Edwina McCann

Firstly, thank you for allowing me the privilege of sharing this special occasion with you.

I’d like to open by acknowledging Pro-Chancellor, Dr Ron Sandland, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education and Students), Professor Shirley Alexander, Associate Dean (Research) Professor Ashish Sinha, University Secretary and Director, Governance Support Unit, Mr Bill Paterson, Associate Professor, Education, Christine Burton, members of UTS Council, distinguished guests, and of course all of you – the graduates, and your friends and family.

Given the time I have spent on the UTS Business School Advisory Board, and after listening to your impressive achievements tonight, I know that I am definitely not the smartest person in this room. If there is a barometer by which you can consider yourself some sort of success, being asked to deliver a speech to a room full of talented UTS Business School graduates, it would have to read pretty high.

In trying to pinpoint exactly what worked for me to have arrived here tonight, I can conclude that any success I have enjoyed has less to do with having the smarts, and more to do with treating every life and career experience as a learning opportunity.

Charlie Munger, who, you being Business School graduates will all know of I’m sure, and who is very good at giving a commencement speech, once said:

“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”

So, in the interests of you waking a little wiser tomorrow, please indulge me now while I share a few things I’ve learned.

Let's get one thing out of the way: I am sure there are a few of you in this room thinking ‘what on earth am I going to learn from the Editor-in- Chief of Vogue?’

Well, did you know some bright sparks at the University of North Carolina have developed a formula (of sorts) to judge what it takes to be fashionable? They asked 239 people (why that number is unclear) which colour combinations and outfits they preferred. They found that most people preferred outfits that were neither too matching nor too clashing, but rather fell in the sweet spot in between.

So what does this tell us aside from the fact that the peeps at the University of North Carolina clearly have too much time on their hands? Well, when it comes to fashion, and in my opinion business, it’s all about balance.

Being a bold, big-picture optimist is essential for success, but it's important not to look too hard for evidence to confirm your passions so you can remain a realist when making decisions.

Two of my other learnings concern two of the buzzwords of the moment: disruption and data. Working in media, I experienced the arrival of the digital age like a career-sledgehammer. I can’t tell you how many times people still look forlorn as they ask me: ‘How’s life in magazines?’ – no doubt expecting to hear the commonplace story of declining revenue streams and customers.

But that isn’t our story at Vogue. In contrast, we’re close to doubling our revenues over the past five years. Now this may not sound like huge growth when you talk start-ups growing at 100 per cent year-on-year, but to achieve this in an “old media” business with an existing heavy cost base and business structure is unusual. We had to perform while we reformed, which is much easier to say than it is to do.

For us, this was achieved through the diversification of income streams. Vogue, like all media, is at its core a content producer. In our case we document our times and popular culture through the prism of high fashion, but we could produce the best recipes for chocolate cakes and the same logic would apply. People still want content, but we all know how they want to consume their content has changed.

So our distribution model had to change too and with that came opportunities, not just challenges. In our case, it allowed us to create a 24-hour conversation with a much larger audience than we’d ever reached before. It allowed us to build a newsroom whose content is only related to the magazine about 10 per cent of the time. We now have 2.5 million plus followers across social media including Instagram, Snapchat, and our podcasts, a dedicated online audience of over 300,000, and we can mobilise 200,000 people in a single night to attend a shopping event – all this from a magazine masthead which sells 50,000 odd copies. The learning is Vogue is a brand business, not just a magazine.

But media never sits still and today we are seeing the rise of eventing or what we call the “experiential” market. As social media has come to dominate our lives, so has our desire to fill our streams with experiences. Take the example of the gaming industry: it started with the player spending 20 cents to play Space Invaders with mates standing around to cheer them on; Play Station, and later XBox, completely disrupted the public video arcade model and took gaming into the home. Cut to today and audiences of 70,000-plus will pay 70-odd-dollars each to sit in a stadium and watch a giant screen projecting the world champions playing on the stage in front of them, and those gamers take home millions of dollars in endorsements and prize money. Things change, but at its core much stays the same – people want to game, the weight and size of earnings have just shifted between the players. The trick is to stay on the winning side.

And here’s another tip on how to make sure you can make the best of your future opportunities: if you haven't already, learn the digital language of coding and marketing. It is predicted there will be 100,000 jobs in the IT sector over the next five years and not enough graduates to fill them, especially female graduates. But is it not just for a career in the IT sector that you will need a digital knowledge to get ahead. 

Not knowing how to speak the language of the digital developers and marketers who will help build or manage your business will be crippling. Not understanding basic coding will be like not being able to read and write. I know plenty of executives like me who have signed off costs for digital product builds, baffled by the numbers but unable to assess them with any diligence because we simply don’t have the skills. It’s barely excusable today and it won’t be excusable tomorrow. So I am learning to code, and if you haven’t already, you should too. Speaking the language of technology is already an essential and basic business skill and an advantage in any industry.

Our annual business plans have been focused on growth, and this has highlighted to me the necessity of combining creative and strategic thinking. It is not something that came naturally to me. I was strong on the creative and weak on the strategic, so I actually asked for a colleague of mine to become my publisher… effectively my boss. It was the best business decision I’ve made. So my take-home here is don’t let your ego get in the way of what is best for the business, and be honest about your strengths and weaknesses and team up with those who have strengths where you don’t.

I almost forgot about DATA! Big data, raw data, field data and experimental data; everyone is collecting it, “data is the new oil” after all, but not everyone is sure what to do with it. Successful entrepreneurs think creatively not only about their initial product or service, but more importantly all through the stages of growth. Shocking statistics (like declining magazine revenues, for example) can result in knee-jerk decisions, but further analysis might come up with new revenue sources. My learning: data is an essential tool and a wonderful compass but without applied creative thinking, data alone can’t solve a problem.

And so to managing creatives: Creative capacity is vital not just for modern business practises but for tackling the problems, challenges and the opportunities of this century. I try to remember this while managing a team of brilliant visual creatives, the stylists and photographers who create the extraordinary imagery of Vogue. They are artists, and frankly sometimes they can be rather emotional.

Whether an artist’s work is considered brilliant or not is subjective, and that can make the world feel fragile for the creator. Many of you may end up partnering with, working with, or managing creative artists – and I would put some entrepreneurs and inventors in this category. Trust me, it will be a life full of wonder, never dull, but on occasion you may be required to check your logical, business-focused mind, and search for every empathic cell in your body to make sense of a situation. But depending on your chosen career or company, it could be these brilliant and, yes, sometimes brilliant emotional minds who unlock your future success.

This graduation has been hard earned through your hard work, and it is a celebration of your academic achievements to date. Now with it begins your next chapter, and it is time for that champagne and the budget, so… my Top 5 leave-behinds…

If your product or company solves a problem or make people's lives easier, you are generally on to a winner.

1. Be resilient, because this, too, will pass.
2. On some occasions there is not a right or a wrong decision, just a decision.
3. Remember to remain agile – if you are going to fail, make it fast and cheap.
4. Grow to be a generous leader, and the best leaders consider succession planning. And you know why? Because you should…
5. Celebrate people who are smarter than you, especially those in this room tonight.

Thank you again for having me tonight, and good luck.