MSM Graduation Day 2014 Mr Koos Bekker

Thomas and Eric, friends here. I think Jordin asked me to say a few words in the expectation that I could possibly say something vaguely uplifting to young people. I'm not sure that's possible. Firstly, most advice you get in life is free and perfectly worthless. And secondly, MBAs and DBAs are by their nature, I think, what's a good word, Dutch word... that's what you should be and that's what I was when I left. I was not particularly amenable to advice at your age. So if I say, make some observations, it's a triumph of hope over experience. Let me nonetheless say something about what business schools teach you. When I was at business school, they taught us calculus, operations research, statistical methods, marketing 101, accounting. But somehow they never, all these instruments, but they never taught us or tried to teach us what to do with our lives. Is MSM the same? Did you have any class on what to devote your life to? Anyone who attended a class like that?

Just think of the metaphor. You build and ship a warship, you equip it with radar, sonar, and torpedoes, and you set it out in the ocean. You say, go forth. And you say, where to? Say, but that's not my department. It's fairly pointless. All these instruments are useless unless they're in the service of something. Now, I read recently about happiness. There was the most recent study was two weeks ago at the London School of Economics, a guy called Dolan, and he concludes that you need two things for happiness in your life: the one is purpose and the other one is pleasure. If you simply devote your life to purpose, you become an irritable old scold that no one wants to listen to. And if you just go for pleasure, you become sort of an empty hedonist. And as it happens, some Greek philosopher like Epicurus or a Roman recreationist would have agreed fully. Okay, now how did that apply to my simple business life? Now, I think first maybe the result of Harvard, oats, sort of, and All-Bran. I grew up in South Africa, and 30 years ago, it was a miserable place, very dark, your dean here will tell you. And in the 30 years, I experienced our company work in media. I experienced the process of transformation into a normal democratic society. It's not a perfect society but it works a lot better. And that provided a sense of purpose to my life. I feel I didn't live completely in vain. Our media participated in this. And take into account our company is 100 years old. In our past, we actually fully participated in apartheid. This was a change of heart that occurred about 30 years ago. The second pleasure or sort of purpose thing for me is that I happen to work in media. Now, over the past, 1980, you were most of you were not yet born, just before you were born. We negotiated contracts with Hollywood using fax machines. Anyone who sent the fax yesterday? The women wore shoulder pads, okay. Anyone here with shoulder pads? That was 10 years before the internet was invented. And over the past 30 years, our total industry transformed in every respect. And we were part of that transformation. And media is not peripheral to the world; media is the basis on which we conduct our conversations in society. That's the way societies talk to each other. And we went through all these transformations: from analog newspapers, magazines to television, from television to the internet. Now, the internet, we move towards social networks and e-commerce and these things. And that participating in what I regard as the biggest economic shift over the last 500 years since Gutenberg, that gave me a sense of being where the action is. So, if I can just ask, are all you guys sorted out on the purpose of life? Who is clear on the purpose of his life? Let's just see as a straw poll. Anyone? Okay, one, two, five. Okay, one thing to think about. But let's think about the second item, and that's one of pleasure. I tend to think, although I can't prove it, that most of the pleasure you derive in your life comes from relationships. And I think in most people's lives, there isn't anything as important as family. I tended to grow up quite a little bit distant from my family. And over the years, I've realized how important it is. For instance, my wife followed me moving house five, seven times for my career. She had to leave what she was doing and find something new to do, and she landed on her feet. She became a fashion editor in one city, New York, an art student in another, designer in another city. Extremely important to you, Mary. How many of you are not yet married? Okay, that's the majority. Look out. The next thing is your friends. Now, when we're in our teens and twenties, friendship is extremely important. That's the time of our lives when we refer mainly to our peers. It should be so, it is so. You are in that phase. You tend to think that your roommate or Michelle next to you that you met in Maastricht are very important. I will guarantee you, in 30 years, you wouldn't recognize them in the street. Most friendships you form at this phase of your life completely disappear. So I'm sorry to be negative, Jaron and Michelle. It's not important; it evaporates over time. But then perhaps an interesting development which I didn't anticipate and you might find in your life is what happens at work. The people that you work with daily become your friends. Now, it's quite a hard thing to understand. I was a chief executive longer than anyone in South Africa. I headed up a listed company for 22 years. And remember, if you head up a company, you can never give any of your subordinates that unconditional approval our mothers give us. You have to be able to fire anyone in the company if that's what's needed to save the ship, otherwise you're a very poetic chief executive. So one level of me always said, but these guys are dispensable, they are commodities. But if I look back on my life, some of the most worthwhile moments were when we went drinking in Guangzhou, eating creepy crawly creatures in shady restaurants, Abu, where are you? Or when we lose a deal, to go crying together. Or when we have a success, to drift down on a sailing boat in the Bosphorus, then drink white Sicilian wine. It's the most unbelievable experience I had in my life, and it comes from colleagues. So if friends are not that important, at least my experience, not your university friends, your colleagues are going to be very important. So you better select the industry that you work in carefully. How many of you guys are sorted out in the industry? You know which industry you're going to be in? Okay, one-third. About okay. It's a very hard choice. I qualified as a lawyer. I studied for five years at reasonable marks. First, I went to a magistrate's court. I saw manila files, blood smears, all the smart allegory that lawyers tried in a court, and I was disgusted and I resigned. And I traveled around Europe unemployed for six months, just bumming around. My life was at an end when I was what, 26? And then by accident I came across media, and I absolutely love it. Now, what happens in media is that it's an extremely complex world. You have at least five axes moving at the same time. So just imagine this: here's technology. So here's analog, digital, mobile. Right? Tomorrow morning, Facebook finds a new way of communicating. You better get your response because we run a Facebook in China and so on. Technology shifting all the time. Then there's regulation. Laws and regulation make our industry, media. They can kill you. You better be very alert. Then there's consumer taste. Families become modular, shopping shifts from Saturday to Sunday. All these things happening. So you have all these axes moving at the same time. And then you're sitting behind your desk on your PC. You see an email coming in. Your biggest, your second biggest investor has sold out all your shares this morning. Right? And you panic. And your PA stands there with a finger wagging on your nose and say, where's that memo? And then on this line, the minister is shouting about what your editor wrote in his Sunday paper. Right? And you say, what a life at one level. And what I can say to you is I love it. It's an industry that happens to suit my personal taste. It may not be yours, but you need to find yours. Okay. So, Dean asked me to say something about emerging markets. Now, the problem is I won't insult your intelligence by pointing out that in 1981, every Indian bar a few were dirt poor and every Chinese was poor. Okay. And all of you know that unless something fundamental changes the way the world works, China will become the number one economy in the world, and India number three, in a very few years. That is not because they run sweatshops or somehow flout the international order. It's something very deep rooted in the way the world works, and I'm not sure it can be changed in the short term. And I think the most important figure in all of this is the mother. So what drives China is the Chinese mother. So just imagine you're in Beijing. The kid comes back from school. You have one kid. You're going to drive that kid till nine o'clock tonight on homework. On Saturday, you're going to take him to maths class and then to violin and so on. And all your friends do the same. It's a fanatical world. And then some, in some ways, Indian mothers are worse. You compare that to Europe. I'm not particularly European, but I'm not prepared to drive my kids quite that hard. The consequence, though, is that when you look forward at 10 or 20 years into the future, the mothers that have children today in Maastricht have a reasonable expectation that their kid will end up flipping hamburgers in the Shanghai Hilton. Because where work goes, money follows, and the economy follows. Europe cannot maintain its lifestyle now in a world; it will simply become poor as nothing to stop it. And if you say, what can you do to change that? I think it's deeply fundamental. You have idiotic politicians in France that legislate a 35-hour work week. You have Germany last month, it was a wonderful idea that when Mercedes-Benz workers go on holiday and they come back after a month and they switch on the email, they should not see that emails have accumulated during their holiday and they shouldn't be forced to deal with this now. It's at such a level of idiocy that you just say to yourself, Europe deserves to become poor and Asia deserves to become rich. And I'm not sure there's anything in the short term that can be done to turn that around. Maybe in one or two generations when the Chinese learn European bad habits, but in the short term, nothing is going to stop that. Then, you may say, yeah, why don't you mention money? Now, this is after all the business school, and you're supposed to invest a lot of your time in the instruments to make money. And I was thinking about it. I was lucky. I made money at the age of 30, and then I made more money at 40, and so on. I was extremely lucky. Now, why is that not featuring? And I think it's because of the utility curve. Do you still, you teach the utility curve? Is that when you make the first million, few million euros, it's going to change your life totally. You can look after your parents. You can eat in any restaurant in the world. You can travel for a holiday. It changes, it gives you liberty. Very important to be poor; it's horrible. So the first million is very important. But then there's a diminishing return. Between 10 million euros, 100 million, nothing much happens. Between 100 million and 200 million, absolutely nothing happens, right? So I'm not convinced that great wealth is really correlated to happiness. I think a little bit of money is correlated, but beyond a certain point, I think money is pretty pointless and certainly not worth devoting your life to. Then, perhaps the last point. I'm an entrepreneur, and there's sort of a popular notion out in the world that it's sexy to be an entrepreneur. And many business school students start life on that assumption, and I think it's the wrong assumption. To be an entrepreneur means that you are a part of one or two percent of any given town's DNA. Maybe Maastricht will have one or two percent of the people are constitutionally suited to be an entrepreneur. What do you need? Firstly, you need to be fairly loony. It's not an attractive life. You work immensely hard, you take enormous risks, and most entrepreneurs fail. It also causes a lot of damage to people all around you. And if you look at entrepreneurs, they usually are defective people. It's your father was a drunk, so you want to prove that you're not really as bad as him, or you're a nerd, can't meet girls, so you become a CEO because there's nothing else to do on a Saturday night. So a very important question one has to ask yourself, especially with an MBA, is really where, where do your talents suit you best? Are you really best as a number one, or as in our company, many people have slotted in as number two, as a top marketing director, as a good HR man, as a financial chief. So I think one important suggestion is not to be deluded by the sexiness of being an entrepreneur, but rather to find that slot in society that suits your personality best. Now, lastly, the piece of research that I referred to earlier did a study of different careers, and then it ranked them, and they tried to find the most, the career that gives you most happiness, and it found top of the list: gardeners and florists. Now, I just want to say, for my life, I beg to disagree. No one could have been happier in his life than I, and that was in business after an MBA. Thank you very much indeed. You.