Conversations with the President: Commencement Speaker Randall Stephenson | University of Oklahoma

Thank you, Joe. It's a pleasure to be here.

My upbringing probably looks like about 80 percent of the people that are in the University of Oklahoma graduating this year. I grew up in the state. In fact, I grew up eight miles north of campus in Moore, Oklahoma. In fact, Toby Keith and I graduated at the same school, Moore, Oklahoma, went to high school there. Toby likes to brag that only his name is on the outside of the water tower anymore. I tell Toby mine is on the inside of the water tower, it's white inside, that counts. So anyway, I grew up in that community and grew up in a classic middle-class family and just grew up loving Sooner football, loving all things Oklahoma.

Well, OU was huge in terms of teaching me the things that I needed to succeed, not just in my job and in career, but in life. And I reflect a lot on my time at Oklahoma, particularly in graduate school. In graduate school, I tell people that I didn't learn subject matter, I did, but I really learned more than anything was how to think, how to reason, how to respond to challenge, how to respond to aggressive challenge in a classroom doing case studies and so forth. I also had professors, one I always reference is Dr. Fran Ayers, who I just loved. But she had an approach when you were learning dry, sterile, boring things like tax law or accounting theory and those types of things, to always push you to go back and understand what were the people who put these rules in place trying to accomplish, what was their motivation. That's one of those things that regardless of what you're doing in life, if you come at a problem where you're trying to get to a solution with a counterparty, always having an appreciation for what are they trying to accomplish moves you quicker to solution, moves you quicker to success than anything else. And so I just always look back at these what I would call bedrock learnings, bedrock principles, how to think, how to reason, that have helped me more than anything else as I went into the world of business.

That not only translated well, they have proven to be universal tools. And that when I look around me, my peers who are other CEOs or even leaders in our government, they're the same tools. When I look at the ones whom I admire, they're the same tools that they actually deploy and how they interact with people and how they try to affect change. So yeah, they not only were critical in terms of developing me, but I also see them as critical in some of the greatest leaders that I've interacted with.

Don't worry about your next job or your next opportunity. Whatever position, role, business you step into, step into it in that moment with nothing but a focused and concerted effort to do that task or that role as best as you possibly can. That's one of the things I always loved about recruiting out of the University of Oklahoma. I ran AT&T, you brought, dude, 99 times out of 100, that's the kind of person you got. And what I found is you come in and you master a task, you master a role, you fundamentally change how that role or responsibility is done, you don't stay in that role very long. You get asked to do other difficult things. And I'll never forget one time I had gone through my career early on and I'd stepped into a role and I'd be asked to clean it up. You'd clean it up and as soon as you got it cleaned up and running great, they'd throw you into another mess. Never forget going to who was the CFO of Southwestern Bell at the time, expressing my frustration, 'Every time I fix one of your messes, you turn around and throw me into another one.' And he just paused and he looked at me and he said, 'You're finally beginning to understand your value to this organization.' That is exactly what every individual ought to come into their role thinking and do it, fix it, make it better, move on to the next thing. I've always told people if you find yourself in a job that you've been in for 10, 15 years, you ought to ask why. There's probably a reason. And if you're not being asked to go do other challenging, difficult things, then there's probably an indication that you haven't really dealt with in a great way what you have before you at the moment.

I got my first job at Southwestern Bell. I like to say I got a job away. My brother got me on. My brother's an installer for AT&T in Norman, Oklahoma, still to this day. And I was dating my wife, Lanice, at the school, and I remember asking her if she would marry me and she said, 'Yeah, to marry you, you better get a job.' I talked to my brother, I got on at Southwestern Bell working in the data center in the tape room and had the most menial, boring job you could ever imagine. I hung nine-inch tapes, and most of your students will not even know what a nine-inch tape is, storage tapes on tape drives to run building jobs. And it was absolutely awful. There's a classic case, I went into that job and I thought, 'There's got to be a more efficient way of doing this.' And so I took that role and changed it. They put me on something else. And over time, you know, I was asked to do things like run operations, co-move our fans, came back in the middle of a bunch of deal-making we were doing at the time, rolling up other telephone companies. I got to be engaged in running some of those processes. Soon I was CFO, then CEO. My wife, and she doesn't know how it happened either, she looks at me and says, 'How could this have possibly happened with you?' And I had a great experience.

Not only fair, it just happens to be accurate and true. And look, I was fortunate. I grew up in Oklahoma at a time when, you know, from a public policy standpoint, we appreciated the importance of higher education and we invested taxpayer dollars in higher education. And unfortunately, you know, as budgets get tight, we seem to have pulled back on that. But I have to say, were it not for the ability to get an education when I was in school for fifteen dollars a credit hour, I mean, I laugh when I think about that, but fifteen dollars a credit hour to go to school, I was able to get a full, high-quality education. I graduated without a single nickel of debt. And that gave me the opportunity to pursue the things that you and I have been talking about. And I really, I regret that we as a society have not appreciated the significance of what an investment in the education of our young people produces and how it actually, the returns that it creates for a state and the taxpayer. But yeah, I very much agree with your sentiment that higher education, when done right and delivered properly like I think we do at the University of Oklahoma, the return on investment to a society is...

It's attainable to fewer people is probably the better way to think about it. And the beauty of low-cost education is it makes it available to all people in society, not just a select few.

That defines me, fancy, yes. That's exactly right.

Oh my, you know, when you're running a company, when I retired the company was 180 billion dollars in revenues and we were in, at that time, I think 190 countries around the world. And we had the largest full-time labor union in the United States. We were investing more capital than any other company in the United States for like the tenure of my years as CEO. And so you're faced with constant, really big challenges as you think about what you were trying to accomplish as a company. Invariably, unfortunately, your success or failure would run through Washington D.C. and public policy and even litigation and regulation. And so you ended up spending a lot of time in the world of public policy and rule-making. And, you know, you've thrown before the Senate to testify why you were trying to do a certain thing, you'd have Senators challenging you and trying to embarrass you. You'd have interactions, as you articulated earlier, with presidents trying to help them formulate policy around taxes and what would stimulate investment and create, you know, incentives to invest in broadband, which was in everybody's best interest. And so it was invariably those issues around public policy that created the greatest challenges. I've always said that if we could just get a set of rules that were defined, whether they were good or bad for a particular company, they just are what they are, define them, leave them alone for five years, watch what U.S. business will do. U.S. business will invest under those rules, they will hire under those rules, they'll provide health care under those rules, they'll do all the things that make this country great. But unfortunately, the rules, particularly in this day and age, move not every year, they move every month. And so when you're running a big company trying to make multi-billion dollar investments that have paybacks over multiple years, man, when you have a structure like that, it makes it really, really hard. So that's where I spent a disproportionate, unfortunately, amount of my time.

Oh boy, the old Chevron Doctrine. And to your point, people will start, you know, falling asleep if we get into it, but that is a court ruling, a precedent that gives the administrative element, the bureaucracy, a lot of power in how the rules are set. And that's what allows the rules to change from month to month, literally.

It's interesting. When I was asked to serve as chairman of the Business Roundtable, and as you said, it's the CEOs of the 200 largest companies in the United States that make up the Business Roundtable. I spoke to my board about it because you go into a position like that, you're going to be front and center and you're going to be, you have to represent not just AT&T but the entire business community and what is good for, quote unquote, business, which I happen to believe business to be a very noble endeavor. I happen to believe business done right and done ethically, there is nothing that creates more prosperity, more employment, more jobs, more well-being than business done right. So when I stepped into this, I spoke to my board that I felt like this is something I should do not just for AT&T but I just felt like it was a civic responsibility. And so when I stepped into it, I stepped into it asking those questions. And I've tried to coalesce the CEOs around what are those things that really would matter in terms of propagating the environment that I just articulated to you, steps up hiring, steps up investments, steps up productivity, steps up wage growth and those kind of things. And we, the CEOs, 400 of us, landed on a very select number of priorities. And it was four priorities. I'm not even sure I could recall them all, but I'm quite confident I could. But obviously one was tax reform. And that one was not big because we want to pay less taxes, that was not the point. Yes, what is the thing we could do that would have most impact on elements I just discussed. At that time, the United States taxed corporations higher than any other developed country in the world. And we live in a world where capital is fungible. If I can get a better return in Japan as an investor, I'll invest there. If I can get a better return at that time in China, I'll invest there, Mexico, Latin America. And so we spent a lot of time talking about we've got to get the structure right where investors say we want to invest in the United States of America. And so we initiated an effort on tax reform. And I had many opportunities to have direct personal conversations with, at that time, President Obama. And we unfortunately did not move the needle under the Obama administration. I must say I had a good relationship with President Obama. When the president was elected, tax reform was initiated and act got done. I know there's a lot of people who would debate this, but I would suggest that tax reform, that tax policy drove unprecedented levels of investment for the next three to four years. It drove, for the first time in 20 years, enhanced productivity in corporate America. Why is that important? It's important because mathematically you cannot have wage growth for the average American without productivity growth. We finally began to experience three and four percent productivity growth and wage growth at all scales, at all levels of the employment base, began to grow. And so it just is an indication of if business gets their mindset correct and tries to position it in terms of what's best for America and the American worker, you can get things done and you can influence public policy. And that's what we tried to do while I was in the Business Roundtable.

When I stepped down three years ago, I viewed at that time the greatest competitive threat facing the United States was the reality that all of these silicon chips that are in every facet of our society, they are in the microphone that you're speaking into right now, Joe, they're in the PC that I'm working on, they're in these smartphones that we all use, they're in your car, they're in your refrigerator, they are in every element of our lives. Our modern society runs on silicon chips. These silicon chips are almost exclusively manufactured in either Taiwan, a large amount of them in China. And as you think about threats to our competitiveness, if there were ever a moment of hostilities, what would be the biggest threat? To me, that is a massive threat. It's a radical threat. Our Congress has tried to do some things about this over the last year. They've ended up putting a lot of junk into bills that are designed to try to get fabrication of silicon in the United States. But I can think of nothing more important than figuring out how we relieve ourselves from the dependence of silicon on the Far East and get that onto the shores of the United States of America. And so to me, that is probably one of the greatest threats facing us today.

It is absolutely a national security issue. And you just made the best comparison. I mean, energy security is critical, food security is critical to our security as a country and our independence as a country. Silicon manufacturing is an element that is consistent with each of those. Our modern way of life, how people work, how people commute, how people entertain, how people receive medicine, health care, is all dependent upon this technology. And I would really love to see a greater concerted effort for addressing this.

The tools, notably the ability to think and to reason, let's always start there. If you don't have a basic grounding in thinking and reasoning and logic, you're going to struggle. I don't care what you're pursuing. Now, as you think about technical tools, what are the technical tools that are critical over the next five years that we probably weren't even talking about when I was in school? Blockchain. I mean, people who have a working and adept knowledge in blockchain and the ability to use blockchain tools are going to be high, high demand for a long, long time. The same with, as you just articulated, generative AI, artificial intelligence. And people that are getting grounded and well-situated in understanding how to use those tools, how to develop applications on top of both blockchain and AI, by the way, I think those two come together in a very short period of time and they become really powerful tools together. But people that can actually learn to develop on top of those, just like, you know, when I came out of school, people who could develop on top of HTML, you know, and applications on top of the internet, that's where all the wealth and the knowledge and the great products were created. People who can do that same kind of development on top of blockchain and generative AI are going to be the ones who really excel over the next 10 years. And so I hope our students are looking that way as they begin to position themselves for the career moves or thinking about how they can move into those areas.

Oh my. Look, technical schools are a path for students and I think they're a good path for a lot of students. And you can go to technical schools and get the technical skills you need to excel in some of these areas. But the people with the breadth and the depth of thought, the depth and the breadth of reasoning and logic, those come through the disciplines that you just articulated: the humanities, the arts, the letters, philosophy. I think those are the capabilities that if we're not rounding our students with those type of capabilities, then we're just a vocational or a technical school, which is important, but I think we aspire to be much more than that for our young people.

You know what, we've covered a lot of that waterfront here, seriously. We will talk a little bit about growing up and what were the things that really were important and critical to me. We will also speak about the dangers of technology and some of the downsides. I'll call it the dark side of technology. I hope our young people as they step into the world of commerce will be highly heightened and made aware of and perhaps give them some things to think about as they move down that path. And then we'll also talk a lot, Joe, about some of the ills of our society and some things that I think this generation is uniquely equipped to address. And I'm talking Gen Z. We're now talking to Gen Z. And they have some qualities that we haven't seen in recent generations that I think are going to be critical to helping this country and even more broadly the globe survive and thrive. And so we'll be talking about what those qualities are. And I hope this generation when they step out will take full advantage of these unique skill sets that they have and these unique temperaments that they have. I know a lot of people my age in the workforce complain about Gen Z. I think Gen Z is our greatest hope. We have not had a generation with the, what I will call, the unique perspective that this one has, which gives me so much optimism for where we are going as a country.

You know, I retained what I'll call some business responsibilities. I sit on the board of this little retailer out of Arkansas, you heard of Walmart, right? It's a mom and pop, little mom and pop shop. And I've really enjoyed that. The Walton family, I've gotten to know quite well. It's an amazing company, amazing company as it relates to technology and some of the challenges that they are facing. So I've stayed engaged there. I also have remained engaged with the PGA Tour. And, you know, they've had some issues, an alternative competitor coming in, specifically funded by the Saudis. And so there have been a lot of interesting challenges with that. I love the game of golf and I know a lot of the players and that's been fun. But then Lanice and I have engaged a lot with the University of Oklahoma. And I just give you credit and Stacy Reader at the College of Education on trying to address some of the learning shortfalls in our secondary education system in the state of Oklahoma that are producing some alarming results. And I have a passion, at least, and I have a passion to looking at what I'll call the lessons, eighth and ninth grade. This is an area where when kids struggle, if we don't get them remediation and help, particularly in the area of math, you can almost put a statistical predictor on how many will not graduate high school. You can put a statistical prediction on that in terms of how many will end up in cars. And you can put a statistical predictor on that in terms of how many will be reincarcerated in five years. And we have a situation which is a downward spiral of not addressing this. And so Lanice and I have been doing some work with Stacy and her team at the Oklahoma College of Education to try to create some solutions for how we step in and remediate this and see if there are things here that can be scaled that can change the trajectory of this for our state in Oklahoma. So that's taking a lot of time. We're doing a lot of other civic engagement. We have five kids and about a number, so keep me busy. But these are the areas that we're focusing on.

You would probably drop off. It's always fun visiting with you, Joe. Thanks for all you do for the University.