Transcription
Members of the MBA and doctoral classes of 2026, distinguished alumni achievement award recipients, families, friends, and loved ones, and the faculty and staff of Harvard Business School, welcome to the 2026 Harvard Business School commencement ceremonies. I am delighted to be with you on this joyous occasion.
On behalf of the entire HBS community, I want to offer our graduating students and alumni achievement award recipients my warmest congratulations. We've come together to celebrate your remarkable achievements. I know how meaningful this day is for you. Over the past several days, I've seen the excitement building up across campus as you've shown your families around the places that have become part of your lives, tried on your regalia, paused for photos at the Harvard Business School sign, and spent time reflecting on the journey that brought you here and the paths that lie ahead. The pride you and your loved ones feel is unmistakable. Looking out over Baker Lawn, today is truly inspiring. And I am honored to share in this celebration with you. So, let's begin.
To our graduating students, this would be the perfect moment to recognize the many people who have supported you and helped make this day possible. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives and partners and children, classmates and friends. They stood beside you along the way. You would not be here without them. Today they sit behind you, but they are still cheering you on. So, take a moment to stand, turn around, show everyone gathered here how much their love and encouragement have meant to you. So, please join me in offering them a heartfelt and rousing round of applause.
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Over the years, I have had the privilege of watching many classes cross this stage to receive their diplomas. Each class leaves its own distinct mark, shaped by the experiences, challenges, and achievements that defined its time at Harvard Business School. I will always remember the way the class of 2026 faced moments of adversity with a spirit of adaptability and resilience. We pride ourselves on being a global institution with about a third of our students coming to the school from dozens of countries around the world. Last spring as Camille and Sabine noted yesterday you found yourselves unsure whether you would return to the United States if you traveled for capstone and uncertain whether you would be able to complete your second year in the MBA program in Boston. This was an anxious moment for all of us. Every student is a valued member of our community and our learning environment is predicated on the richness of experiences and perspectives you bring with you. As many of you know our faculty had contingency plans that included holding classes on a distant campus. I am thankful those scenarios didn't come to pass and throughout the months of uncertainty I appreciated how your class supported each other and stood together.
And on this most happy occasion I also recall how the class of 2026 came together during a moment of profound sadness. In September 2025 Zoe Savellos a student who started at HBS with the class of 2025 and completed her RC year with the class of 2026 tragically passed away. Though she lost her life to cancer she never wanted to be defined by it. Her passion was supporting underserved populations and she hoped to pursue a career that would tie together climate action and socio-economic development by launching an impact investing fund. As we continue to grieve Zoe's loss I have admired how you carried each other through difficult moments with grace and kindness and have been inspired by her optimism and all the good that she had done. We're very pleased that Zoe's story and legacy will be sustained each year through two new fellowships created this year. The Zoe Caroline Sevelius Memorial Fellowship and the classes of 2025 and 2026 Zoe Sevelius Fellowship Fund.
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It was a privilege to see Zoe's parents Vivian Ackerson and Elias Sevelius at the Fellowship Dinner earlier this spring. And just yesterday I received a letter from them to our community. They wrote and I quote "You have contributed greatly to solidifying our belief that Zoe's short life made a meaningful positive addition to the world. This by itself fills us with light and hope. Most needed aids for navigating our way through our grief." Please join me in a moment of silence to honor and remember Zoe. Thank you.
As you embark on exciting new chapters in your careers, I'd like to offer a few thoughts about the challenges and opportunities you're likely to face during this time of great change. And the skills that will help you in that journey. Specifically, I'd like to talk about how you might think about the evolution of artificial intelligence, the importance of humanity and judgment in an era widespread technological change, and the essential quality of initiative that will increasingly differentiate leaders from everyone else.
Let me start with the opportunities and challenges you will face with artificial intelligence. Each passing day brings new advances that offer tremendous promise and raise profound questions. We can see already how AI is beginning to shape industries, including finance, health care, consulting, and technology. It's also changing the core functions of organizations, whether advertising and marketing, operations, or strategy. As many of you begin new jobs, I expect your daily issues and decisions may look substantially different than those of graduates who took similar roles just three or four years ago. And three or four years from now, you'll need to be ready for more change. As leaders, you will be expected to understand and shape the impact of AI. How will it change the role of commerce in society? How will you use it to innovate and build competitive advantage? What governance challenges will it pose? How will it impact culture and people? How will it affect workflows, roles, and organization structures? How aggressively should you invest in it? And how can you ensure those investments deliver a return? Organizations will be looking to you to answer these questions. There will be challenges. Many people believe that AI will have an impact on jobs. Others are concerned about information security, energy use, environmental impact, and cyber attacks. Still others worry about national security, privacy, and bias. There will also, however, be opportunities. The world gives us an endless supply of problems. And AI tools might fuel innovations that lower the cost of addressing them. It could democratize knowledge in ways that make education more accessible, health care more affordable, and cures to diseases more probable. It may even create new more interesting jobs.
Even as AI will be implemented, it will be vital to nurture human relationships and connections and understand social context. Here at Harvard Business School, we have adopted AI for innovation with one simple goal in mind. Doing things to advance our mission of educating leaders who make a difference in the world that beforehand had been impossible to do. We built tutor and feedback bots so we could tailor learning to your learning journey. The goal of our AI-driven career platform is to enable you to find jobs that align with your individual job and location preferences. We are using AI to facilitate lifelong learning so that as alumni, you can benefit from the latest research, cases, and frameworks. And we are building an AI-native entrepreneurship platform called Foundry to empower thousands of entrepreneurs to learn, develop their ideas, and secure funding. Like you, Harvard Business School will continue to find new ways to use AI to innovate so we can extend our reach and deepen our impact. I am confident that the mastery and adaptability that you've honed in classrooms and activities at Harvard Business School has prepared you well to navigate careers in this fast-changing world. But even as you seek to leverage AI, I hope you will continue to develop what I believe will be critically differentiating skills, namely interacting with others and making decisions.
So, let me say a few words about humanity and judgment. However AI changes our world, leaders will need humanity, wisdom, and judgment to be effective. History has shown us that the more we speak about technology, the more we also need to think about people. Hanging on the second floor of Hawes Hall, a few steps from here, is a beautiful portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, inscribed with the seven deadly sins he believed were inimical and detrimental to human progress. Wealth without work, worship without sacrifice, politics without principles, pleasure without conscience, science without humanity, knowledge without character, and commerce without morality. I want to pause on the last three of these sins. Science without humanity, knowledge without character, and commerce without morality. The first parts of these statements, science, knowledge, and commerce, are elements of the world that AI is changing. But for society to truly benefit from these advances, leaders will need humanity, character, and morality. This means wrestling seriously with questions of bias, privacy, security, and people and the future of work. And doing so in a way that earns the trust that society must have in these technologies to realize their promise. The distinctive leadership skills that humans bring to teams and organizations will become even more valuable as technology takes responsibility for some slice of work. One colleague put it to me this way. AI is starting to displace IQ, but it will have a harder time replacing EQ. Said differently, AI will get smarter before it becomes wiser. In this era of AI, our humanity, represented by wisdom, empathy, and emotional intelligence will become even more vital. As will judgement. Judgement in my view is not the same as intelligence. Good judgement involves evaluating information critically and interrogating ideas deeply. It entails tapping into tacit knowledge and an understanding of context and relationships. It means identifying the most critical factors, seeking insights, and recognizing patterns. Judgement is particularly important in ambiguous and uncertain situations that involve competing values and priorities when the cost of making a mistake is high. Good judgement leads to solving problems productively and making decisions wisely. I am confident that the last two years at Harvard Business School have helped you hone your judgement and critical thinking. You have learned to challenge assumptions, evidence, analysis, and inferences. You understand how to reframe problems, gain insights, and identify important issues. You know how to effectively communicate your position and defend your ideas, how to constructively discuss and deliberate with others, and how to test your own beliefs and biases, and sometimes change your mind. Most importantly, you've learned how to listen, how to reason, how to learn, and how, but not what, to think. A 1991 book by my colleague C. Roland Roland Christensen, David Garvin, and Ann Sweet called this process education for judgment. When our institution began using the case study method in 1921, our founders could not have foreseen a time when we'd all carry small electronic devices in our pockets that could respond to verbal commands offering answers to just about any question. But in many ways, the case study method remains the perfect pedagogy for an era when information is becoming cheaper and more widespread. As my colleague David Moss describes it, the case method raises your intellectual heart rate by forcing you to think hard, exercise your mind, respond to demanding questions, and practice decision making and collaborative problem solving so you can tackle new situations and problems. In the coming years, you will face new trends, challenges, and opportunities. To succeed, you will need to separate truth from falsehood, and information from misinformation, and stay curious and fair-minded. You will need to redesign organizations, roles, and responsibilities, and decide how work must be done. To navigate this environment, critical thinking, judgment, creativity, empathy, emotional intelligence, and the ability to interpret and contextualize will be distinctive and invaluable assets.
As much as we value intelligence and judgment, the final quality that I would urge you to develop as a leader is initiative, or what OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy calls agency. Acting like an owner and stepping up to shape outcomes rather than simply accepting a course of events. Taking initiative means being proactive, committed, responsible, and accountable to drive success. It means being all in, going the extra distance, doing what it takes, and not giving up. This quality will be particularly important in a world of persistent change. My colleague Krishna Palepu argues that the only constants for organizations will be their mission, purpose, and values. Strategies will need to adapt quickly, perhaps over months instead of years, as will the actions to implement them. I urge you to embrace change as an opportunity to grow and develop and act. It does not matter where your initiative comes from, whether it's from optimism, purpose, passion, or commitment. What is crucial, as Karpati says, is to set goals and pursue them even when they seem difficult to attain. And to have confidence you will figure things out and get things done. Things may not always go your way, but you must sustain the internal drive to do whatever needs to be done. Last week I attended a memorial service for one of our illustrious alumni, Richard Menschel. Shortly after graduating from Syracuse, Richard enlisted in the Air Force and while on duty contracted polio. The resulting paralysis had a lifelong impact on his mobility, but it did not define him or limit him. He graduated from Harvard Business School in 1959 and had a storied career at Goldman Sachs. His incredible philanthropy supported hospitals, educational institutions, and museums. He epitomized what it means to have initiative and never give up.
So, engage with AI and humanity, sharpen your judgment, and take initiative. And as you think about the leadership journeys ahead of you, reflect on what you might do as a leader to infuse these qualities into your teams and organizations. Let me end my remarks by returning to what I said when I first welcomed you to campus in fall of 2024. I hope you will never lose sight of the basics. Act with integrity, empathy, and humility. Don't forget to hold the door open for others. Take every opportunity to create purpose and meaning in your life and for others. Treat those who you lead with respect. I have seen wonderful evidence of your generosity already. As I noted earlier and was delighted yesterday to learn too about Nate Alvarez's leadership across your class.
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To organize thank you notes to a number of the service teams, custodial, fitness, food service, landscaping, security and more on our campus. Your generosity here is much appreciated. And let me reiterate wise lessons from yesterday's class day speakers. As Hugo Lieber outlined so eloquently,
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education carries an obligation of service. A responsibility to contribute to something beyond ourselves. Stand up for what you believe in. Attempt things that matter even at the risk of failure. Senator Romney also touched on the theme of service. Noting that building a nation's economy whether by buying, by joining, or by launching a company is an important form of public service. But he also reminded us that no success in business compensates for failure at home.
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In a few moments we will honor four remarkable recipients of this year's Alumni Achievement Award. Larry Culp Paul Finnegan Jennifer Eplet Riley and Mitt Romney. Remember that their journeys commenced from exactly where you are sitting today. We have the same high hopes for you. I know I speak on behalf of our entire community when I say how proud we are of you. We offer you congratulations and our very best wishes. Thank you all very very much.
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