Reflecting on a 25-Year Plan: Insights and Unpredictable Journeys (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: What's interesting is that it is now 25 years since you got your MBA, and as part of your MBA experience, you were asked to write a 25-year plan. I was.

Speaker 2: I'm going to work out for you. There was a professor, I think his name was Dr. Naylor, does that sound right? Tom Naylor. Yeah, Tom Naylor, and he was a great professor, and one of the things that he asked us to do was to write a 25-year plan. Maybe some of you have had to do this, and it was more of a personal plan, and normally I would never remember this, but I was doing a commencement address a few years ago, and I was scrambling for some old things, and I found in a box this plan, and this plan had turned yellow because of age, but I looked at it, and I would say it was reasonably accurate for all of 18 to 24 months after it was written, and it was nothing. There was nothing, not a single thing on it that was accurate post that. Not a single thing, zero, and I think that the lesson there is, at least for me, maybe you guys will be different, maybe you have much more insight into what you may be doing, but for me, the journey was not predictable at all, and it goes sort of back to the Lincoln quote is, the only thing I believe you can do is prepare, and the world is going to change many times, the environment is going to change many times, the companies you work for are going to ebb and flow, you may wind up in the same company, you may not, you may wind up in the same career, you may not, you may wind up with the spouse you're married to now, you may not. There are lots of things in your life, I hope that one doesn't change, but there's lots of things that change, and I think that you sort of have to have a North Star, and stay with the North Star, and let those things go on about you, and sort of find your journey.