OPEN TO INNOVATION: How Engineers Can Lead in Disruptive Change - Fireside Chat with Jim Whitehurst

Yeah, so first off, great to meet you, and thank you so much for being here. I have to say the one person who's not here is my daughter. She decided to go have sushi tonight instead of hearing this, but she's heard most of this before, so I'm trying not to take that personally. Also in Jones, by the way. So I think that question is one of the most important for leaders broadly, but certainly for engineering leaders. When I go back to 1989 when I graduated, so much of technology was implementing the known, taking processes and coding them. But if you look at the transition that started happening after the internet, it's really accelerated in the last decade. As President Leebron said, it really is becoming how companies create value. What that means is you're going from delivering against a prescribed known to how you lead and create in a wholly unknown area. That's a fundamentally different thing. I have twins. My daughter's here at Rice, she's very techy and good at writing term papers. My son is at NYU studying film, very artsy and can do creative writing. The idea of my daughter trying to do creative writing would make her head explode. Engineers aren't generally the type who are super creative right off the bat; it's something you have to work on, especially when you get teams and how those things work. But to use a simple example, we talked about this earlier. If you think about an engineering exercise, how do you take 2% of the cost out of making a car? That's relatively valuable. But if you realize the average car is used 90 minutes a day, and if you can increase that by 20%, that's a whole lot more valuable. When you think about how to do that, there are a hundred different ways: ride share, autonomous driving, co-ownership, and all these things. So all of a sudden, you think about how you solve that problem. It's not just what's the engineering solution; it's how do I even imagine what the solution is that I'm going to go try to solve. So the role of engineering organizations is becoming less directly about applying technology to a known problem and more about how to create a vision of the future and then how to get there. As an individual, there's one thing about how you go about doing it, but now as a leader, how do you do that with a number of people who have to work together to innovate at scale? I'll promise I'll stop talking in a second. This is a little bit the parallel that started to dawn on me: it's not just about how do I make individuals creative. When I was at Delta, I thought I knew how to run an organization. Delta was considered a really well-run airline, and we did pretty well, first in on-time performance. I came to Red Hat, and Red Hat felt like chaos. My first reaction was, 'Oh my God, I've got to clean this thing up.' But what I realized pretty quickly is it actually wasn't chaos; it was a different way to manage when you're trying to drive innovation. You don't want anybody innovating on the safety procedures before your flight. You don't want DevOps fail-fast going there. There is a very different pace for how you think about doing things. The myriad things that have to happen for a plane to leave on time, the crews, the schedules, the safety procedures, all of that. How you lead when you're trying to minimize variance, which is what we used to do in computer science when I first graduated, looks so different than when you're trying to drive a faster pace of innovation and you actually want to inject variance. It's easy to talk about injecting variance when you start talking about a DevOps process, and most of us understand what that means. But think about it for an organization of 10, 100, or a thousand engineers working for you. How do you drive a pace of innovation? We can come back and talk about parts of that if you want, but that broadly is the challenge that engineers and engineering leadership have: taking a broader role in solving those problems. I'll give one more example and then promise I'll let you ask another question. There was a time at Delta when the CIO really wanted budget for other purposes. He came up with the idea of the 42-inch gate displays you see at airports now, with the flat screens showing the weather, etc. He was really trying to get budget to do a whole bunch of IT renewal stuff. But what he figured out was that in Delta's case, you had two narrow-body agents to board a domestic flight, and that was really expensive because we had tens of thousands of agents. If you could go from two to one, that was worth over $100 million a year. Why do you have two gate agents? Because a lot of people go up there and ask questions: what's the weather like, where am I on the standby list, where am I on the upgrade list, are there any window seats left, when's the plane going to arrive, is the crew here? By putting all that on the screen, we were able to go from two to one gate agent. That's a very simple example, but it was him and his team that were proactive, saying technology can do this because the people in the airport weren't thinking about that. So that's a very simple operational thing. Now you start getting into all the revenue things. Really recognizing that engineering organizations need to be leaders in thinking about how the capabilities of technology change the business models of organizations. That leads to a whole myriad set of leadership opportunities and challenges for engineering leaders. Well, answer your question.

Yeah, so in order to really think about making continuous change, you really need to understand the business that you're in broadly. Especially if you're going to a startup, you hopefully understand that piece well. Even then, really understanding how your customers are using the product and what the potentials are, what they are doing the hour before they use your product and the hour after, and how they are using it. Even with that, there's value. But especially if you go to a larger organization, really understanding how the company makes money and how the pieces fit together. Often it's in the seams between the organizations where there's less visibility that all of a sudden you can see a solution. Just an example from Delta: my big thesis, which turned out to be right, which is why I ultimately got a couple of promotions, was I started to have this theory that connecting travel wasn't as profitable as we thought. Airlines back in the 80s built these airline hubs that connected people, and connecting travel was really profitable. But then in the 1990s, the regional jet was born. These little 50-seat Bombardier and Embraer regional jets started flying. What that ended up doing was, if you're going from Savannah, Georgia to Los Angeles, you used to have two ways to go: over Atlanta on Delta or over Charlotte on whatever the predecessor of US Airways was. But after the birth of the regional jets, Continental was flying it from Houston, American was flying it from Chicago, so all of a sudden there were six ways to get there. My hypothesis was that the profitability of connecting travel was becoming less profitable. All of the airline profitability systems worked on looking at individual routes and not the tos and froms. So I started downloading all this data from the DOT on passengers and ticket fare samples. By the way, I had to use Linux to do that because this was the early 2000s, and Windows had the FAT file system which only did 4 GB, and 4 GB wasn't enough. So I started messing around with Linux, which turned out to be transformational in my life later on. But anyway, I was actually able to prove this out. I was doing all this when I was treasurer. The treasurer is the person who manages the dollars, but I was passionate about it, interested in it. I started talking to people in the network and built this thesis, which ultimately allowed me to go from being treasurer to running the network, which is how the planes fly. But it was because of that level of curiosity. I'll use one other example. The current CEO of Red Hat is an engineer. Red Hat does a lot of things in infrastructure but doesn't do a lot in machine learning. As a hobby, he has a townhouse in Boston with his gym on the top floor, and he can't hear the doorbell. He could rewire it, but he decided that was dumb. So he put a microphone on a little computer, a Raspberry Pi, and did a machine learning algorithm for the microphone to recognize the doorbell, and then it would ping him on his phone upstairs. That sounds really simple, but as he said, a year later when they started talking about whether to offer a set of open source tools called the Open Data Hub, his ability to engage in that was so much higher because he had toyed around with it and done it himself. He understood it was shockingly easy to build a model to recognize the doorbell. You give it a whole bunch of sounds and teach it. So basic simple things like that, if you're interested in something and you're curious and you pursue it, either it has a direct impact, like in the case of how the airline flew, or in his case, he built enough context that he could be more able to have a set of conversations. I think that is critical. So as you go forward, just be curious about how your organizations make money, what the seams are, what different kinds of people in organizations do. Ultimately, I think it's just interesting. It'll make you a better general leader, but it will also help you contextualize how the business makes money and how you might be able to impact that over time, especially if you want to lead. Because other people are also going to ask you about things about the business. The more context you can provide for your people, the more effective leader you are.

So being an engineering leader, I will say, is tough because engineers in general are very logical people, which is good in many ways. But at the same time, great leaders are people that others follow because they want to follow, and 'want' by definition has some degree of emotion in it. So there's a whole set of soft skills around how you get people inspired about what you're doing, to want to do what you want them to do. But at the same time, you have to appeal to the logic as well. So you have to do both: build the whole logic story but also work to inspire. And by the way, you're doing it with engineers who, on average, are more introverted. We used to have these problems. When innovation happens, great innovation typically is not a single individual; it's getting people together to build off each other's ideas. That requires getting people together, and we have a lot of introverts. So you have a lot of work to do. We used to have engineers say, 'We want to get together and do this. Can I just instant message it?' It's like, 'No, you probably need to be there.' So really working to build spaces where people feel comfortable interacting. There are multiple sides to that. One is building a place where people can be comfortable and open, but also moderating it so it doesn't become too harsh. One of the interesting things with engineers is that somebody might say, 'That's the dumbest freaking idea I've ever heard.' In some engineering environments, that's considered very collaborative. But other people, that turns them off. So as a leader, you're trying to create a context where people feel comfortable saying things, and you want people to say if that's a bad idea, but doing it in a way that's respectful and inclusive. You don't want to create an environment that is only considered inclusive by people who are willing to withstand withering criticism. Getting that balance right is tough, and frankly, it's tougher with engineers because they are more likely to be introverts and generally are more okay with some really harsh feedback. So the soft skills around that, and recognizing it's too easy for people who don't love interacting to say, 'Let me just divide out the responsibilities and give them out to people and come back.' But if you don't have people working together, you're not going to be as creative. So the soft set of skills of how you engineer getting people to work together and be inspired to do it is key and hard in engineering organizations.

Well, a big part is, and these are generalizations, I know some very extroverted engineers, but in general, when you're leading a marketing organization or some of these other organizations, you have generally more extroverted people broadly. So your ability to bring people together and build emotion and energy off of each other is just easier. When I was at Red Hat, going to a sales office and engaging in strategy and what we're going to do and why and how was a very different experience than going to one of our engineering centers, where you got a lot more logical questions, but it was harder to get people viscerally emotionally attached to what we're doing. We were able to do that more around open source and the mission. But I think there's a lot of heart and head. Leading with head and how you augment with heart, whereas in a sales or marketing organization, it's a lot of heart and you add in a little bit of head. In terms of how you're thinking about it, you need people who want to do something, not because you told them to, but because they want to do it. That's a combination of intellectually understanding why it's important and emotionally being invested in it. Frankly, that second part is the one where it's just harder with introverts. So it's a skill set you have to learn, and honestly, a lot of it comes with practice. Getting people in a room, working on the tenor of the conversation, making sure it's happening, and you build that over time. I will say, and I mentor several CEOs now who are engineers who've been CEOs, the other thing I would say is think really hard if you want to do it. At Red Hat, we had careers of advancement and careers of achievement. There are a lot of people who want to have influence in their career and feel like they're continuing to progress, but they don't want to manage people. Some people just don't want to hire people, fire people, give performance reviews, give bonuses and have them complain, and explain why this person's going to get more. All that messy people stuff, some people just don't want to do it. That doesn't mean they don't want to have tremendous influence and respect in an organization. I've mentored some folks who decided, 'You know what, I don't want to be a CEO. I know I started this thing and I love it, but I want to be on the engineering side and get somebody else to do all that stuff.' So the other thing I would say is really think hard about what you want to do and what you love to do. You're always going to have to do some things you don't love to do, but you want 70% or 80% of your job to be stuff you love to do, and you put up with the rest because it's necessary. Construct your career around that. Over time, as you think about an individual job, you may be stuck in a situation where 70% of the stuff is not what you want to do, and then you start thinking about what you want to do next. But over time, as you have career choice, try to make sure you get that mix right. We've had some great leaders at Red Hat where you'd be like, 'We want you to run this organization,' and they'd say, 'No, I don't want to do that.' I always respect people who really understand what they want to do and what they enjoy doing. Others, it's just a journey. They might say, 'I don't necessarily love this, but I love being able to see the impact my technology has, and I love focusing on the technology and the customers, and I want to hold my nose and put up with the rest, and I hire a strong chief of staff to do the stuff I don't like to do.' But really thinking hard about what you like to do, the whole point is if you're successful in life, the biggest gift you get is you get to do what you like to do. So think really hard about that and how you craft around that.

Well, so one thing I would say is part of it is just keeping a broad aperture. I read The Economist cover to cover every week, and I have a little more time than a lot of people now, but pick what the 10 things are. Go to a16z; they have great blogs on various companies they're invested in and what and why and how. Pick whatever the seven or eight sources are that you think are both interesting and meaningful to give you a broad perspective. Spend time doing that. At Delta, even when I was treasurer, I would go to lunch with the guy who ran maintenance and go to lunch with the person who did the scheduling stuff. When I got promoted, I was really young, but it was like, 'Well, yeah, he kind of knows more than anybody else because I just talked to more people and asked questions a lot more.' So doing some of that is important. One of the things, I'll state the blindingly obvious: the most interesting thing to 99% of the world is themselves. So just ask somebody about what they're doing, what their challenges are, and they're happy to just gush it all out there. Seriously, just find people to go to lunch with in a company you work for, in areas that are not yours, and ask about their job and what they're doing. I find it interesting to hear, and most people are happy to tell you. Afterward, it's like, 'That was such a great conversation,' and they're just imparting. I'm a little bit on the border between extrovert and introvert, and I've found for me, as a bit more of an introvert, the best way to have a conversation with someone is to ask them about themselves, what they do, what their challenges are. They're happy to talk, and then you don't have to do that much talking. So I'd say the average conversation, just because I'm not super socially adept, I find just asking people what they're doing, and the conversation emerges from that. That to me is a great way to get a lot of perspective, but it's also a great way to interact with people that is pretty low stakes because all you're doing is asking about them.

I'll go a little bit out on a limb here. I think that if you look at technology companies today, whether it's market cap or share of GDP, they continue to grow and grow. The source of advantage for businesses much more today is not owning assets but using those assets effectively. So the Fourth Industrial Revolution to me is a lot about a whole new set of winners continuing to take share in the economy. Whether that's autonomous driving, advances in healthcare, will it be the HCA Hospital Corporation of America that wins, or will it be technology companies that extract more of the value? Where technology companies begin and end will get blurry because you'll have things more focused in technologies. But there is tons of room for attackers to take share across these categories because innovation becomes important, and it's really hard for large established companies to innovate as quickly. Technology becomes the source of advantage. Now, that's one perspective. If you want to look at it from a societal perspective, the last Industrial Revolution, we are all tremendously better off. From 1870 to 1950, GDP per capita in the industrialized world doubled every 30 years. That is profound. From the birth of Christ to 1750, we only went up 50%. Then we started every 30 years doubling. So incredible value creation associated with that. I think we will see that with a set of technologies coming together now, which we're calling the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But you also have to remember the Industrial Revolution was marked by a lot of wars, a lot of people dying, communism, socialism, a whole lot of different economic models happening. So to think we're going to go through something this transformational for the world without a lot of political and social unrest, I think is pretty crazy. So I think there's a lot of goodness that will come out of it, but there's going to be a lot of disorder until we figure out how to allocate capital in this new world order. This is a bit of a gross simplification, but I don't think it's too far off. You basically had four or five technologies that really came together in 1870. I always use that people talk about 1750 for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but it was really when we got Bessemer steel, trains, mass manufacturing, so you're able to make stuff and distribute it quickly. If you look at technology, a lot of what we've had up until recently was like 1750 to 1870, a slow progression. We were making some progress, factories were built, but it was when a set of technologies came together that really exploded. I do think generative AI, which allows more cognition to happen in computers, along with broadband, high-speed communication in your pocket, etc., all of a sudden what humans can do and what machines can do will change. I think that creates enormous value. It will create new jobs, yes, some jobs will go away. We will have autonomous driving, but jobs will be augmented and new things will be created. The problem is then how do you distribute wealth across this? A good friend of mine, Jim Goodnight at SAS, is really good at telling you what to put on a store shelf and how many facings of each product to have. Jim's a billionaire because of that. That replaced the mom-and-pop shops that knew their communities. So it's one billionaire and a lot of people making minimum wage versus a lot of people somewhere in the middle. That problem is going to get worse and worse in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is why I think there's going to be a lot of social and political upheaval until we find a new way to distribute wealth. If you go back to the Industrial Revolution, massive amounts of capital and massive amounts of labor created enormous efficiency. How do you divide the wealth created between capital and labor? It started off with the capital owners getting it, and then we went through different systems around the world. In the US, we had a social welfare system and unionization, which ultimately distributed wealth and created a middle class. How do you do it now? Jim Goodnight is a billionaire because he developed a piece of software that he sells to companies that now have people with minimum wage putting things on the shelves. They can't unionize against Jim because he's in a different company. So this idea of how as a society we redistribute wealth, we have not figured out. There are so many incredible possibilities, whether it's how we cure diseases or, I actually spend a lot of time on the environment. I'm an optimist on the environment because I think the advances in material sciences and other areas will figure out how to capture carbon. But all those are the great things. However, I do think as a society, how wealth is distributed in that environment needs to change. We have a lot to figure out. Sorry, that's a long answer to your question.

Yeah, so it's funny when I think back on it. When I graduated with a degree in computer science, I decided I wanted to go do business, get an MBA, and be on the business side of technology. I always thought I'd be on the business side of technology, but I got really, really waylaid. I went to the Boston Consulting Group out of college, and I thought I'd do that for a couple of years. I'd been there about a year, and I got put on this project where we were doing all this evaluation work with really complex models. This wasn't just in a spreadsheet; it was really complex. We had these fading curves in terms of cash flows and how things would change over time that wasn't algebraic. You literally had to run them on a mainframe. I had this laptop with floppy disk drives, and you'd have to run it at night, and it would go up and down to the mainframe, writing things to the floppy drive. It was so loud I had to put it in my closet with an extension cord because I had a studio apartment. So I ended up getting all the manuals and rewriting it. Honestly, it wasn't that hard; it just wasn't something you could do in a spreadsheet at the time. So I rewrote it on the PC. Well, once you've written something, you know it really, really well because you've gone through it and had to deeply understand it. So I very quickly rose into leadership in what was called corporate development, which involved valuation, what multi-divisional companies are worth, how you assign values, M&A, and all that stuff. I went to business school, came back, stayed at BCG, and was loving it. One of my big clients was Delta because I was interested in why they were valued the way they were. A big part of why I think I was successful there is because I programmed this thing. I was actually pretty happy, but 9/11 happened, and I got a call from the CEO, Leo, who I knew because I had been serving them at BCG. He said, 'I need you now to be my treasurer.' I said, 'You're out of your mind. I know nothing about being a treasurer.' He said, 'That's okay. Nobody in their right mind would loan us money now, so you're smart, you'll figure it out.' That's how I made that first transition. A lot of that was because I was so deep in how those models worked that it allowed me to build credibility and leadership quickly. Then I started to tell the story about how the flight profitability models we had back then didn't really do origin and destination; they allocated revenue doing all the route stuff. I spent a lot of time deeply understanding that, which is how I ultimately got promoted to running the network. The success out of that moved me to be COO. When we emerged from bankruptcy, it was a weird process. A new board gets created, and they want to bring in their own management team, so that's when I left. But because I had been doing all that work in Linux, I got this call about Red Hat. I knew Red Hat well; I was using it at home, had hacked around on it a lot, so I had credibility going there. You asked the question about mentors. I'm not sure I'd say mentors, but over time I've definitely built what I'll call a team. There are two partners at BCG who are very good, dear friends. One was a little more senior, one a little more junior, coming up through. I called them for advice all the time. I know them well; they're good friends and colleagues. A couple of friends from business school the same way. When I left Delta, which was a little unexpected because new management comes in and says, 'Okay, see you later,' a friend called me and said, 'Get on a plane to Minneapolis tomorrow. I'm calling three other people. We're all getting together, spending a couple of days talking about your life and what you're going to go do.' So I got on a plane to do that. When he left his last job, I did the same thing. So over time, you build a cadre of people who know you deeply, and their advice is invaluable. Other people have done really well with mentors. I don't know if I've ever had a quote-unquote mentor as much as these people that I've just known and can call for advice, and I trust, and they know me. Build those now. People at Rice, who do you think knows you there? Actually, there are two other Jones '89 members on the Rice Board of Trustees. The three of us, if you had put a lottery on that we would be on the Board of Trustees, it would be more likely we'd be in jail. But they're both highly successful individuals. It's people like that that I've kept in touch with who I can call. There's something about knowing you and what makes you tick that their advice is phenomenal. Others, I don't want to say don't go get mentors, and over time people can help with that, but I've found life's long, and the friends you make and the connections you make are incredibly powerful. One other story in that regard. When Delta was getting into financial trouble, we wanted to sell a regional subsidiary of ours called ASA. The problem is when you go into bankruptcy, all of your contracts you can basically abrogate. So we wanted to sell this business to a partner, but we were going to sell it knowing we'd probably file for bankruptcy, so the contract wasn't worth much. I called the COO of SkyWest at the time and said, 'Look, I know you want to own this thing. We would like to sell it, but it's a weird situation because whatever we agree to, in six months if we go bankrupt, we can cancel. So how do we build something where you have enough leverage that you feel things are going to work out?' We did a lot of work around that, and I ultimately met their board of directors and spent a lot of time building trust. Well, it turns out one of the members of their board of directors was on the board of directors of Red Hat. So when the recruiter who had been hired to find the CEO said, 'I know this is a crazy idea, but this guy Jim Whitehurst,' the board member said, 'I know Jim. I fully trust him. I know how he ticks.' Those kinds of relationships are really important in life. So again, whether it's people who are friends who can advise you or just the reputation you build over time and people you can ultimately call, to me that's almost more important than mentorship. Life's long, jobs are short. The people you meet, the relationships you have, and what your brand is with people in the industry and around you is the most important thing you have. Everybody goes around, we were talking earlier, about whether you stay a long time at one place or bounce around and get a lot of different experiences. My answer to that was, 'Well, it kind of depends.' Some people get a lot of emotional satisfaction from a deep commitment to one place. Others want to try different places and get broader sets of experiences. I would say if you're going to leave somewhere, leave on really good terms. Be honest about why you're leaving, give notice, never burn bridges. You just never know when those things are going to come back. It's the right thing to do, but you never know when you turn around 10 years later and you're on the other side of the table from somebody, and you want them to say, 'That person is an honorable person. They've done the right thing.' That is option value that will always serve you well in life.

One piece of advice? I'm going to come back to really be deeply, deeply curious, not only in your area of expertise. You need to have some depth in one area, but you need to be curious and have some breadth. I am amazed at the number of people who really don't understand how their company or their job fits into the whole. To be successful over time and just be a well-rounded person, you need to know that. At some point, to make certain leaps in your career and in life, having a broader perspective is so important. Whether that's not just in business, but socially, geopolitically, just making sure that you don't get sent down a rabbit hole and so focused that you don't have a broad perspective, which I do think is absolutely critical. So be curious, toy around. I have a little more time now because I'm mainly doing boards and advisory and other stuff. I've built an iOS application, I've built a website, I studied in Germany a long time ago and I'm relearning German, I do a lot of photography. One could argue, 'Well, why those? They don't have any direct impact.' But I don't know, maybe they will at some point. I do think being curious and open, serendipity is such an important part of life. Frankly, if I hadn't been curious about the network thing, I probably would have been COO at Delta. I certainly wouldn't have gotten the job at Red Hat. Who knew? So do things you're interested in, but I would just encourage you, don't make it so that you're so interested in this one thing that you get really, really narrow. You want to have some breadth in terms of your perspective, both business and globally. That would probably be the big one. And again, I can't hold on. I have twins, so I can have two favorites. So that's one piece of advice. The other is again, come back to do what you love to do, and you will be good at it, and good things will happen. So be self-aware. There are several CEOs that I mentor. Some have been wildly, billionarily successful, and others are somewhere in the middle. But the ones that are best and most successful over time are the ones that are most self-aware. Self-awareness has two pieces: what are you good at and what are you not good at, so you can work to spend more time on what you're good at. And also, what do you love to do? There's a high correlation there. If you're good at it, there's a good chance you really like to do it. There are some people where that's not true in history, but in general, what you're good at and what you like to do often overlap. So really understanding that so you can both choose jobs but also structure your jobs, especially as you get leadership roles and you have chances to pick people on teams. I've got a lot of flaws, but I think that's one thing I know. The reason Red Hat was so successful isn't that I'm that good, but I was smart enough to hire really smart people with things I didn't like to do and I wasn't good at, and they were phenomenal at it. So it worked out. And that's not just professional success; I think it's personal success. I really enjoyed every day at Red Hat and what I did there and the impact we had. But a lot of that's because I did what I like to do, which was what I was good at, and got other people to do other things. So really reflect on that. And honestly, this is the other place back to mentors versus friends. If you get deep with a mentor, they may be able to help you with that. Your friends know what you're like. So at some point, I know you generally joke around and have fun, but sometimes it's worth, as you're thinking about a job or a high-stakes decision, having a deep conversation with your friends. You'll be amazed how insightful they are about you. They might say, 'I don't know if you want to do that because frankly, I don't think that's your strong suit.' Those kinds of conversations can actually be really helpful. But if you can do what you're good at doing and like doing, that's going to be success. You'll be good at it, therefore you will be successful doing it, and your career goes from there. Thank you.

Can I say one other thing? This is not the question, but I'll say we also talked about solitude a bit. I found Rice to be such an extraordinary place to be for the four years that I was at Rice. My wife went to Amherst, which is a great, well-respected school. She loves her high school, that's where she really fit in. I found I fit at Rice like a fish in water. It's the people around you. No offense to the professors, we had great professors too, but it's really the people around you and the culture. The other piece of advice I would give is just really make friends, make contacts, and frankly, when you graduate, keep in touch. There are people that I fell out of touch with that I got back in touch with five years later at business school or 10 years later serendipitously. Those are some of the best friendships that I have because they knew you at a formative time. They share your intellect and intelligence, so they wouldn't be here, and they probably share a lot of values. So savor that while you're here, but take it with you for the rest of your career. I really do think Rice is a truly special place in that regard. So again, just enjoy it, but make sure you take it with you when you leave.