About the speaker
Our speaker today is Mr Jack Curtis.
Jack is the Regional Manager for the Asia Pacific Region at First Solar. He joined First Solar in March 2008, and has been focused on First Solar’s business development efforts across a range of geographies.
Jack was originally based in New York where he led First Solar’s market development team for North America. In September 2011, he relocated to Sydney where he currently leads First Solar’s commercial activities for the Asia Pacific region. Jack has also been closely involved in a number of First Solar’s regulatory initiatives, working to promote and structure effective renewable policy platforms in a number of regions.
Prior to joining First Solar, Jack worked in the investment banking division at Goldman Sachs in New York where he focused on mergers and acquisitions and equity capital markets transactions in the power and renewable energy space. Prior to Goldman Sachs, Jack worked at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, a law firm based in New York and Allens Arthur Robinson, a law firm based in Sydney.
Jack holds a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Technology Sydney.
It gives me great pleasure to invite Mr Jack Curtis to deliver the occasional address.
Speech
Chancellor and Vice Chancellor, Faculty Deans, Members of the University, Distinguished Guests, Graduates, Family and Friends.
I’d like to congratulate each one of you sitting here today for the simple fact that you are sitting here today. It is 11 years since I was sitting exactly where you are wondering how long the graduate address would last after waiting for D – Z of the alphabet to receive their degrees. You have my blanket approval to start throwing academic caps if I run too far over time. By the same measure, if I come in under time, I expect a standing ovation and to crowd-surf to the exits.
I’d like to acknowledge that I know exactly what you’re all thinking right now. Who is this guy? And where is our graduate addressor who should be a bit older, a lot wiser, and seriously more credentialed, albeit a little less convincing in a slim fit suit.
I’d like to sincerely thank the university for the opportunity to speak today. It is a genuine privilege, and, while it was never quite explained to me why I received such an honour, I’m going to a hazard a guess as to why I’m here. There is certainly a deep pool of more experienced business executives that could be speaking to you today. However, there are very few that have navigated a career path that will resemble your own. As you’re all aware, today’s career path model has evolved dramatically over the past couple of decades. No longer do you choose one profession to work in, or a single company to work at, collecting your gold watch 25 years later. Career options are vast and varied and it is unrealistic to expect upon graduation that you will have a clear and certain view as to which profession you should enter in Year 1, let alone in Year 10. The good news is that you should view this uncertainty as a positive thing and I can tell you that it matters little whether you have any idea of what you want to do as you sit here today.
Despite these developments, and a generally improved focus on career management, I have observed a meaningful disconnect between the graduate’s view on what will lead to a successful career and what I believe will lead you to a successful career. I by no means claim to be the ultimate arbiter on the topic, but to date I have had an extremely fulfilling career and can say with all sincerity that I have genuinely enjoyed going to work for the past 11 years. That’s not a bad place to start. The path by which I have arrived at this point is in all likelihood going to be very similar to the potential path on which you are about to embark.
I’m not going to dispel an entire lifetime of rhetoric that you’ve no doubt heard about the importance of hard work, good grades, and other quantitative drivers of success, because, yes, they are important. It’s just that over time some of them matter a lot less than others and more qualitative factors will quickly supersede them as accelerants of your career. I’m also not going to trivialize the fact that the workplace today is tougher and more competitive than it was 10 or 20 years ago, because it certainly is. When I look at the resumes of people I interview for entry-level positions at my company, I sometimes feel compelled to offer them my job and ask for directions to the bathroom and photocopier.
So what I would like to do today is provide some insight into my career and what I have learned along the way so far. I hope that you’ll find at least some of it useful as you plot out your own career path. I also hope that it will provide some comfort that you are already much better equipped to succeed in the workplace than your 51 pass mark in legal, process and history may lead you to believe. For the record, my mark was 56.
Here’s the first thing I know to be a fact. Never will your grades matter more than when you apply for your first (or next) full-time job after graduation. In the absence of a better approach than standardized testing, on which I certainly have no helpful suggestions, your university transcript will strongly influence where you are next hired. While extra-curricular activities and that 6 months you spent inner-tubing down the Mekong delta are all fascinating and helpful, employers generally have no better benchmark against which to assess you than grades. Now, if you have top-shelf grades, that’s terrific. If you don’t, however, don’t despair, because here’s the second thing I know to be a fact. As soon as you receive your first job offer, your TER, ATAR, RBT (or whatever they call it these days) and university transcript will become largely irrelevant. Much more important than where you fall on the grade spectrum is where you choose to work for your first (or next) job after graduation. That is what will kick-start the waterfall effect for the rest of your career.
The two criteria I believe are essential for choosing your post graduation job are firstly, learning a hard skill, and secondly, exposure to autonomy, by which I mean being dropped in the deep end with as much regularity as possible. The hard skill can be learning corporate finance, contract drafting, commercial negotiation, editing a book, or riding an elephant. It doesn’t really matter. It just needs to be a tangible set of skills that you can leverage into future roles. You can learn one of these at pretty much any corporate institution in the country. The tougher of the two criteria that will differentiate you infinitely more than any hard skill you learn, is finding a role that will enable autonomy and fast-track your experience base. There’s only so much benefit you can derive from spending 6 months in a litigation discovery room coding endless files with multi-coloured post-it notes. When I interview people for roles today, I care a lot less about where someone worked as opposed to what they actually worked on.
When you do start your first job, there are a couple of ostensibly mundane skills that I’d recommend you focus on: quality control and attention to detail. They are in amazingly scarce supply in the professional world, and if you can become good at both, they will have a positive impact on almost every facet of your work. They cannot be learned overnight, but only through a constant vigilance and an eagerness to improve. My first full-time job was at the law firm, Allens, in Sydney. On my first day, the head of litigation at the time asked me to draft a basic three-line letter to attach documents to be sent to a client. After rejecting my first four drafts for various crimes against punctuation and formatting, he suggested my secretary draft it for me. Unsurprisingly, she required only one draft. I returned to my desk dejected and fairly convinced that the next letter I would be drafting would be my own termination letter. I did, however, derive some comfort from the knowledge that it would likely take 18 drafts and six months to finalize. With that first experience began my career-long obsession with quality control and attention to detail. Learn how to do it well - this is non-negotiable guidance.
More important advice, and in your newly minted quest for autonomy, is to seek it out. Sitting at your desk waiting to be asked to join Julia Roberts on the Pelican Brief faces long odds. Back yourself to seek out great work from those senior to you who cover areas that interest you. You’ll be surprised at how rare pro-activity is exhibited at junior levels in the workplace and how eager senior people are to reward it. Don’t assume that just because you are junior or can’t draft a three-line letter that you are not capable of stepping up to work that is apparently above your pay grade. It is only by accelerating your exposure to it will you be able to achieve a competence beyond your professional years, and quite frankly, beyond your peers.
After my year in litigation at Allens, I was required to do a rotation in corporate. I had really enjoyed my year in litigation and was very reluctant to move. Knowing that staying was a non-starter, however, I sought out plan-B. This was to find the partner in corporate I had heard not only did exciting work but also was committed to giving junior lawyers a double dose of deep end.
Up to his office on the 20th floor I strode, or probably less dramatically rode the elevator, knocked on his door, introduced myself and told him I’d like to work with him. I think he was a bit taken aback at first but given no escape route other than his corner office window, he agreed to give me a shot. It started the next day in a meeting with Sony Music. I trailed him into the conference room at which point he introduced me to four senior executives from Sony and then to everyone’s shock and horror (especially mine) promptly left. What followed over the next hour was, I am sure, the greatest pile of garbage a client has ever listened to in an Allens conference room. But by some miracle they didn’t demand that I be kicked off the account and it turned out to be one of many similar experiences I enjoyed during my time in the corporate department. That partner also went on to become a great mentor for me.
He was also the person responsible for my next career step – moving to New York to work at the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. If you haven’t heard of Cravath, and I certainly hadn’t until 8 weeks before I boarded a plane to the U.S., it is probably New York’s most prestigious law firm with a healthy reputation for high-end work and long hours. Never in my life have I been more convinced that I was totally out of my depth than my first day at Cravath. My new colleagues were the top percentile graduates from the most illustrious law schools in the world and without wanting to do a disservice to our alma mater, I was fairly certain that the cream would quickly rise to the top and I would be left circling the bottom of the tea cup.
What I came to realize over the next few months was that yes these kids were smart, and no doubt intellectually smarter than me. However, the perception that hard work was the only criteria for success at Cravath, could sometimes lead us to lose sight of the fact that the people that we were supposed to be impressing the most, our clients, were often ordinary companies staffed with people that didn’t work at Cravath or go to Harvard or Yale. And yes, they wanted good legal advice, which you were essentially guaranteed of at Cravath anyway, but they also wanted someone with some common sense, general commercial acumen and a view on life that didn’t require a footnote or involve an esoteric reference to the thrilling origins of promissory estoppel. One of my clients from Texas often just wanted to talk about duck hunting with me, which I fast became an expert on. What ultimately struck me was that the intelligence bar that needs to be cleared to be successful in one’s career, even at a firm like Cravath, was actually not that high. Yes there is a bar, but once cleared by demonstrating that you can write cogently, speak confidently, and tie your own shoes, there is a myriad of much more important qualitative abilities that centre around emotional intelligence, or EQ. These will have a far greater influence on your career success.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Cravath and was fortunate to work with fantastic partners who valued capabilities and personality traits beyond falling asleep at one’s desk. In addition, a number of my fellow associates remain great friends to this day, largely for the same reason. It was a pleasure to work alongside some of the most talented lawyers in America. So what I realized from my experience was that while working hard is important, working smart is much more so. Face time is a useless concept and no company or boss worth your time or effort will value it. I also learned that the competitive bar may often seem higher than you think but that you already have many of the skills that will help you clear it and, they’re unlikely to be developed from a militant reluctance to leave the office before 2am each night. They’re more likely to be cultivated on an overseas trip, learning to surf, playing a musical instrument, or taking up origami. Or similarly, seeking opportunities at work outside the norm that will haunt you at first but excite you for much longer. I mentioned earlier that grades will get you your first job, but it is your experiences in both life and work that will get you your second, third, fourth and so on until you’re CEO of Facebook.
After about two years at Cravath and literally 18 interviews, I switched to investment banking at Goldman Sachs in New York. This was largely because I realized that while I had very much enjoyed my time at Allens and Cravath, I didn’t want to be a lawyer forever. I thought that I would actually enjoy working on the business side and the best way to enable this goal was to develop another skill set (in finance) and be exposed to a different side of how companies do business. Although I worked fiendishly hard at Goldman, I really enjoyed the work and exposure I was getting to a range of different companies. At the time, the solar power industry was on a rocket-like trajectory and one of our clients was a company called First Solar which, in 2007, was the best performing stock on the NASDAQ. At the beginning of 2008, they offered me a job. At this point in time, Goldman had just had one of its best years in history, I was really enjoying the work, and even getting home before 11pm to catch the Real House Wives of Beverley Hills. However, the opportunity to work at First Solar, a company that was right at the beginning of its growth cycle in an industry that was dynamic and volatile, was very appealing. My view was that if the whole thing went belly up three years from now, it would at least be an interesting experience. Against the advice of almost everyone, I left Goldman when it was at the peak of its powers and before the financial crisis was a twinkle in anyone’s eye to join a company that made solar panels that nobody had heard of. It turned out to be the best career decision I have ever made.
The move to First Solar reinforced a fortunate streak of decisions that has been a key contributor to my career progression, which is, that I have worked at each job just as long as was necessary to derive the experience and exposure I required to move to the next step in my career. I have enjoyed every one of my jobs but that’s largely because I sought out the work I was interested in and the people I wanted to work for and, I recognized when it was time to move on. While this initially involved jobs at several different firms, it certainly didn’t always translate to leaving one company for another. As with my experience at First Solar, it can mean a long and enjoyable career at the same company in a series of new and stimulating roles.
Two of the largest challenges to a happy and successful career progression are complacency and risk aversion. If it turns out that you ultimately love the idea of being a career lawyer, investment banker, or accountant, that’s great. But some of the unhappiest people I’ve met in my professional life are the 20 year-old career veterans stuck in a job they hate but would now have great difficulty leaving for a range of professional and personal reasons. The takeaway is this – be disciplined about assessing your career evolution every couple of years. Ask yourself if your current job is either a) enjoyable and fulfilling, or at least b) the means to an end with a clear off-ramp, that is, your next job. It’s easier earlier in your career to make job choices that are perceived as more risky. Don’t let the fear of failure or taking a wrong turn deter you. I’m almost certain that even if it’s a bust, it will be a valuable experience all the same.
I have been at First Solar for over 6 years now and I love my job. I have done business all over the world in some extraordinarily random locations and enjoyed almost every minute of it. This includes the time I had to eat camel hoof soup in a tent in Inner Mongolia during a sand storm and then sing show tunes between doing shots of something that I’m sure they sterilise livestock with. I’m really enjoying the work and getting great experience, and that is at least a) or b) of the above. Having said that, I still consciously check in every couple of years to ensure that I’m on the right career track without falling into the trap of believing the grass is greener without validating whether it actually is.
There’s an old saying attributed to a Roman philosopher called Seneca, which is: “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”, and I believe this is the best equation for a successful career. A happy and fulfilling professional life won’t just blow down your front door. The key is to remain disciplined about navigating your career, work hard when you need to (but not when you don’t), and focus on leveraging your qualitative attributes. Combine these with a willingness to take advantage of opportunities when they arise, and I’m confident you’ll have more luck than most.
I don’t believe in 5 or 10-year career plans unless you want to be a wine maker, so don’t worry if you have no idea what you want to do as you sit here today. Just put yourself in the best position to take advantage of the right job offers when they come along. Please trust me when I tell you that it’s not as scary out there as it seems. While studying hard at university was definitely time well spent, the factors that will dictate your success from this point on will rarely hinge on rote learning, cramming or standardised tests. Take time out to expand your horizons, interests and interaction with the world. Regardless of how disconnected it may seem from your career ambitions, I assure you it will stand you in good stead.
I wish all of you the best of preparation and opportunity – and if you focus on maximizing both, I have no doubt that luck, success and happiness will follow.