BCEMBA06

Commencement Remarks
Ed Matovcik

Dean Campbell, Associate Dean Hanabury, Dr. Lyons, platform guests, distinguished faculty, tireless administrators, our loving families and friends, and my fellow Berkeley-Columbia MBA graduates:

Welcome to this special celebration of an extraordinary journey of knowledge and understanding we have all shared together.

I am proud to have been selected to be one of your class commencement speakers. It is a high honor that few of you might fully understand.

When I was first notified that I was accepted into this prestigious program I got so excited I just about turned inside out. Then I came to the first block and it hit me. I was completely blown away by how smart the rest of the world had gotten while I wasn’t looking. I was sitting next to guys who had some serious candle power.

My wife will never forget this. I came home that Saturday night half beaming with shear joy to know that I would be learning with the best and the brightest and be taught by the best and brightest ……and half scared to death that someone would somehow discover that I didn’t belong here.

(I’m not kidding.)

I was afraid that someone would tap me on the shoulder and say, “I’m sorry Mr. Matovcik, but our records department has made a terrible mistake. I’m afraid you couldn’t pass 8th Grade math and you shouldn’t be here. There’s a bus waiting for you outside. You can’t miss it. It’s a little shorter than the others. Have a nice day. …… and Go Bears!”

So thank you, class of 2005 for not turning any of us in to the math police on that first day. And thank you to the administrators, faculty, staff, and especially to our families and friends who have shared in our sacrifices over this extraordinary journey.

I’ve loved this program from the very first day. The depth of the professors. The quality of the administrators. The character of the students. For many of us, it was what some poets refer to as “The Perfect Moment” …. When the head and the heart and the spirit come together in one place inside of you. For the past two years, it became our tonic. It made us shine brighter than we’ve ever shined before and smile more than we thought we knew how…. even though we were being crushed by an ungodly amount of school work on top of our full time jobs and family responsibilities.

These weren’t just students who this school so artfully selected for this tapestry of character and knowledge you see before you today. These were accomplished leaders who have lived lives which tell stories. They’ve been enriched with character and experience that doesn’t just know the answers but instead develops a relationship with the problems. It’s this character and experience that enriched every single class. Other MBA classes have monologues. We know. We’ve sat through them in New York and in other countries. Here, at Berkeley-Columbia, we had dialogues. We constantly learned from each other by sharing our knowledge and challenging our norms.

Our professors have taught us well. We are now masters in the principles of corporate finance, the art of accounting and the skills of leadership. We can brand you, market you, lead you, organize you, merge…AND acquire you. We can crystal ball you, cost account you, strategize you and social responsibility you. We learned when to open our kimonos and when to keep our BATNA’s to ourselves. We even learned how to avoid becoming the unfortunate airplane pilot who wonders how that mountain goat got up here in the clouds.

But our greatest lessons came from the quality of character our families and friends instilled in each of us. You know exactly how special your son, or daughter, your spouse or your parent is who is graduating today. Now just think of cloning that specialness 65 times and locking it in one room for 12 hours a day, 3 days a week, once a month, for two years.

While the world around us was coming apart, we were finding common ground to complex problems. I’m a little older than the class average. I walk around this campus during the day and realize I have t-shirts older than some of the undergraduates. I’ve seen a lot of public discourse over the years, but I’ve never seen a time in our nation’s history when so many people have become so angry, mean-spirited and sour as I’ve seen recently. Rudeness has become an acceptable way of announcing disagreements and vile speech is becoming institutionalized as political discourse. Anger and complaining have almost become the national pastime.

That’s why this class is so special. They have been this island of positive, creative, entrepreneurial problem solvers. They are optimistic, engaging, funny, and always quick to debate a hot political topic but never shallow enough to succumb to the easy temptations of closing their minds to other views.

We have Democrats, Republicans, libertarians, Rotarians, vegetarians, and even a contrarian from San Diego. We have the yins and yangs of the political spectrum who understand that both extremes are lethal and intellectually dishonest. You want diversity? We got it. We have every color and flavor you could imagine. And guess what. We all get along. Yes, our mamas taught us manners.

Our families and friends have provided us lessons no professor could teach. Our families and friends have taught us humility, ambition and responsibility. You have given us more than just love. You have given us dreams. You have given us a sense of wonder, the gift of passion, courage, respect and faith. You taught us that we can learn more from our mistakes than our successes. You have carved our characters by showing us by example to work and sacrifice….to be honest, and most important, to help your neighbor who may not be good at math.

Technology can be cool. But nothing replaces the human connection. We had one course that basically tried to teach us how to build a rocket ship for NASA. Many of us struggled mightily to survive. At the end of the day, I didn’t learn a lick about linear programming, but I learned who I would want in my fox hole when the bullets start flying. Guys like Randy, Pat, Tuttle, Karthik and Kenneth would never hesitate to put down what they were doing to help teach us non-technical souls when the going got hairy. The same goes for folks like Mary Beth and Albert and our other accountants who would tutor the rest of the class when the professor may have moved over some materials too fast. Or Todd and Brad who helped us get through Corporate Finance. And Cyndi and Antonia who gave up their free weekends to review Organizational Behavior cases with us.

These are the kind of children you raised. These are the kind of parents you have. These are your brothers and sisters. These are the new guardians of the public trust. And these are my new friends.

We agree with the philosophers who said that money can vanish over night, power can evaporate, but friendship and character and personal integrity are rocks that no one can take away from you.

We know that many of our family members who have left this earth at much too early of an age are smiling down on us today. As a class, we have felt a connection to them as much as we have felt a connection to all of you throughout these past two years. Though we may not have known your names, we have felt your influence on our learning.

We look into your faces today and see how proud you are of us. Proud that we beat ourselves silly working fulltime and going to school fulltime while still trying to be parents, husbands, wives and lovers. But do you know how proud we are of you? Do you know what you have meant to us during these challenging times? Do you know that you are responsible for the character and values inside each of us?

I think I can speak for the class in saying that we are incredibly proud of you, though we will try to remain tasteful about it while we are all dressed up.

Some relatives and friends have traveled great distances to be here. We know what is in your hearts. Love. Pride. Relief. And Fear.

You fear what is about to come next, don’t you? While it is time for us to exhale, you are inhaling and holding your breath. What will be our next adventure on life’s list of masochistic, over-achieving challenges? What will be the next sacrifice of sweat and tears as we emerge from one crucible and start looking for another?
You have watched us most of our lives as our ambitions and satisfactions wage constant war. You know we are incapable of arriving at any condition of life where we are totally satisfied. There is no single point in our any of our successes, except for maybe love, where we throw up our arms and say, “That’s it. That’s all of everything I have ever wanted to achieve.”

We know. It’s a problem. But it is in our DNA. And some of you gave it to us. So now we both have to live with it and hopefully understand it a little better today than we did yesterday.

Robert Kennedy captured it pretty well when he said “If there is nobody in your way, it is because you are not going anywhere.” We seek obstacles so we can overcome them. Or as my father used to say, sometimes its better to feel too much than too little.

We still owe you a lot. You have sacrificed a lot. Whether we are your spouse, parent, friend or employee, we have missed some important times with you while engaged in this MBA program. Some of us missed our wedding anniversaries….twice. (But I love my wife.) You have been extremely patient and we are grateful. It’s been physically demanding, for you as well as us. Our bodies did not look like this when we began this program. I’m not sure they’re even made out of the same material as they were before. Or at least it doesn’t feel like the same stuff.

We’ve grown as an extended family together. Since our first day, we have had four marriages and one engagement. Eight of our classmates have become new parents. Four more babies are on their way. One in Seattle, could be born today.

These children, much like our children here today, will learn from us, much like we continue to learn from our parents, spouses, siblings, bosses and special friends who are with us today as we take one more step on this incredible journey.

Thank you for your support. Thank you for your sacrifices. And may our future successes be worthy of your dreams.

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