U of I Commencement

Thank you Dean Ghosh.   I appreciate the opportunity to be here with all of you today at what I hope will be a fulfilling commencement for you.  But, let’s face it; most special events in your life are often more about logistics of figuring out where to go, knowing where to park, getting there on time, making sure you have the right number of seats together, etc. You need to keep perspective on what’s really important.  In my family, you cannot even think about celebrating without planning exactly when and where you are going to get your next meal.  And let me be clear, I have dined in some of the finest places all over the world, but when I come back to beautiful Champ-bana, it’s Pop’s for pizza or no place at all (hold up box)!  

But back to the subject at hand.  The reason I talk about the details of planning today is because I’ve learned that life has funny way of distracting you while you are living it.    When something momentous occurs, try and take a step back and think about what you’ve been doing, with whom you’ve been doing it, and what meaningful difference, if any, you are attempting to make.  Take a deep breath, soak in this marvelous venue, and think about the efforts that you, and those who have supported you, have put forth to get here.  You should be proud.   

I kept two things in mind as I prepared my remarks.  First, you probably have a bunch of other things you’d rather be doing. And second, I am actually expected to impart some perspectives that will be of use to you.  I’m a technology and healthcare guy, so I’ll weave those topics into my remarks.  But the overarching theme I want you to take away is:  Learn to both recognize and embrace the implausible – as it is your reality.  

It was 23 ½ years ago - roughly the average age of those graduating today - that I went to my own commencement here at U of I.  1984 was an amazing time to anticipate and embrace massive change.  Right now, as you trot out into your next phase, you are on the brink of a similarly amazing time of transformation.  Let’s face it, implausibility or even absurdity is the norm, even in the business world right now.  Did you think when you entered college, that in the midst of the explosion of the Internet revolution, the advent of genomics and the next round of the green movement, that the several most valuable corporations in the world would be those that deal in a finite supply of primordial sludge – meaning oil?  Not IBM, Microsoft or even Google.  Did you think that the quant jock hedge fund geniuses would be outperformed by non-leveraged commodity returns in gold and silver, and that such undisputed talent would lose over $70B investing in risky mortgage-backed securities?  Could you imagine graduates of higher education like yourselves, would play with variable mortgage rates like a Las Vegas gambler plays a roulette wheel.   Did you think that two of the most innovative technology firms in the world, Sony and Toshiba – would spend years fighting an irrelevant battle of high definition DVD formats, when your generation already knows that HD movies will simply be downloaded for your viewing pleasure and stored on devices that already hold more data than U of I had in its advanced computing laboratories when I went to school. When I try to think of something in commerce that is totally consistent with when I graduated, one of the few things that pops into my mind is that it was illegal then, and it is still illegal to import Cuban cigars.  

Lesson 1:  There’s no speedometer on technological rate-of-change

Midwesterners tend not to brag as much as those in other cultures.  Humility is good.  But you should be proud to have attended the University of Illinois from a technology perspective.  One of the inventors of the transistor which gave rise to the microchip and modern computing taught here for 40 years. The precursor to solid state computing, the ILIAC, was developed here.  The inventor of the LED (Light Emitting Diode) was educated here (LED’s light up Times Square).  E-learning was pioneered here with the PLATO system.  And of course, I’m sure most of you know that the user friendly web browser that became commercialized as Netscape was developed here, giving rise to the Internet age.  Many of you may know that a U of I graduate developed the first big-time customer relationship management (or CRM) software company.  But, I’m sure you didn’t know before today that a U of I graduate founded a company that pioneered software as a service for the healthcare industry that today organizes the healthcare system for over 120 million Americans.

I came to the University of Illinois in 1981 after being raised in Boulder, Colorado. Most of my classmates thought I was nuts, moving from the snowcapped Rocky Mountains to the cornfields of Illinois.  But I had a hunch, back when I was in high school that the intersection of information technology and business was going to be very important, and U of I’s CS program was ranked #1 in the country and the business school was ranked #2...so I came.   I was fortunate to arrive at the dawn of a newly minted Management Information Systems degree.  Not only was the world not yet flat – with reference to Thomas Friedman’s must-read literary work - but the painful walk from DKH to the far reaches of the engineering campus in the winter was the metaphorical embodiment that our campus wasn’t even connected. When you look ahead, what hunches do you have about how different disciplines will come together?  How will longstanding assumptions change?  When I was in school, U of I bragged about the library, the greatest number of volumes of any public University.  Today, while still true, one has to think hard about how that retains importance in context?  If the information isn’t digitized, then it isn’t accessible by today’s standards, boxed in by brick walls and the minimum expectations we all have of accessing information.  As information becomes digitized, it no longer matters where it sits.  Maybe one of you can invent an e-book that emits the smell of musty leather for nostalgia-sake or perhaps become wealthy by starting a business that specializes in library real estate reclamation.  

A brief glimpse of technology during my college years illustrates technological change.  Your rate of change over twenty years will be triple mine.  I was lucky enough to have a roommate with an Apple IIe computer.  I sure couldn’t afford one.  It had a green character-only screen…no color…no graphics.  It connected to a dot-matrix printer and it had one floppy disk drive from which you loaded your operating system and software program (assuming you didn’t have to write it yourself).  You had to remove the software diskette and put in a data diskette to store your documents or programs.  Each floppy disk held 180K of data.  Let me put that into I-pod perspective.  Each floppy held roughly 1/5000th of a Gigabyte, not even enough for a single MP3 song – or about  1/millionth of the amount of storage that comes on a typical PC or MAC hard drive.  My programming classes were on punch cards that you had to turn in to somebody to feed into the computer.  If you dropped your stack of cards, or you bent one, you got a bad grade.  I did get an “A” in advanced auditing, because I was able to program the Apple IIE to play the tune of the Illini fight song.  This was some of the earliest digital music, like hieroglyphics on the wall of a cyberspace cave.  I was a true geeky technology maverick.  While people were typing (or retyping their papers) through the night, I was editing on a word processor and could print out my paper at the robust rate of 2 minutes per page while I was out having a C2B2 at Dairy Queen.  I’ll bet you didn’t know that the DQ blizzard is another great U of I innovation.  By the way, your kids will laugh at your clunky I-pod nano as well as about the fact that you had to use a keyboard.

I’ll intersect health care and information technology for you in a few minutes.

Lesson 2: Know how and why things work – not just how to work them

My most poignant college moment came early in my freshman year.  I had managed to test myself into engineering calculus B, was getting my butt kicked by the class, and asked a junior down the hall who was in calc D for some help on a problem.  He looked at it and said that he couldn’t remember how to do it.  I asked him how he had done in the class, and he’d gotten an A.  I made a personal resolution that day that I would actually understand my subjects, and not just learn enough to pass the tests.  This lesson has served me well in life.  Once you are in a management leadership or professional capacity, your subordinates and customers will quickly assess whether you know what you’re doing, and perhaps more importantly, whether you know what they’re doing and can help guide them.    A related college lesson came from the wall of the jazz band practice room.  It said, “To be truly innovative, you must first be steeped in tradition”.  

It has been said that the definition of technology is anything that didn’t exist when you were born.  It’s just plain true.   I’d visit my grandparents when I was in college, and they couldn’t work their VCR.  My parents, both upstanding graduates of the U of I, can’t work their home theater system.  My generation can’t let go of things that look like phones - let me explain why.  When I arrived on campus in 1981, the first thing you did was stand in line at the local Illinois Bell office, pick up your phone (which was leased by the phone company) and order a phone line (and get a number), which took a week to 10 days to hook up.  Once that occurred, you could call your parents, for about $.50 per minute long distance and tell them your phone number.  If you were wealthy enough, you hooked up an answering machine with a cassette tape in it.  So just know that the phone-like devices being carried around by us back-end baby boomers are really dutiful umbilical cords back to our mommy’s.  Now, everybody walks around with Bluetooth earpieces talking with their hands and staring off into space.  Such behavior in public would have led to institutionalization in a mental facility in 1984.

My children…my eldest in college now and not much younger than you…have more technology than even I, a technologist, dreamed of at your age.  And like many of you, they know how to use it, but they know little about how it works.   I had an internship at a computer-timesharing company in college.  The CEO of the company was a physics PhD who enjoyed expounding to me on a variety of topics.  One day he pointed to the wall and said, “Jeff, do you know what makes that wall hold together and support weight?  Before I could embarrass myself, he said, “young man, I know why that wall is able to develop and retain its structure at a molecular level, and although esoteric in a world of pre-constructed materials, it makes me feel good”.  I did some underage philosophizing that night and thought about the importance of what he had said.  But isn’t it so true of technology today?  When a kid uses new technology, you always hear a doting parent or grandparent say, “kids these days are amazing, they’re technology geniuses”.   Unfortunately it’s not true.  Today’s Internet-enables phones are the microwave ovens of my parent’s generation.  It’s simply an engineered device dumbed down so that nearly anybody can use it.  However, I personally know the guy that became a multi-billionaire creating edible food that could easily be prepared in a microwave; because having a microwave oven doesn’t make you a better cook, just like having a multi-channel communication device doesn’t make you a better communicator or time manager, nor does it make you a better discriminator between fact and fiction.  That doesn’t mean these are not great inventions that contribute to society’s potential in a phenomenal way, just don’t confuse genius with the ability to purchase and use consumer electronics.

Lesson 3:  Budget healthcare into your life and try to keep up with the changes

So, just how does the healthcare system work?  You might want to figure it out since your health status is the number one factor that will influence your quality of life.  It’s a huge topic, but let me give you some highlights.   First, the economics of healthcare.  It costs real money to organize and deliver health services to people.  In the United States, the healthcare industry represents 16% of GDP or about $1.4T in 2007.  We have 52 million uninsured Americans; healthcare insurance premiums are increasing at least double the rate of inflation; large employers like GM and Ford are shedding responsibility for retiree health benefits as quickly as Investment banks are diversifying mortgage-backed securities; small employers are increasingly not even offering health care benefits, and the worst situation is yet to come as the front-end of the baby boomers prepare to technically “bankrupt” Medicare in about 2018.  All this while the U.S. spends more per-capita than any other country…we must be doomed.  This might be worse than melting polar ice caps, but at least Al Gore invented the Internet to help save us.

Now, let’s think about information technology and healthcare.  Did you know that 60% of all care delivered by physicians includes unwarranted variation from documented best practices; that redundant imaging and lab tests are performed routinely; that 20 -30% of medical costs are attributes to things the patient either didn’t want or didn’t need; and that if a hospital or doctor makes an error that leads to complications, the hospital and doctor tend to get paid more than doing it right the first time.  Absurd you say?  It’s not because doctors are trying to be freelancers or because people are indifferent.  It’s because the integrated information technology required to synchronize all the moving parts of the healthcare supply chain is staggeringly complex, and much like it took the last decade to close the last-mile in high-speed Internet communications, we are at the front-end of the decade in which we will complete the last-mile in synchronizing healthcare information among consumers (patients), doctors, employers and health plans. 

With the current chaos, is it any wonder that society’s leading health care expert, filmmaker Michael Moore (that would be sarcasm), puts out a film suggesting you would be better off receiving your health care in Cuba…(I had to tie back to the cigar thing).  And politicians are running around saying we need MORE spending to take care of everybody with some suggesting a government-run single payer system.  If that was true, why is my company seeing an unprecedented level of interest in information technology solutions that run the U.S private health care system coming from countries with single payer systems?  Does that sound implausible?

The good news and bad news is the sheer amount of capital spurring advances in biotechnology.  It’s good, because by the time most of you are set to retire, you will be treated less on a reactive basis for the diseases you develop, and more on a proactive basis based upon your genetic and environmental predispositions as well as your behaviors.  It’s good because when one of your organs is injured or wears out, stem-cell and other technology will help you grow a new one or return it to a more youthful state.  The sort of bad news is that the capital creating these breakthroughs is seeking return for investors, and the need for returns keeps things rather expensive, if not unaffordable for many.   

The truth is that there is plenty of money being spent on healthcare in the U.S. to take care of everybody at a high standard, and that will become easier to achieve with advances in healthcare technology.  Another truth is that it is not necessarily the case in countries with socialized medicine.  Let me boil down the reason for the healthcare problem in one sentence.  Consumers have been disconnected from making rational choices and dealing the actual cost of their healthcare for decades.  If you are from a country with socialized healthcare, you are even more disconnected.  You need to expect that to change.  You need to expect that health insurance means insurance, and not 1st dollar coverage like your parents had.  You need to expect that if you engage in riskier health behaviors that are controllable, the equivalent if you will, of driving your body recklessly, that you will pay more for your healthcare than somebody who is more careful.   

You’ve been trained by society to think about financial planning for your car, for your higher education, for major lifecycle events like weddings, for your housing, and for retirement in general…but you have not been trained to financially plan for health care.  Consider today your inaugural training.    If health care is 16% of GDP, are you planning to spend or save 16% of your income for healthcare upon graduation?  Too much…how about 10%?  Maybe because you are young and invincible, you’ll budget it in when you’re a little older.  Older like me?  Older like your parents?  Older like my parents?  Don’t make the equivalent mistake of waiting to financially plan for your children’s college education until they’re 16.  I’ll make you a deal.  If you budget healthcare into your lives and acknowledge that much of the cost of healthcare and your quality of life is driven by you, then my company, TriZetto, and others like it, will keep developing the information technology that allows you to optimize your healthcare finances and the quality of care you receive, so you and your doctor, in partnership, get the right information, at the right time, to create the best result. 

Lesson 4:  Always consider yourself an underdog – benchmark against only the best

Let me conclude by saying that it takes a lot of intellectual honesty to balance your potential with your personal goals.  You actually need to decide pretty early in your careers, whether you want to be city class, regional class, national class or world class.  Any of those choices is fine depending on what else is of great importance to you…proximity to extended and immediate family, participation in local religious and civic involvement, etc.  But, don’t believe that you can be world class if you are not participating in and competing on a world stage.  And know, that in a professional sense, the effort involved to move from one class to the next is an order of magnitude move, as is the amount of time you need to invest to achieve it.  If your personal situation allows it, I encourage you to try and move beyond your comfort zone for as long as possible, and push yourself against the best you can find anywhere you can find them.  

Despite the nice introduction I received, the facts are that I fell a bit short of making bronze tablet; I never made into the 1st jazz band; I didn’t set any records on the CPA exam; and there are technologists and CEO’s outperforming me in the marketplace every year.  Back in 1983, I did try to associate with greatness by tutoring one of the linebackers on the football team the last time the Illini went to the Rose Bowl.  We won the big 10 that year, but when we got on the national stage against USC, it was u-g-l-y (mention 1983 commemorative Pepsi bottle).  The point of this is to understand that at each point along the way in my professional journey, I either failed to hit my highest goal or fell short of the best against whom I was competing.  I encourage each of you to do the same.  You will find people who tell you you’re the best, and they may even mean it. But be intellectually honest and remember that there are 6 billion people on this planet.  Race them all to the top end of achievement for as long as you are able.  

Use your strength, discipline and humility as an Illini…and go do great things.  Thank you for your kind attention today, and congratulations!