
That was a special request – I’ve only used that joke at every graduation for the last 15 years, so you were okay. You laughed.
More seriously, what comments could I pass on to you as you continue to forge your careers? Most of you are at the front-end of your careers; mine is at its end, and I’m doing less and less, and I’m enjoying doing less and less. When I first graduated, many decades ago, it was a totally different world to the one you will forge your careers to. And there’s very obvious things – no mobile phones, thank god. No PCs, no internet and email, until 10 years into my career. I mean, it’s a remarkably different world, and I say that because yours, equally, in 20 or 30 years time, will be as different, if not more so. So you have to learn how to deal with those challenges. The Chancellor mentioned that, but equally, many things stay the same, and I want to focus on those things, a little bit, which stay the same, because it’s the only way to cope with the change that happens.
So I note change will be a constant, and I know one other thing will be a constant – commentators who predict the outcome of that change will be wrong, because they usually are. Ten years ago, the PC and the internet were supposed to deliver us paperless offices. Have you ever been into a lawyer’s office? You’ll know that that is the greatest fallacy upon mankind. So, you need to rise to the challenge. You need to embrace that challenge, because the change will happen. If you see it as a problem, then that is the mistake. But equally, when you rise to the challenge, it’s equally a mistake to accept the change outcomes as inevitable, because all futures have to be shaped and forged, and this institution is a good example of that.
If we’d accepted that it wasn’t a premier institution 20 years ago, it wouldn’t be one today, because it was only by forging the change and shaping a future that I’m able to say that you’ve graduated from one of the finest institutions in the world. And that goes for any workplace or any part of your lives that you go out and do. And what becomes a constant in that, the same in my career as to your career, are behavioural matters. The Chancellor touched on these. In the end, skills, abilities, knowledge are important, and I certainly strongly encourage you to keep on learning. I’m still learning, many, many years after my first degree, and you should be as well. But it is behavioural skills and attributes that will make the biggest difference.
We live and work in a social world; organisations are about people; they’re not about knowledge and skills. In the end, they’re totally about people. And there are six things about that world that I’d like to emphasise, which I think are important. Firstly is respect – respect for all. Treat everyone with respect, regardless of their status, ethnicity, your self-interest, whatever it is. Treat everyone with respect. I make it a point to talk to anyone in my organisation. I try to be friends with everyone. They don’t always think that back here, or they never used to, but I did try. At the minimum, I can guarantee you’ll be a happier person and you’ll enjoy your life more, but more importantly, those you interact with will be happier and more positive about their lives and their working with you.
More importantly, think about integrity and authenticity. The Chancellor mentioned this: do everything with the highest integrity. If you don’t think it’s the right thing to do, it’s very simple. Don’t do it. You will be pushed to the limit sometimes to ignore things, or to make outcomes or do things that you don’t think is right. Always challenge those situations. In the end, your integrity is all you have in the workplace. If you give that up, you can never get it back, so stick to that; I plead with you to do so. Also, be authentic. You need to be who you are. Life is an endless, multi-period game – that’s the economist in me coming out; sorry about that. Life is an endless, multi-period game. You can keep the façade up for a little bit, but you can’t keep it up year after year after year. In the end, people will see through a façade, so you have to be you. Be you with a passion, but also work hard on making sure you are someone worth knowing and someone worth working with, because if you don’t work on that, you know, it is a multi-period game and you’ll bear the consequences.
Third thing I’d like to mention is listening. Being an active listener, a thoughtful listener – it’s the most important communication skill you can have. Some of my colleagues behind me at this point are going to say, ‘Peter, you tended to fail at that quite regularly’, and they’re right. But I always tried to be a better listener during my careers, because it’s how you learn, and it is how you show respect for others. So you can think about at least why they have a different opinion to you, why they have a different viewpoint on something. Listening is one of the key organisational skills.
Next: observe and learn. Watch others who are better at things than you are – the Chancellor mentioned this – or more successful, and try to understand how they do it. It’s amazing what you can learn with never having asked a question if you just watch others go about their work and their life. My wife will tell you that I’m an inveterate observer of people, which drives her to distraction at times, but I find it fascinating the way people go about the world and the way they interact and what they do. And I’ve learned a lot through watching successful leaders do their job. I’ve learned then how to adapt that into my life and into my way of working so that I can be better at what I do, and not have to put on a façade. So, do that, and you will learn, but remember, it’s not about copying others; it’s about learning from others and integrating it into what you are. If you can do that, you’ll actually perform more highly.
Next, I’d like to emphasise embracing diversity. As this ceremony itself evidences, we all bring different cultures, ideas, skills, experience and capabilities to any setting. It’s the total synergistic effects of that diversity that lead to great outcomes. There’s a great danger in organisations of being like me – managers have a great temptation to hire people who are like them. That way lies failure. I’ve seen it time and time again. I learned from one of my bosses many years ago, who was so diametrically the opposite to me, that I couldn’t figure out why he would even want to work with me, and I struggled to work with him, initially, and he said to me exactly that: ‘I picked you because you’re the opposite of all my weaknesses, so you are like the other half of me I should have, but I haven’t got.’ And so we fought endlessly about decisions, but in the end, we all came up with better outcomes, which was great. And I’ve learned from that, embracing diversity, and more so from cultural diversity and so on and so on, in a modern world you can’t go wrong.
Finally, work life balance. It has been one of my bugbears, and one I worry about most in the modern world, that there’s too much pressure on work and that our personal and family lives have to cop out, and are not sustainable. I don’t know if you read recently a story of a young Japanese journalist who died a few years ago after doing 160 hours overtime in one month. I mean, that’s 40 hours overtime a week. That’s double work. I mean, basically the girl didn’t sleep for a month, and she died from the health effects. I know a young professional who recently told me that having changed jobs, her new job was sending her 20-30 emails over the weekend, and then rebuking her for not responding, indicating that’s not how you perform in this industry. Now, surely, we can’t find those two stories acceptable. I mean, that is not a sustainable world, it’s not a sustainable organisation. We need all to be better than that. We need to take our holidays, we need to work reasonable hard hours, we need to engage with our families and our friends. I’ve seen what you guys do when you’re here as students, working and studying and doing things – I don’t know whether you sleep occasionally; you must do occasionally, but you push it to the limit. You can do that while you’re in your 20s, you can sustain it a little bit in your 30s; you can’t sustain it into your 40s and 50s, so you need to work out another way of living before then. I encourage you strongly to do so.
I’ve worked these ideas over my 20 years of a management career. I’ve tried to be better at all of them, and to be honest, I’ve probably been 70 per cent successful at addressing those three points. I know I’ve done better because I tried, and I hope that you’ll think about them and perhaps integrate them into your lives. So again, a very warm congratulations to you all, and I wish you all the best in your careers and it’s a great pleasure for me to join you as a UTS alumnus.
About the Speaker
Emeritus Professor Peter Booth holds a Bachelor of Economics from the University of Sydney, a Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary) from the Sydney Teachers College, a Master of Economics from the University of New England and a Doctor of Philosophy from Griffith University.
Peter began his academic career in 1977 at the University of New England as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Accounting and Financial Management. He subsequently became a Lecturer at La Trobe University and Griffith University where he undertook his PhD. He became a Senior Lecturer in Accounting at the University of New South Wales in 1988 and moved to the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in 1993 as Professor of Management Accounting.
During his career at UTS, Peter held a number of senior positions in the (then) Faculty of Business, including Associate Dean (Research and Development) and Dean, prior to being appointed to the position now titled Provost in 2002.
As Dean of Business, Peter strengthened the strategic focus of the Faculty, developed the Faculty's research interests and drove the strategic expansion of the Faculty's operations and partnerships overseas. During Peter’s term as Dean, the Executive MBA was launched; the Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation joined UTS; the Centre for Corporate Governance and Centre for Quantitative Finance Research were established; and UTS’s relationship with the University of Shanghai through the Sydney Institute of Language and Commerce was developed.
Peter has had an enormous impact on the University during his fourteen years as Provost. He has made major contributions to the management and development of the University, including undertaking a major review of UTS’s strategic plan resulting in UTS’s aspirational goal of being a world-leading university of technology – an aspiration and direction that has continued to hold true for UTS. Other major achievements include: restructuring the University’s faculties; managing the growth of new UTS disciplines through the Graduate School of Health; developing UTS’s business intelligence and feedback systems to deliver sophisticated and reliable load planning and a robust key performance indicator framework; managing major transitions such as the closure of Kuring-gai campus and the development of the UTS Moore Park Precinct; guiding UTS’s major regulatory activities, including the Australian Universities Quality Agency and the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency registrations and compliance; and nurturing UTS’s commitment to the development of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and staff.
Peter has made an outstanding contribution to the development of UTS, being key to its growth, reputation and success. He has been at the forefront of the development of UTS’s strategic direction as well as having the primary responsibility for its implementation through UTS’s core activities in faculties.
