Elaine Henry OAM
Chair, National Breast Cancer Foundation
Ceremony: 11 October 2019, 10:30am - UTS Business School
Pro-Chancellor, Provost, Deputy Dean, Presiding Director, Members of the University Executive, Council and Academic Board, staff, family, friends and, most importantly, Graduates of the UTS Business School.
I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and pay my respects to their elders past, present and to come.
Graduates, cherish this moment and store it carefully in your memory bank. You can feel justifiably proud of your achievement and no matter what life has in store for you no-one can take this from you. Reflect on the sacrifices, the hardships and the challenges and take the learnings forward in your career and indeed your life confident in your own capacity to revel in the mysteries which present.
I look around and see global citizens who want to stay connected with the world and shape the future, and I can relate to those concepts.
But firstly I want to address another concept of Charles Handy the management guru with whom you are probably acquainted – he likes to be known as a social philosopher incidentally – many decades ago he said something that I have never forgotten and I try to act on:
“To plant a golden seed is to identify a talent in someone – something they are good at – and point that out to them. If they trust you, it can give them the confidence to go and achieve something with it. High achievers were almost all given a golden seed in the first 20 years of their lives”.
I humbly offer you a golden seed today but I implore you to use it for the common good. I have no doubt that you will after all you have been part of this fine, young university which has a two-pronged approach coalescing excellence with a sense of social justice, adopting a transdisciplinary approach to enable a well-rounded graduate to emerge. And you are on the right side of history.
I know quite a bit about being on the right side of history as one of the first people I worked for was a pioneer in the field of public health and epidemiology in London but it took three or four decades for the rest of the world to catch up. Being young and impressionable, I soaked up his every word and action but I also acknowledged the struggle you had to endure if you were prepared to go against the tide – to disrupt the status quo if you like. And when vested interests are threatened the opponents can be formidable – it is not for the faint hearted. I was perhaps well equipped for what lay ahead in my business life – summed up quite succinctly by my first boss who wrote in a reference: “Elaine thrives on a challenge.”
When I returned to Australia I was given a great opportunity if I was prepared to confront the challenges. Early on, in fact in the first few months of my taking up the position of Executive Director of the Cancer Council, I learnt that you had to be on the front foot and not shrink from telling it as it is, however unpalatable when, through no fault of our own, we were on the front pages of the newspapers for a whole week. So in life, you have to have the courage of your conviction backed up by evidence and reason.
Anyone seriously involved in tobacco control will have similar stories to tell but here is a vignette of mine to illustrate.
I was rung up one evening as I was working late in about 2005 by a reporter from The Australian newspaper. She wanted a comment for a front-page story about evidence being given by a whistleblower to a US Senate Inquiry on the harm done by smoking. He had been engaged by the Australian Tobacco Institute who would stop at nothing it appears to keep selling their products unhindered. It seems his job as a private investigator was basically to “stalk” me and go through my rubbish trying to find any information they might use to intimidate me. My response to the reporter was “yes I had a feeling such tactics were being employed but it would have been a pretty boring job going through my rubbish and all they would have found was the truth”. And that truth was – “in using science and economics and
political persuasion we were saving lives”.
Fast forward - in stepping down from my executive career I was able to reflect on that and many more examples, such as being relentless about improving the five-year survival rates for women diagnosed with breast cancer from 74% in 1985 to 91% in 2018, and be satisfied that in following “my passion and not my pension”, as espoused by Henry Ford, I could live with myself which is what a previous Chancellor of a University up the road indicated to me to be the litmus test for all difficult decisions.
But perhaps the most over-powering memory I am left with was from my time at The Smith Family as I was bidding farewell to staff and volunteers around Australia. After the formalities one of our Learning for Life workers came up to me and said: “you perhaps won’t know me but I was a recipient of a Learning for Life scholarship as was my sister who is studying medicine at a Queensland university. Our mother sends you her thanks for giving us a life”. Wow. Of course, over a 12 year period with the help of sponsors and mentors, we were able to provide opportunities to hundreds of thousands of young people to break the cycle of poverty, often intergenerational, through the power of access to education. The students seized a second chance offered and now work in the great multiplicity of careers that the world has opened up for them in this technological age. They are the ones who have built up resilience through mastering the challenges thrown up to them and I am sure they are well on the way to becoming great leaders. After all, they had already taken on board the words of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Professor
of Business at Harvard, that: “it is not which road you take but how you handle the bumps along the way that will make you stand out as a leader”.
As you embark on your next road, the world of work which awaits you is vastly different from just a few years ago and yet some concepts are enduring. I used to quote Dave Packard of Hewlett Packard fame who said that an organisation is but “a community of people” but it fell on deaf ears. Now it is almost a mantra, and Charles Handy has elaborated further by adding: “you should establish a common purpose” and then at the end of August at a business roundtable in the USA, a group that represents CEOs of big corporations declared that it had changed its mind about the “purpose of a corporation” according to Milton Friedman and said “that purpose is no longer to maximize profits for shareholders, but to benefit other “stakeholders” as well, including employees, customers, and citizens”. Hooray, at long last.
I have so much I could say but I am time-limited. In preparing for this occasional address I tried to recall just one thing that was said at my graduation and failed. This is understandable given the excitement of one of the biggest days in our lives but I have put together a cascade of ‘c’ words to succinctly sum up what I have been trying to convey and maybe something will gel for you. “You have to have the courage and confidence to challenge the status quo and change the trajectory you are on with compassion for your fellow travellers, championing a new cause or course of action based on a compelling reason with great clarity of communication and thought while creating new connections or collaborations of those with convergent views which you will have to commit to in a spirit of collegiality always conscious of oneself and being capable of courting and convincing decision-makers while overcoming likely conflicts, determined not to constipate progress with too much analysis and options but to catapult us through shaping a better future.”
Congratulations; celebrate.
Speech
Pro-Chancellor, Provost, Deputy Dean, Presiding Director, Members of the University Executive, Council and Academic Board, staff, family, friends and, most importantly, Graduates of the UTS Business School.
I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and pay my respects to their elders past, present and to come.
Graduates, cherish this moment and store it carefully in your memory bank. You can feel justifiably proud of your achievement and no matter what life has in store for you no-one can take this from you. Reflect on the sacrifices, the hardships and the challenges and take the learnings forward in your career and indeed your life confident in your own capacity to revel in the mysteries which present.
I look around and see global citizens who want to stay connected with the world and shape the future, and I can relate to those concepts.
But firstly I want to address another concept of Charles Handy the management guru with whom you are probably acquainted – he likes to be known as a social philosopher incidentally – many decades ago he said something that I have never forgotten and I try to act on:
“To plant a golden seed is to identify a talent in someone – something they are good at – and point that out to them. If they trust you, it can give them the confidence to go and achieve something with it. High achievers were almost all given a golden seed in the first 20 years of their lives”.
I humbly offer you a golden seed today but I implore you to use it for the common good. I have no doubt that you will after all you have been part of this fine, young university which has a two-pronged approach coalescing excellence with a sense of social justice, adopting a transdisciplinary approach to enable a well-rounded graduate to emerge. And you are on the right side of history.
I know quite a bit about being on the right side of history as one of the first people I worked for was a pioneer in the field of public health and epidemiology in London but it took three or four decades for the rest of the world to catch up. Being young and impressionable, I soaked up his every word and action but I also acknowledged the struggle you had to endure if you were prepared to go against the tide – to disrupt the status quo if you like. And when vested interests are threatened the opponents can be formidable – it is not for the faint hearted. I was perhaps well equipped for what lay ahead in my business life – summed up quite succinctly by my first boss who wrote in a reference: “Elaine thrives on a challenge.”
When I returned to Australia I was given a great opportunity if I was prepared to confront the challenges. Early on, in fact in the first few months of my taking up the position of Executive Director of the Cancer Council, I learnt that you had to be on the front foot and not shrink from telling it as it is, however unpalatable when, through no fault of our own, we were on the front pages of the newspapers for a whole week. So in life, you have to have the courage of your conviction backed up by evidence and reason.
Anyone seriously involved in tobacco control will have similar stories to tell but here is a vignette of mine to illustrate.
I was rung up one evening as I was working late in about 2005 by a reporter from The Australian newspaper. She wanted a comment for a front-page story about evidence being given by a whistleblower to a US Senate Inquiry on the harm done by smoking. He had been engaged by the Australian Tobacco Institute who would stop at nothing it appears to keep selling their products unhindered. It seems his job as a private investigator was basically to “stalk” me and go through my rubbish trying to find any information they might use to intimidate me. My response to the reporter was “yes I had a feeling such tactics were being employed but it would have been a pretty boring job going through my rubbish and all they would have found was the truth”. And that truth was – “in using science and economics and
political persuasion we were saving lives”.
Fast forward - in stepping down from my executive career I was able to reflect on that and many more examples, such as being relentless about improving the five-year survival rates for women diagnosed with breast cancer from 74% in 1985 to 91% in 2018, and be satisfied that in following “my passion and not my pension”, as espoused by Henry Ford, I could live with myself which is what a previous Chancellor of a University up the road indicated to me to be the litmus test for all difficult decisions.
But perhaps the most over-powering memory I am left with was from my time at The Smith Family as I was bidding farewell to staff and volunteers around Australia. After the formalities one of our Learning for Life workers came up to me and said: “you perhaps won’t know me but I was a recipient of a Learning for Life scholarship as was my sister who is studying medicine at a Queensland university. Our mother sends you her thanks for giving us a life”. Wow. Of course, over a 12 year period with the help of sponsors and mentors, we were able to provide opportunities to hundreds of thousands of young people to break the cycle of poverty, often intergenerational, through the power of access to education. The students seized a second chance offered and now work in the great multiplicity of careers that the world has opened up for them in this technological age. They are the ones who have built up resilience through mastering the challenges thrown up to them and I am sure they are well on the way to becoming great leaders. After all, they had already taken on board the words of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Professor
of Business at Harvard, that: “it is not which road you take but how you handle the bumps along the way that will make you stand out as a leader”.
As you embark on your next road, the world of work which awaits you is vastly different from just a few years ago and yet some concepts are enduring. I used to quote Dave Packard of Hewlett Packard fame who said that an organisation is but “a community of people” but it fell on deaf ears. Now it is almost a mantra, and Charles Handy has elaborated further by adding: “you should establish a common purpose” and then at the end of August at a business roundtable in the USA, a group that represents CEOs of big corporations declared that it had changed its mind about the “purpose of a corporation” according to Milton Friedman and said “that purpose is no longer to maximize profits for shareholders, but to benefit other “stakeholders” as well, including employees, customers, and citizens”. Hooray, at long last.
I have so much I could say but I am time-limited. In preparing for this occasional address I tried to recall just one thing that was said at my graduation and failed. This is understandable given the excitement of one of the biggest days in our lives but I have put together a cascade of ‘c’ words to succinctly sum up what I have been trying to convey and maybe something will gel for you. “You have to have the courage and confidence to challenge the status quo and change the trajectory you are on with compassion for your fellow travellers, championing a new cause or course of action based on a compelling reason with great clarity of communication and thought while creating new connections or collaborations of those with convergent views which you will have to commit to in a spirit of collegiality always conscious of oneself and being capable of courting and convincing decision-makers while overcoming likely conflicts, determined not to constipate progress with too much analysis and options but to catapult us through shaping a better future.”
Congratulations; celebrate.
About the Speaker
Elaine is currently Chair of the National Breast Cancer Foundation and the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth. Her career includes 25 years as an experienced leader in the not-for-profit sector where she was the Chief Executive Officer of The Smith Family and Executive Director of the Cancer Council of NSW.
Specifically, she played a major role in establishing the National Breast Cancer Centre and Breastscreen NSW. She helped develop the model for Australia’s breast screening program as well as convening the National Steering Committee for Australia’s inaugural Breast Cancer Day.
Elaine has served on a wealth of committees and boards during her career at the state, national and international levels across all sectors including Chair of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth, a Director of Social Ventures Australia, the Australian Social Innovation Exchange, the Public Interest Journalism Foundation, the Financial Literacy Board and the Australian Statistics Advisory Board.
In 2009 Elaine was given the Research Australia’s Lifetime Achievement Award. On several occasions, she was named one of the Australian Financial Review’s BOSS magazine True Leaders.
In 1994, Elaine was awarded the Medal in the Order of Australia, and in 2006 she received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of New South Wales for her community service and contribution to the control of breast cancer.
Elaine holds a Bachelor of Science Honours from Oxford Brookes University.
