Mark Scott

Managing Director, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
BA, DipEd, MA(Syd), MPubAdmin (Harv)

Mark Scott addressed graduates from the Faculty of Business at the Great Hall, City campus, Friday 8 May 2009, 10.30am.

About the speaker

Mark Scott is Managing Director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Before coming to the ABC, Mark spent almost twelve years in a variety of editorial and executive positions with Fairfax Media, including his appointment as Editorial Director of the Fairfax newspaper magazine division and Editor-in-Chief of Metropolitan, Regional and Community newspapers. He holds a Bachelor of Arts, Diploma in Education, and Master of Arts from the University of Sydney and a Masters degree in Public Administration from Harvard University.

Mark Scott has presided over a significant transformation of the ABC since his appointment as Managing Director in 2006. The ABC has extended its leadership in News with the launch of ABC News Breakfast and by establishing its Continuous News service. Editorial standards at the ABC are now independently audited to ensure the Corporation continues to set a benchmark for quality in the Australian media. The ABC's international engagement has expanded, through new partnerships with agencies like AusAid in its work on international projects, and by continually increasing audiences for Radio Australia and Australia Network.

Mark Scott was named Media Person of the Year in 2008, the year in which the ABC inaugurated Australia's first internet television service, iView, attained its highest audience share on record in Radio and Television, and more than 14 million vodcasts were downloaded.

Speech

Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Faculty Deans, staff, distinguished guests, graduates, family and friends.

I am delighted to be able to join you at this important moment in the lives of our graduates:

• a recognition of their dedication and hard work
• a milestone of achievement in education and a foundation stone for meaningful careers and community contributions
• a day of pride, not just for those being recognised — but for family and friends who
• have provided support and encouragement along the way.

You made it, and I am sure there will be a number of you who wondered if this day would ever come.

But it did. Congratulations.

I know I stand between more significant and memorable moments: photographs and celebrations — so I'll make my comments brief.

In a sense I feel I am here representing the neighbourhood. At the ABC in Ultimo, we feel that UTS is springing up all around us — and there is certainly a different feeling around the precinct when the semesters are in full session and the campus is alive with students. We love having you around.

Ultimo is one of the oldest parts of the city of course, but now UTS and the ABC are both playing their part in its renewal — and in building this part of Sydney as its creative hub. And I am very interested in what is happening at the university — not just in study areas like communication, but also in business. Here, truly innovative thinking is underway about how to use design as a key tool in helping businesses become better places to work and to better engage with their customers and their communities.

We are all going to need to be designers in our careers: rethinking new ways to work, new ways to connect with markets, new ways to deliver in collaboration with partners, to create new products and services.

I suspect that your experiences at university have not prepared you for a single career. Instead, you have learnt how to develop in a continuous way, the skills and experiences you need to take on the new challenges you will face.

It took me a long time to learn this.

I was of the generation who went to university to discover what I wanted to do with my life. Strong role models for me: my father and grandfathers, had seemingly had the same careers all their lives: happy, challenged, engaged in their professions till into their seventies.

And I went off, looking for my answer, only to be more confused on graduation than I was on enrolment. At least I knew on graduating that I didn't want to be a lawyer, which was something.

It was almost a decade after graduating with my bachelor's degree that a professor expressed his surprise when I talked about still trying to find out what I wanted to do. He explained to me that the world was different now — and that most likely my career would be a series of experiences in which I gained the skills and capabilities that only then would open new and surprising doors.

And from where I sit now, I can only marvel at his insight into the narrowness of my original thinking.

To this point, I can now count up seven different careers I have had to date: from teaching to being a political advisor; as a policy analyst; as a journalist, an editorial leader; an HR executive and now a CEO.

The only thing that I know for sure is that I would never have planned it or dreamed it — and that it is an example of one of those blindingly simple yet insightful statements: that life can only be lived going forwards and understood looking backwards. I can look back and see stepping stones that were not visible to me as I stumbled along.

Some of you may already have clear career ambitions — and others are most likely where I was on my graduation day: optimistic, opportunistic and a little overwhelmed. Uncertain, perhaps, in these uncertain times — but ready for whatever may happen.

What I would encourage each of you to do though, is to savour each step on your journey: even if it doesn't seem of significance, or on a clear path to where you want to head. You just don't know what lies ahead... who you might meet, what you might learn, the insight you might gain, the opportunity that you could see open before you.

I think to say you make your own luck is a little simplistic. But in my experience, things are more likely to work for you if you are fully engaged in the moment where you are; if you are seen as hard-working and reliable — if you are seen as someone who can be trusted and worth backing for bigger and better challenges.

If I look back, and give you a moment of self-reflective honesty — I doubt I was really ready for any of the positions I held when I was first given them. I was raw starting out as a teacher, naive as a novice political advisor, totally inexperienced as a first-day journalist — and the day I started working at the nation's great broadcasting institution, all I really knew about radio and television was how to turn on the set. But I suppose there was enough evidence in how I had performed in previous roles — that I had developed enough skills and experiences where I had been — to allow people to trust me with the new.

Still, you never really get over the feeling that the impostor police are about to burst through the door and drag you away. I don't think it is necessarily bad to never escape the feeling that you want to keep earning the job you currently have, to keep proving that you deserved the trust and that you are delivering on it.

In thinking through this idea of a career as a journey rather than a destination, I have found solace in the epic voyage of Odysseus back home to the island, Ithaca and his wife Penelope, told in Homer's The Odyssey. There is a wonderful recent translation by Robert Fagles, that made the epic story come alive for me and I recommend it to you. I give it to some of the talented emerging leaders at the ABC when they embark on our most demanding internal development program.

All Odysseus thinks he wants to do is get home — and the road emerges as so long and torturous. It takes him years, but it is astounding where he goes on the way, what he experiences, what he does.

The Greek poet Cavafy captures the message for us today so well in his poem, Ithaca, when he writes:

When you start out on your journey to Ithaca,
Pray that the road is long,
Full of adventure, full of knowledge...
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
And to anchor at the island when you are old,
Rich with all you have gained along the way,
Not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches,
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.

That's where my head is at today — probably half way through my career. A recognition that success will be a journey, not a destination. That I cannot pick the next stop, just as I couldn't pick this stop or the last one. But to make each stop count. To attack each challenge with gusto, so you master new things, gain some real knowledge and wisdom and so you can move on with no regrets.

I should conclude with some reference to the ABC, as you will most likely soon be taxpayers if you're not already — and therefore, in my eyes — shareholders.

I can report to you that your ABC is doing pretty well, or it was when I left the office. The Chaser boys have been filming overseas and you never quite know when some diplomatic incident is going to erupt.

We are in the process of transforming the ABC from a great traditional broadcaster of radio and television — to being a robust public broadcaster of the digital era. We want to use the opportunities of new technology to reach and engage with our audiences in different ways — to let our programming be seen by more Australians, in more ways, more often. We see universal, fast broadband as a tool that will allow audiences to create their own ABC — to be able to harvest all the content we have made or are showing today — and be able to watch or listen to what they want at a time they want on a device they want. It also will allow the audience to be part of the experience: to create content, to contribute to programming — and enable the ABC to take it to a broader audience. More than ever before, we will be Australia's town square — a place where citizens can come to listen and learn, to speak and to be heard.

You can already see some early signs of this revolution: though our leadership of podcasting; the creation of iView — our internet television service and through ABC mobile — which allowed me to watch Media Watch in the back of a cab last week. Through sites like unearthed.com.au, where unsigned Australian musicians have had millions of songs downloaded — leading to new careers, the triple j playlist and positions on the Hottest 100.

To deliver all this, the team at the ABC are learning new skills, utilising new technology, gaining new experiences — all of a kind unimaginable just a few years ago. Such is the revolution taking place in media organsiations. Such is the revolution sweeping people's working lives and your future.

I hope it's all ahead for you: meaningful jobs, fascinating careers — and today, celebrations.

I am so happy to have been able to join you to commemorate this important milestone.

Enjoy the journey ahead.

Thank you.