Winter 2005 Commencement Address (Undergraduates)

Delivered by John Morgridge 2 p.m. Ceremony, Dec. 18, 2005

Fellow graduates of the University of Wisconsin:

I’m delighted to share your commencement at this great university. Just over 50 years ago, my wife Tashia and I received our degrees here at Madison at Camp Randall with some 4,400 other graduates. I am therefore pleased and honored to have the opportunity to share some observations from life’s journey, which are referred to with my MBA students at Stanford as “Rules of the Long Road.”

Rule #1: Enjoy and live fully each stage of life. Don’t hurry. High school, college, marriage, first job, children, grandchildren, retirement and post-retirement employment opportunities. Best I can tell, most of you did fully enjoy your Madison years. Try to find that same fulfillment in your first job. I long had a goal of becoming president of a company. It was not until I was 57 years old that I became president of Cisco Systems with 37 employees.

#2: Invest in friendships and a good marriage. Start now. Friendships are not free. Cards, calls, gatherings, e-mail – it takes time, but it pays lifelong dividends. I still hunt every year with high school and college friends who took geology professor “Doc” Laudon’s no-credit Wisconsin duck hunting course back in the 50s. There were a lot more ducks in Wisconsin then.

As a special favor to your folks, marry early and start a family. Grandchildren are wonderful gifts (to) your parents for raising you. To our delight, our oldest grandchild starts college next fall.

#3: Set annual mental and physical challenges. Be curious. Stay hungry. Learning is the work of a lifetime. I loved my work as a computer salesperson because it let me ask a lot of questions and learn about different businesses. Eight years ago I started teaching a course in entrepreneurship at the Stanford Business School. It is indeed a daunting mental challenge to prepare for and teach 66 newly educated young adults like you twice a week. Stay physically active. Start now and when you are in your 50s, 60s, 70s, you will have the bodies to keep up with your desires.

Our outlet has been bicycling. In the past 10 years, we’ve ridden our bicycles across Wisconsin, Iowa, New York and Missouri, around Lake Michigan, from San Francisco to Chicago and across the United States. Jogging in our 40s and 50s gave us the stamina to do that. Next year our plan is to hike the Long Trail, a 270-mile north-south journey in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

#4: Learn to forgive both others and yourself. Mistakes are part of life. Make amends. Move on. Don’t carry baggage. It weighs you down and it weighs your friends down.

#5: Make sure that what you want to be is what your want to do. As a senior at Madison I took a series of pre-law courses. While the title (of) lawyer was appealing, the actual work was not interesting to me. Many individual contributors, engineers, architects, teachers, researchers long for management jobs, not realizing that these are people jobs, not technical jobs.

We spend a third of our life working. Make sure it is more than just a living. Make sure it is a life. You are blessed with an endless list of work options. Take the risk to find the one that is fulfilling to you.

#6: Learn to give back. The students at your university have a wonderful tradition of giving back. You are first in the nation in the number of Peace Corps volunteers, and I know that many of you have already been involved in service while at the university. Congratulations! Continue to seek ways to give back.

Make sure you develop the art of small check giving. Our first check to the UW was for $5.00 in 1967. In recent years, we’ve added a few zeros. We are blessed people. It is our need and our duty to help our fellow man.

During life’s journeys we all make a rather small number of key decisions. You have already made a few of them. For most, you were born in Wisconsin – very fortunate, went to good Wisconsin schools and are graduating from a great university, the University of Wisconsin. Congratulations on completing this important milestone. I hope that the rest of your life’s decisions are as sound and fulfilling as choosing to get your degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

One last note: Stay foolish. I know that students at Wisconsin are often accused of too much foolishness, and perhaps it is true. That said, I have always tried to make foolishness a part of my life.

At our 50th wedding anniversary, I gave my wife, who is also my best friend, a set of Ritz-Carlton sheets at a cost of $275. Foolishness, you say. Wrong! Even at 70-plus, we find a certain exhilaration in jumping between those mercerized Egyptian cotton, 291 thread count sheets every night. Stay foolish. Go Badgers! Thank you.

John P. Morgridge is chairman of the board of Cisco Systems, a leading supplier of networking equipment and network management for the Internet. He also serves on the boards of a number of nonprofit organizations, including the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the Nature Conservancy, and the technical advisory board for the Milwaukee Public School System. He and his wife Tashia are the driving force behind UW–Madison’s Morgridge Center for Public Service, a central clearinghouse for those wishing to volunteer their time and expertise in the community and to a broad array of organizations seeking volunteers. The center has been instrumental in making UW–Madison one of the nation’s premier institutions in the area of service learning.