Distinguished Speaker Series: David Rubenstein - Co-Founder and Co-CEO, The Carlyle Group

this is Duke University welcome to pupa and our final distinct series of the year my name is Hank woods I'm the associate dean for development alumni relations here at the school is my distinct pleasure today to introduce our speakers dean bill bolding who most of you know and David Rubenstein who is the co-founder and co-ceo of the Carlyle Group one of the world's largest private equity firms many of you have probably heard of some of David's works he's a Trinity seventy graduate of Duke University as well as Law School graduate at the University of Chicago in 1973 he has had a distinguished career in law and policy before founding the Carlyle Group in 1987 needless to say he's had a tremendous success in his business career but as perhaps is well known for his many philanthropic endeavors many of which you will see around the Duke campus he is presently the chair of the board of trustees and is also Co chairing Duke's 3.25 billion-dollar Duke forward initiative which just surpassed the two billion dollar mark his mini philanthropic endeavors outside of Duke are far too long to list here I will give you a personal anecdote like many of you who have families I took my two young daughters and my wife to Washington just a few years ago and after we had been to the Washington Monument the National Archives in the National Zoo my 13 year old turned to me and said dad who is this Rubenstein guy needless to say if you've been to the nation's capitol you've been been the beneficiaries of his generous support of many different initiatives I was pleased to know and mr. Rubenstein thank you when I told my 14 year old now that I was introducing you today she said dad that's really cool those of you with teenage daughters you know that's a hard thing to do thanks so much it it is really cool that David is here with us today David is is one of the most knowledgeable people on an incredible range of subjects that you could ever hope to encounter as well as being wickedly funny he he is an expert in private equity and politics and panda pornography and that's just the piece so so so David we we really are happy to have you here and just to give you some sense of where I want to go I want to talk about different points in your life and and it seems like there's some magic number 17 27:37 okay and and then it all breaks down from there but but let's start with 17 so you what what I'm really after here is is trying to get some insight into where where does some of these personal characteristics come from so if he if we looked at your high school yearbook and we looked at the person who was voted most likely to succeed would we find your picture well I was an editor of the yearbook so it was a little unfair because I I promoted myself a little bit more than maybe I should have but no I grew up in very modest circumstances I'm from Baltimore and my parents graduated from no college or no high school my father dropped out of high school to go into World War two and came back met my mother they got married when he was 20 she was 17 I was born more than nine months later and and my father worked in the post office his entire life and he made $7,000 a year at the maximum so I went to a large public high school and it was uh and I skipped the grade or so so I made a mistake of graduating from high school when I was 16 which is not a good thing to do I think generally and probably was socially awkward and among other things and I wasn't a great athlete among other things but so my yearbook would would not have had me as the most likely to succeed nor would my college yearbook at Duke I would have been among the least likely people in my class to have been on the Board of Trustees or ever become chairman the board and so I've recent years I've met people who were the stars of my college class and I looked at their careers and they look at me and they say like how did you do this because you weren't that impressive when I knew you when I came to Duke I came the Duke because I needed scholarship whoever gave me the biggest scholarship that's where I was going and I came here that gave me what was then a big scholarship and that tuition was then a thousand dollars a semester as is about that high now or something like that about thousand a semester and so I you know I got a scholarship came here and it was a different campus to be honest at the time in my class there was a quota of Jews Duke had a Jewish quote in those days about 5% I didn't know at the time and it wasn't known until Terry Sanford came in and he changed it later before I graduated and they had also had just desegregated a few years earlier so in my entire class of undergraduates there were 12 african-americans and less than 5% people were Jewish I had go into a high school which was half black and half Jewish came here and was a little different and you know I I just you know didn't find it as welcoming as I had wanted it to be but I realized that you know in life you have to you know take advantage of the opportunity to get and I had a scholarship so I just buckled down and and you know and did the best I could and I you know was never invited to join a fraternity I didn't have the money to join one my son is an undergraduate here now and I've told him I want him to join a fraternity called Phi Beta Kappa but he doesn't seem as interested in and no I saw I basically hung out at the library and my theory was to get the best grade you can and get the best scholarship to law school in those days I was interested in being a lawyer and to be honest that just a not really quite answer your question but what happened was I when I was in the sixth grade I I had a life-changing experience I watched the television show that was the inauguration of John F Kennedy January 20th 1961 and he gave a speech that was 14 minutes in length and he said in his famous speech ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country and my teacher in the 6th grade went over that for a week with us every word every line in this in this really poetry in prose form and I just it stuck with me that I wanted to help my country and I didn't think making money wasn't a great thing I wasn't on my horizon my parents had no money and they didn't think about it so I wanted to be a lawyer and go into government and politics and basically try to change the country from being a government official and so when I went to law school my real goal in life was not to make money got into private equity never heard of it and so I wanted to go in the White House and be an advisor and work in government and help my country and so I went to work at a law firm in New York where the man who wrote that speech for John Kennedy worked his name was Ted Sorensen in my view the greatest presidential speechwriter ever and I worked with him for a few years and ultimately I got enough courage to say can you get me a job with somebody who can get me into the White House and I he did and he got me a job with a man who was 24 pairs United States his name was Birch Bayh 7 1976 as you all probably know he didn't make it in fact 30 days after I joined his operation he dropped out and so as will probably happen to you or may have happened to you it was a thing where I was looking at myself saying oh nobody thought I was a great lawyer nobody was upset when I left the law firm the clients were probably happy and I went to work for somebody who'll be President estates and it didn't work out and then I got a call out of the blue from somebody didn't know and maybe you've had this before I have to answer they said would you like to work for somebody else who's gonna run for president I'd stayed and I rolled my eyes who is it his name is Jimmy Carter he's peanut farmer from Georgia I don't know anyway eventually I took the job I went there and he at the time Jimmy Carter was 33 points ahead of Gerald Ford the incumbent president and after my work was done Carter won by one point so Carter often wonders you know what was your contribution but White House staffs I think as we've seen over the last 40 years are not filled by people who on merit they're filled by people who worked in campaign so I became at 27 years old the deputy domestic policy advisor to the president I'd states a job for which I was completely unqualified but Carter was unqualified as well I thought he didn't know anything he was governor of Georgia he didn't know anything about Washington here so I I worked there for four years I loved it I mean to me it was the greatest through on the word here I'm serving my country the thing I really wanted to do at 27 I'm running around on Air Force one marine one president States is asking my opinion I mean what could be greater greater life but one of my responsibilities was to help fight inflation and I managed to get it to 19% which is very difficult no one has done it since I managed to fight mortgage rates and got them down to 22% so on the rumor that I was going to be appointed to be the senior advisor in the second term and exactly the same age as Ted Sorensen at 31 I would you know really become you know the more important advisor to the president in the second term on the strength of that rumor President Carter thinks he lost the election so I had to go out and a life-transforming experience I went back in practice law but it was very difficult and some of you will have this experience and may have had it one day I gone to Duke University a great school I've gone to Uemura Chicago Law School a great school I practice at a great firm I'm an advisor to the President on States and the next day I can't get a job unemployed because when we lost the election all of a sudden all the people said to me you're a bright young man come call me when you want to work in my law firm I call them the day of the election and none of them called me back because nobody wanted to hire and X Carter White House aide who was 31 years old and really hadn't practiced law and didn't know much about law and so it took me many many many many months to convince a law firm to hire me at any position and finally a modest-sized law firm hired me for a very junior position I had to start my life all over again professionally and it was disconcerting but in the end it was great because it was humbling and it made me realized you know what's more important in life and what things you really have to worry about and what's ephemeral what's not ephemeral and I did that for a number of years and it came to the conclusion after a while that I wasn't a great lawyer and I had to do something different and okay so I just have to tell everybody that as we were walking up to the the stage here David said well you'll you'll ask what's the drill you'll ask me a question and I'll do whatever I want right what's right so that's what happened and I'm still I you know I'm sorry to do that but so what happened I started so let me let me back up a little bit all right so the after this this astonishing success and in your role with with Jimmy Carter apparently he's he's forgiven you because the two of you still talk right and so I'm curious to do the two of you ever reminisce and say if only we had done such and such that that it would have all turned out a little bit better well everybody in life likes to blame other people how many people like to blame themselves so the course the people in the Carter White House and President Carter would say if only you know the Iranian situation hadn't happened if only the energy crisis hadn't happened if only certain people had been more cooperative in Congress of course we all say we did a better job in the public recognized and we did many great things but the public hasn't recognized it yet and maybe in history they will so of course everybody who works in a White House thinks they did a great job and one of the reasons is this when you work in a White House all the information comes in to you so you are the repository of all the information in the world in the United States and when you make a decision you have better information theoretically than anybody else so that's why presidents often say you know it's a communications problem I have if only I could communicate better because I made the right decision now the truth is many of them have not made the right decision but you know they think they have because they have the best information they have theoretically the best advisors but it doesn't always work out that way in Carter's case he he had some bad luck we had obviously the Iranian situation had that not happened Carter might have been reelected and we tend to judge residential success or not by being reelected and by not having been reelected it it transformed the image of Carter and actually although he had been extremely popular in the beginning of his term became very unpopular and back when Reagan beat him so decisively Carter went very much down in popularity and kind of was submerged for a while and people really didn't really want to talk about him very much but one of the great lessons I've taken away from Carter is what he did I went into the business world and and I you know did okay in it there people have been far more successful but Carter had to do something that hadn't been done before he had to take a unsuccessful presidency in the view of many people and transform his life what does he do he left the presidency when he was 56 years old what do you do for the remaining 30-plus years of your life and our presidents now have much greater time as ex-presidents than they do as presidents in the old days they tended to die not too long after they were president now they around for 20-30 years afterwards and Carter created a life for himself which actually I think while it's controversial in points he's written 28 or 29 books he's done some incredible things the Carter Center and so he's a great lesson in how you can take adverse 'ti of the low point of his election reelection defeat and and really make yourself a useful person Society won a Nobel Peace Prize for what he's done so I my her what he did after he left the presidency and I know from talking to President Obama he you know I was focusing on what he's gonna do when he's ex-president because he will be next president for probably thirty years or so as well so anyway I I don't wouldn't say that we've sat down a lot and commiserated about all the things we should have done or not done I did see President Carter not long ago and I was making a speech in LA he happen to be in the same place and we talked briefly about the world and you know it's just hard to you know vision a guy as mobile as he is and as smart as he is at the age of 89 he's still going very very strong and you admire what he did I'm doing a very big big defeat here so I had a conversation like this with David Gergen a few weeks ago and of course David worked in the Ford White House and the Reagan White House not the Carter White House and his observation was that the Jimmy Carter was cut out to be a saint not a president he said that resume with you Jimmy Carter in my view had a high degree of moral certitude about his positions and I think what you have to do as president you have to be somewhat more flexible and recognize that politics is part of the game and if you aren't going to play politics you aren't likely to get as many things as you want out of Congress and you know so I would say Jimmy Carter will probably stand out in history for the rectitude of his positions and for having a void in scandals and having done a number of things that we live with today for example his focus on human rights in foreign policy is something that he really started and his focus on helping you know people who are underprivileged get better positions in society was something he really will focus a lot on but I don't think historians will say he was a great president because he didn't get reelected unfortunately from his point of view but still I think as you look at presidents United States you have to look at what they actually did when they were there and I think what Carter did was was impressive but he didn't get reelected and unfortunate that's how you often judge success so so you are you're extremely patriotic you you even created a category of philanthropy called patriotic philanthropy do you ever think about getting back in the game in terms of public service I say I was 27 I didn't know what I was doing now I'm ready I'm ready coach put me back in the game well since I left the government there has been no demand for me to go back you know I have met and many people when they were president and they never said hey David why don't you come back in you did a great job fighting inflation last time nobody says that but when when John Kennedy gave his speech in those days it was thought that the commit to public service you had to go in the government now the world is different we have NGOs that are doing as many good things for society as the government can do and I have thought that to be realistic my greater contribution can be in the philanthropic area and one of the things I have tried to do is to give back to our government that way so the phrase that you mention is one that I may were more or less coin called patriotic philanthropy no philanthropy I want to remind everybody is an ancient Greek word that means loving humanity has nothing to do with rich people writing checks it's just helping other people with your ideas your time your energy whatever you can do we've bastardized the word a bit and now we kind of say well if you write checks you're philanthropists if you're Wendy Kopp and you create Teach for America you're not a philanthropist the truth is what Wendy Kopp has done is great for society and other people do great things who don't write checks in my case I now have more money than I really deserve or that I really need or that my children really need though they don't believe that necessarily and I decided to try in my life to give away the bulk of the money in while I'm alive and so I was one of the first 40 people that signed The Giving Pledge and one of the other people who signed it was a graduate of Fuqua was Melinda Gates and she and I I think were the only two Duke people at the time who signed it they're probably there maybe somewhere now and the idea was to give back to society in my own case I got very lucky I started a business it took off for a lot of luck and now I now in a position to give back and among the things I want to do is not just give to universities which i think is very important I think universities are one of the greatest assets of our country is our higher education system and it's the envy of the world and it deserves a lot of financial support and I believe that as well you know medical research and things like that are things I'm very interested in as well but one of the things I try to do is the give back to the country because our country cannot afford the things that it used to be out of Ford the government doesn't have the money so for example when a lot of historic documents have come along I thought would maybe leave the country I went and bought them so I bought a copy of the Magna Carta copies of the Emancipation Proclamation copies the declaration independence and put them on display in Washington so people could see them and make them on in effect permanent loans to the United States when the Washington Monument had its problems I decided I would put up the money to help repair it and other things in Washington the Smithsonian National Archives Nashville gallery bar at the Kennedy Center these are things for the federal government just doesn't have the money as used to so I try to say if you give back to the country you can repay the obligation we all have I said when I bought the magnet card on that night at Sotheby's that I wanted to use it as a down payment on my obligation to this country to repay it for enabling me to be able to do what I did I came from a very modest circumstances with an last name that may not have enabled me to rise up in other circumstances other countries so I felt very indebted to the country and I really want to give a large large part of my money away and to give my time and energy to helping the country in ways that maybe it can't do things itself today and you know for example the what think the Washington Monument as an example not to Pat myself on the back when it wasn't that much money relatively speaking what happened was it just occurred to me when they had the earthquake damage there we should get it repaired quickly I thought the US government would take forever to get it done the Congress would do some things would take too much time so I went to the head of Park Service and said I'll put up the money how much will it take the repair he said I don't know and it ultimately came back to me and said he could take 15 million dollars I said okay I'll put it up and repair it as quickly as you can and then he came back to me said well actually some people in Congress want some credit for doing something good for a change so and can they would like to put up half the money I said okay let me put up half the money so we did and then we erected the the round that we had scaffolding and some of you may have been in Washington seen it was beautiful had lights and so forth and when the scaffolding was up they said to me would you like to go to the top of the Washington Monument is very rare to be able to go to the top of the Washington Monument on the outside and they had an elevator on the outside of the scaffolding so I said okay so I get there that day and the Secretary of Interior which controls the Park Service said she wanted to come with me her name is Sally Jewell she was new I said okay she said listen I don't really want to take the elevator up I'm a mountain climber and I've climbed Mount Ranier seven times said well I've flown over Mount Ranier seven times she said I know we have to climb up I said well like is there a defibrillator somewhere good shape but anyway we climbed up and then they put a little harness on me and I get to the very top it's 555 feet and the reason it's that high is because they learned in ancient Egypt and they're building obelisks that if you build them more than ten times the size of the base it will fall over so it's 55 feet down there and 555 feet up I got to the very very top right at the point and when nobody was looking I took out a pen and wrote my initials there so if any of you ever get there you'll see my initials and one last to decide about that all of you probably seen the monument and it's a great symbol of our country in many ways it took a typical Washington project it was conceived of not when George Washington died in 1799 he died in 1799 and he died because he made a mistake he was 67 years old he was riding around his plantation it was snowing and sleeting he came back he had guests in his house he always had guests because it was considered normal to come by and and pay homage to George Washington for 20 years he his wife never had dinner alone that's why they were happily married some people say and they always had guests there and he had guess he didn't know they were he was dripping wet but rather than be impolite and go up and change he sat there for four hours ultimately caught an ammonia in effect and died and right before he died they called the doctors and he couldn't breathe and so forth and what did they do well they cut the veins so the blood would come out because they had bad spirits so a third of his blood that was considered modern medicine in those days anyway when he died he said in his will two things very interesting one don't bury me for two days well why would that be well because in those days the medical treatment was so bad that people often were buried alive and so they didn't he didn't wanna be buried alive so he said don't bury me for two days to make sure I'm dead in fact very often the coffins in those days had little bells in them to make sure that you know if somebody woke up you could ring the bell and say get me out of here he also said he was the only founding father that freed his slaves the only founding father of freed his slaves but he did a little differently he said my slaves are all freed upon the death of my wife and how would you like to be Martha Washington knowing that you know so anyway she freed him quickly but it he died in 1799 he was always so popular in those days actually many all circles so it wasn't until 1832 that they decided to build the Washington Monument a hundred years after he was born and it didn't finish the typical Washington project they started 1832 they ran out of money a whole bunch of other things they didn't finish the 1880 it took 50 years to get it done so it you know hopefully things are a little bit better in Washington but not much okay so so let's see let's see if I can wash if I can pick a thread here all right so he's a funny guy right I mean David is unbelievably funny so two questions about that one where does your sense humor come from where how did you develop how did you develop your your your humor skills and the second thing is because humor is something where there's a fair amount of heterogeneity in terms of what people think is funny has it ever gotten you in trouble almost all the time I'll give you one it got me in trouble recently I was interviewing Hillary Clinton and I had she had come to a karlão event and and I had interviewed there and it went very well and she thought I did a reasonably good job of interviewing her not only like the good job you're going interview me and raised very skilled and she thought I would did a good job and so there was a charitable event in New York that that they were looking for somebody interview Hillary missus a couple months ago I think and so they asked me if I would do it again and I said okay I was involved with the charity and so we did it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art you know if you've been there in New York it's a gigantic place and they for some reason they had it in a stat in a place where a lot of big statues so I'm sitting here she's sitting there and right in front of us is a gigantic statue of Pericles about 20 feet completely naked now we were facing the rear of him and he's holding somebody's head and so I'm sitting here and she's sitting there and I just didn't know you know it's unusual setting if we're sitting in front of here of its own TV so we're not blocked from people so I just said to her well you know have you ever been in a setting quite like this and done an interview on something in front of like this and she said no it's quite impressive and I said well I think how much more impressive it would be if he turned around so I quickly realized I probably shouldn't have said that so what I find I you know you either have a pretty good sense of humor or you don't I in my case I I guess I see the absurdity of life maybe to some extent and of course humor is a defense mechanism it's designed to deflect maybe more serious discussions and more serious things and so maybe in life because I came from modest circumstances and maybe was an underdog all the time I maybe used humor as a defense mechanism but I have found in recent years that when I would give a speech and I would use a lot of humor people would come up to me and say they remember the humor they remember the jokes then I began to realize well what about the substance of what I was saying and oh yeah that was okay too so I began to actually cut down the humor a little bit because I realized you know you could do you know a lot of humor and people may remember that but sometimes you want to get them to remember the main message which is a much more serious message but I've also found that when you give humor and you're you know willing to be funny and make fun about yourself and that's one of the things I would mention I'd say there are different types of humor and maybe because I admired John Kennedy a lot I try to find his humor the best kind which is self self-deprecating humor I never try to make fun of somebody else I just think that's not a good thing I know people that try to do that and my humor generally tends to be self-deprecating and I think that that is generally works pretty well because if you're a wealthy business person and you make a speech for me you'll think you're a stuffed shirt or you're arrogant and so forth and by using humor I think you can show you know you are a common person relative speak and you can see the absurdity of life and you can make fun of yourself and by making fun of yourself people are more willing to listen to you because they think you're not an arrogant idiot which is what they might otherwise think okay so let's go let's go to age 37 and that was the that was your age when you co-founded Carlisle and you're your age at that time is fairly close to the the average age of an entrepreneur there's a myth that the the an entrepreneur is Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg they're kids the average age is 40 but I'm curious what given your experience as as a lawyer and working at the White House and what what prepared you for the world of private equity what what led you to say I'm gonna make now a criminal bet in this area well a couple things happened one and when the years when I should have learned how to be a good lawyer and I did reasonably well in law school I wasn't gonna be Oliver Wendell Holmes or Benjamin Cardozo or you know Louis Brandeis but I was a reasonably he was on the Law Review so okay but I was okay but I wasn't a genius but clearly if you take reasonable skills and you work hard you can make yourself into a reasonably decent lawyer but the years when I should have been learning those skills I was at the White House getting inflation up the nineteen percent so I when I went back to practice realize you had business skills well right I didn't know what skills I had I wasn't right any skills but I the years when I should have learned how to be a serious lawyer when you're a young professional I absented myself so when I went back to practice law I didn't really have the skills to be a lawyer and so I realized that the legal world had become a business and Billy really was down to he's selling clients on your firm and so I really made myself into a bit of a salesman selling my firm and getting other people to do the work I really didn't do that work him I was trying to bring in the business a bit and so I just also a couple things happen to me if you I realized if you don't love what you're doing you cannot be great at it nobody ever won a Nobel Prize working nine to five five days a week and somebody didn't like you have to if you if you're if you're gonna make a success of yourself you have to love what you're doing and I've tell students all the time and I meet with them and tell my own children experiment when you're in your 20s try many different things hopefully something will come to you that you love and it's not work and I just you know didn't really love practicing law I didn't know like what lawyers do I didn't see it was really changed in the world I didn't think I was really you know making a mark on the world and so I took a gamble and I was propelled by an article I read that said on average people start companies starting between the ages of 28 37 there's always a Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates who are different but an average the first entrepreneurial activity of somebody is between 28 37 and not unlike a woman's biological time clock after 37 the chances of certain things happening or lower so I read that when I was 37 and I said oh oh so I realized I didn't have the skills of of an investment professional but I went out and recruited a few people who knew more about finance than I did and I basically decided to do this in Washington remembering a sentence by Everett Dirksen heaping the senate minority leader in the 1960s and he famously said when you're getting kicked out of town get out in front and pretend you're leading a parade now what does that mean take advantage of the situation you find yourself in so I'm in Washington DC everybody who's serious about investing is in New York and private equity so I said we're gonna focus on companies more heavily effected by the federal government then then people elsewhere do and we understand the federal government or because we're in Washington now that wasn't necessarily the case but it sounded good and then I you know I recruited three people who knew what they were doing a little bit didn't have buyouts experience and I we I took six months to raise the first five million dollars and then the company took off a bit and we took off for four reasons I'll be very brief on what they are one we had good chemistry between the founders so if you can get people who work together that's good and you know my founders and I co-founded I have been together for 27 years now that's unusual but that work we all said there for division of labor each focused on what we knew best and could do the best and made ourselves indispensable that area we also had we were lucky and good in what we did our main thing is investing money so we've averaged 30 percent a year for 27 years that's considered good in the investment world 30 percent gross 24 percent net but we did two things that changed to face the private equity world and whenever you are trying to build a business if you only ate what somebody else did we only copy somebody else he won't likely be that wonderful and so we just came up with something that was different and it didn't it changed the private equity world when KKR did the famous RJR deal in 1989 they only had seven people in the firm and that was because the rules in those days said if you're in private equity or buyouts you could have one fund at a time one I'm fun and you could only have to spend a hundred percent of your time on that and therefore you couldn't build more businesses could you had to spend a hundred percent of your time on that managed to have one fun I decided to ignore that and to do something that I would say it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission I didn't want to go to my investors and say would you mind we have one fund we want to have more funds to build a big business I didn't do that I just assumed that I would say I was sorry later and I just went out and built a business that was too designed to institutionalize private equity was just say they had a buyout fund we're gonna have a venture fund a growth capital fund a real estate fund and build a family of funds not unlike what so that fidelity had done in in Boston in the mutual fund area I was going to do the same thing in private equity that was our clever idea to institutionalize that business have many different funds and therefore be able to in effect amortize the cost of a building this business and then I decided the secondly to globalize it to go around the world and that had not been done before which was to say have American flag on a European buyout fund and Asian fund to Japan fund it and that's how we built the business and obviously the track record helps so we did many things and we changed the face of the private equity world but today my biggest concern is that what I did to the firms in New York was to disrupt them they had a model of one fund at a time they just did buyouts I came along with many different products and and created a family of funds and I disrupted the the business model of people in New York now my fear is that somebody's gonna come along maybe one of you and disrupt my business model so you always have to be worried when you're at the top whether somebody is going to come along with a better business model and disrupt you and it's inevitably happens to big companies and so I spend most of my time worrying about how we can change our business model to adapt to the future so are you confident that you're sufficiently differentiated within the existing private equity landscape that the real threat is is from the new the new entrants as opposed to the incumbents it's a complicated question because today whenever you're at the top of the world in any given area of business schools or law schools universities any kind of business endeavor you kind of say well now you finally clawed your way to the top and now you're part of the elite and as you're part of the elite why don't we just kind of work together and we all kind of say we're doing the same things the the other and and you can convince people that if you really want to be at the top invest with Carlisle because we're like Blackstone we're like KKR we all do very good things and we're stable we're going to be around forever and so forth but the downside to that is that you can become a commodity and if you if people think there's no difference between you and KKR and Blackstone and your commoditized in the end somebody will come along and say well I'm different these guys the top it is the commodity I have a better product so you know you go back and forth between whether you really want to say we're part of the elite and we're really great and we're like the other guys or we're really different than the other guys so of course we'd like to say we are great and we're different from the other guys and we're different we would say because we have a different culture we are more global we're more focused on certain kinds of things but the most important thing in our firm is the culture in any organization what will kill a firm or will make it survive is the culture and if the culture is good where you're sharing the wealth you put the investors first you really have a focus on what is the right thing to do you and you you can build a good business the trick is to make it get to the next generation a lot of great entrepreneurs build great companies and then when they leave the companies fall apart a really great company is one where the entrepreneur knows when to step back bring in very good people and they can keep the same culture and enhance it and get it to the next generation it's unclear yet whether the great private equity for instant Bilt can really go to a second or a third generation because these are relatively new phenomenon as you think about that that task of building a great and sustained culture is that something that the co-founders split up and and said David you do it or or or did you have to provide mutual reinforcement well the way we worked was that we had really three of us were really running the firm for 25 years we've now brought in a lot of other people to help us and so forth and you know one person oversaw the investments Bill Conway he was a great investor one person did a lot of the administrative and operational things dan dan yellow and I focused on adding my my own value it was an investor so you know in any organization I always tell students find something that you can that makes yourself indispensable you want people to come to you and say you're the expert in this can you help me and when people come to you and say an organization can you do this for me can you do that eventually they'll say well he or she did that well I'll try another thing and ask him to do something else and your power base expands and your opportunities to do more expands but learn one thing well and make it your own and I decided to make myself into the fund raiser the guy who would raise the money and this was not naturally something I thought I would do because I'd always seen fund raisers as being you know the kind of back-slapping beer drinking golf playing success suspender wearing kind of guys and I don't do any of those things so I didn't think it was natural for me but I decided that I had to do something to make myself indispensable or valuable to firm and I said I would go ahead and raise the money and so I I did that and you know I said now think about it I'm not sure if they do this a few cook there are other business schools but most of life actually is about selling and when you think about it life is really about persuading other people to do what you want because you weren't trying to persuade your spouse your business partner your children your parents anybody that you have a good idea you have a good product you have a good service you're trying to persuade other people salesmanship is really what life is about when you think about it and yet it's a skill that isn't taught all that much and probably there's no great courses maybe you have one many schools don't on fundraising people don't really say that they want to learn the skill or teach the skill of fundraising even though you will find if you don't already know you're gonna spend most of your life trying to sell something or fundraise and you know very few people say I want my little boy Johnny to be a fundraiser when he grows up but the truth is how many people here have asked other people for money in the last year or so anybody ever done that anybody here ask people for money for philanthropic political or business things how many people done that all right how many people have been asked okay you all should have your hands on oh my goodness so you know very often people who are embarrassed about it they will preface it by saying I'm sorry to ask you for money well if you're sorry to ask why are you doing it you shouldn't be sorry if you're asking for a good cause or a good project or something you should be proud of doing it so I made myself into a bit of the fundraising and in the relationship kinds of things and built you know a career of kind of being the face of the firm and I did a lot of travel I would travel you know 40 or 50 countries a year asking for money and and trying to develop the brand of the firm and and and that's kind of what I did and the culture of the firm evolved over a period of time the culture was put the investors first and what we call one Carlyle everybody works together so if you're in Sydney or in Stockholm you have to really response it to other people in the firm if you're not you're not going to be there very long and that kind of cooperative culture is what I think has helped us as much as our track record do you think that the the co-operative culture sets you apart relative to the the New York firms well that's a loaded question because if I answer yes it will say something negative about the other firms and if I answer no I won't be honest so look people who come out of investment banking backgrounds often have a more I would say cutthroat kind of approach and you know there's no doubt that people in Wall Street art you know can be very bottom-line oriented none of my founders and I came out of Wall Street and therefore our culture was a little bit different but the firms in New York that have done well you know they they they they all have different cultures I don't want to say ours is better it's just different in some respects but they all have done quite well in in many respects and now what's happened to private equity it's evolved dramatically we're in what I call private equity 4.0 now because the industry has changed dramatically and it's probably changed the last more last more in the last four years and four five years than it did over the previous 40 years or so and among the major changes is its bifurcated there are now 5000 private equity firms in the world but they're about 4,000 of them that are relatively small or 4,500 or maybe more than that and then they're only about seven that are global that are truly offering many different products in many different areas around the world there's seven of us it's Carlyle Blackstone TPG KKR Apollo Bain and oaktree all have roughly seventy five billion dollars or more under management and are trying to offer investment funds around the world and you know some of them are five of those seven are publicly traded now and I suspect in a couple years you there will probably two or three of them that are so well known that there is well known to the public as let's say Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan and they all are doing exactly the same thing now all seven of us are doing this we are expanding the product base we're trying to go get more individual investors and really reaching out to accredited investors and even non-accredited investors and we are working on special relationships with sovereign wealth funds and globalizing the business such that our brand is well known and ultimately I suspect at some point you'll see a global alternative or global private equity firm having a Superbowl ad because we're appealing to people you know or the general public so the business has changed and interestingly although the United States is today only 20% of the world's GDP in 1960 we were forty-seven percent of the world's GDP we're now only 20% we are one hundred percent of the global private equity firms that probably won't continue forever at some point somebody we'll come along in Brazil or China or the Middle East and build a global private IP for him but it won't be a short time period because it takes a long time to raise this money we manage now you know let's say roughly close to 200 billion dollars and it takes a long time to raise that so I don't think anybody in China can overnight do it but at some point it will change if you take a look at the leading private equity firms in 1980 or 95 or 90 or 95 they're different than the leading ones today because some have just fallen by the wayside and some have moved up and I suspect 10 years from today they'll be different than the seven I mentioned but for the next five years those seven will probably still be dominant because it takes too long for anybody else to get as big as they are as you look at the the reasons behind the success you've you've had personally can you talk about the the role of your work ethic which is prodigious and and the follow-up to that is do you ever sleep well I used to say sleep is overrated but as I've gotten older I'm not sure that's true listen I guess you know I maybe felt as a young person I wasn't as gifted intellectually as people who I was competing with in grade school or high school or college and therefore I thought the only way to really keep up with them was to work hard and so maybe I worked hard because the way I'd the only way I thought I could compete I did find that also that my social skills were very limited so if I was in the library all the time I didn't have to show how limited my social skills were and my athletic skills were even more limited I was the only person in Dukes history who got cut from an intramural basketball team when there were only there were only four other people on the team so I I didn't have athletic skills I didn't have social skills so I guess as a way to bury myself and one thing that I was good at maybe some some kind of intellectual what kinds of things and I just had to catch up to others who were smarter than me so I maybe I developed a work habit and I and it may be been exacerbated or worsened frankly by when I worked in the White House I around the clock and there was an article written in Newsweek about me saying I was a Whitehouse workaholic and I ate all my food out of the machines and so forth and it may I may have tried to live up to that image by working harder than maybe I should have I'm not sure but I I don't really regard what I have done over my career as work so much because I my view is if you love what you're doing it's not work so I love what I'm doing today I obviously don't need to work but I'm doing what I'm doing at a very long hourly pace because I love what I'm doing and when you build a firm from scratch to something that's large you take pride in it and you want to you know see it succeed so I love what I'm doing today I divide my life largely between being the co CEO of the company which now publicly traded and my philanthropic activities and I go back and forth and every day I'm doing some of both and I love what I'm doing my biggest problem is I am 64 years old now when you turn 50 you can pretend you've lived half your life and most people when they get to the fiftieth birthday they have big celebrations or so forth then when I return 50 I was very happy I you know thought I've reached 50 and my firm is okay my family's in good shape and I'll live another 50 probably not but maybe can pretend it when you turn 260 you realize you probably live more than you're gonna live realistically and I notice when I turn 60 people come to me all the time and say well David you you look good today how do you think that was possible well no you really look good today well like what do you think I was supposed to look like and I also noticed like I'm washing on the chair of the Kennedy Center it's the Performing Arts Center and and you know they have these young women graduate from college or about 23 24 they escort me around the Rays events and they'll say well mr. Rubenstein there are seven steps here can you walk up them or should we take the elevator so you know I it drives home to me that I'm in my 60s and you know I recruited Lou Gerstner to my firm after he was the CEO of IBM for about 12 years and he joined my firm when he was 60 he retired when he was 60 I'm 64 and I love what I'm doing but I realized that you can't do it forever and you can't do it at the pace you want so I don't know when my mind or when my body will give out and so we have bought a lot of people into the firm who could run the firm maybe better than the people running it today and so I'm racing through life now I'm a book about my life and it's it's a working title is you know striving for the finish line or something like that because I feel like I'm racing to get to the finish line before too long because I don't know I'm not gonna be able to do this another 25 years or so and I want to get so many things done in my life so I very happy with where I am I don't regard what I'm doing is work and I I don't regret the time that I put into my my career because it's made me very very happy and you know when you get to be wealthy in life none of you who are not wealthy will agree with this when you get to be wealthy in life it's not necessarily the case that money equals happiness you know when Thomas Jefferson wrote that we should pursue happiness or what are the goals United States pursue happiness he never defined what happiness was all about so people often say well happiness is having a billion dollars a two billion dollars or ten billion dollars most the billionaires I know are tortured and not that happy honestly now they may not give comfort to you who want to be billionaires that you shouldn't aspire to it but the truth is having money does not equal success and Happiness I am very happy probably though happiest when I'm giving away the money because I have found that you know making money is nice and so forth but and as I said in an article recently my mother and I'm the only child so naturally if you're the only child and your mother's Jewish he's gonna take great pride in you and she's you know nothing you can do wrong okay so but she never actually called me up and said David I'm proud of you building the largest private equity firm in the world or one of the best project room she never said that but she started calling me saying David I'm really proud of you for giving away this money I'm very proud of you for doing that for helping that cause so it's into just hit home to me that you know you really can enjoy life even more when you're giving away the money you're doing something to help other people and so that part of my life has made it much more enriching and therefore unlike a lot of rich people who don't give away as much money as I think they should I feel very happy to do it I as I mentioned I signed the giving pledge and The Giving Pledge is okay it's it has its faults in the sense that I think we should now make it available really to people with different net worths but the Giving Pledge really only says you're supposed to give away half your money in your lifetime or upon your death now of course if you give away no money during your lifetime and then you die you're supposed to give away half and then your will is read and you don't I've been given away we don't dysentery you out and take you out of the giving pledge so I hope more people will actually start giving away the money while they're alive and I'm trying to give away the bulk of mine while while I'm alive so it's it's very important for Fuqua to develop a culture of philanthropy and I wonder if you can just talk to the the people here about what what was it that caused you to start thinking about the role of philanthropy in your life and how can we get everyone in our community to really have that Wow it's an interesting phenomenon in the sense that you know some families have philanthropic traditions and you know even if they're not wealthy their family may have given a lot of time and energy and ideas and so forth her volunteerism and so for them we have a great tradition about the United States but I basically was tunnel vision on making the money and it's a very strange phenomena you're racing and racing and racing to make the money all of a sudden you hit the line you say wait a second I'm gonna give away the stuff that I killed myself to make and it's strange where you're you've worked so hard to make this money and it's in your bank account you're very happy it's there and then you start saying I'm gonna give it away give it away quicker than I made it but what happened was you know wasn't anything that was completely unique to me you know Forbes magazine eventually outed me and they've added other people they kind of calculate what your net worth is and whether those are accurate or not they're probably within reason them you know somewhat accurate and so I realized that I had this enormous amount of money and I didn't really think that if I was buried with it like the ancient Pharaoh's that I would necessarily need it in the afterlife and I didn't necessarily think that dying and becoming the richest person in the cemetery and having my executor give it away the money would necessarily make me happier so I began to say okay who has helpful to me in my life and my family's life and who were things or what are things that I could do to make the world a modestly better place because my view is none of us really know the secrets of the universe nobody really knows why we're here nobody really knows whether there's life in other planets nobody really knows many things about the universe earth and so forth we all may have religious beliefs but nobody knows for certain why we're here but it's my general view that most people come to the feeling that there is some good thing about trying to make the world a slightly better place and to help other people and when you involve with philanthropy you are helping other people very few people on their deathbed say you know I'm glad I have as much money as I have my bank account and I'm glad I didn't spend time helping other people that really happens usually people say I am glad that I gave away money here I'm glad I help that cause I'm glad I work at that food bank and very rarely do you see somebody say boy I'm upset with myself for giving away money I'm upset from eyes with myself for helping people that rarely happens and my general theory as well as it's a little selfishness in this when you give away money you help other people you feel better about yourself and when you feel better about yourself you're likely to live longer grumpy people don't live as long happy people live longer and so for a lot of selfish reasons maybe I'm giving away the money maybe I think I'll get to heaven more quickly I can't prove it but I don't know sorry but I enjoy it and I enjoy the intellectual challenge of thinking of something that hasn't been done before in my own philanthropy I don't have the money that Bill Melinda Gates has and I'm never gonna have that I have a lot of money by any normal human standards but not by their standards so I don't have their burden and think about it in your case and I've often wondered and you all laugh when I say this what would you do if tomorrow you had a hundred billion dollars all right go buy a yard you'll buy a plane you'll buy a couple houses then you've got ninety-nine point nine billion left what what are you gonna do with a hundred billion dollars that's the problem Bill Gates and Melinda Gates have found themselves with you know and what problems can you really solve and what can you do with that kind of money well it's hard to know they've picked K to 12 education United States and health in Africa as two of their major causes and their great causes whether they have enough money and time to do that I don't know I've tried to find things that are you know less maybe overarching than that and things where I can start something and get it off the ground and make it happen or I can finish something that was going to get done but was floundering a bit or I can can can complete something myself by just getting it done and and and thinking of somebody so I very often I would say okay what can I do to help in such a historic area so I will say I want to restore Monticello or I want to restore some other things that I'll announce shortly that I'm doing in the historic area or I or a certain healthcare areas I say okay I would like I think pancreatic cancer is a terrible disease we don't know enough about it 5% survival rate I'll put up money to create a Center at sloan-kettering for that and you try different things in philanthropy you don't know what's gonna work and in the business world we have a metric it's called a profit and loss statement and and if you if you're good in business you'll have a lot of profits you'll make a lot of money we don't have an equivalent metric in philanthropy we don't know whether these things we're doing it really work so you experiment some things seem to work some things don't we don't really know I am not the kind of philanthropist who sits on top of the person at every hour in the hour wants a report from them and what what they're doing my money I generally you know try to you know give an overview of what I'm looking at and and and give some rough judgment but I try to find some things that are working then give them more money and things that aren't working and give them less money but none of the things I've given money to do I regret I wish some would be more successful in others but Jenny I'm very happy with what I've done and I just wish I had more time to do it and more time to focus on it thank you so I think we have some time for a few questions from the audience here's here's a microphone for you or innovation and and how you value culture do you have a specific philosophy on leadership or what other values do you look for most in a leader leadership is a very elusive thing you know I'd like to say sometimes the most elusive thing in life is personal happiness as all of you will find in the course of your life if you haven't already they're very difficult to be truly happy those who are truly happy are blessed those who are not to struggle with various things in their life leadership is also something it's very elusive and people have debated for many years can you teach leadership or can you just our leaders born and I don't think there's a one right answer or not I think you can learn a lot from what other people have done what I try to say about leadership is that you lead people in really three ways and each of them has its own skill set one is you lead by the way you communicate with people and you can lead you know by writing well leadership are very often people who write well and written books or articles lead other people because they have great ideas and they communicate them well in their written word another way is communicating by speaking a lot of great leaders and a lot of people that have done terrible things but where leaders had great communication skills and I tell students all the time if you want to be a leader learn how to write well not just Twitter language but learn how to write to convey meaningful things in a way that will persuade other people and learn also how to talk in a meaningful way that will persuade other people but the third way of leading is the much more valuable one and that is leading by example so back to George Washington George Washington was a wealthy man one of the wealthiest men the United States and when Valley Forge occurred in 1777 and 1778 in those days they didn't fight wars in the wintertime they just kind of set out the way to the spring to come and so in Valley Forge the troops are sitting there they have no shoes barely have any food clothes are very limited very little sleeping quarters George Washington could have stayed somewhere else but he stayed with his troops to show them that he was part of them and he led by example and when you lead by example because what you do means more than sometimes what you say I think that is the best example of leadership so in in in my firm for example if I say to people you shouldn't do X or shouldn't do Y but I'm caught doing it it you know it doesn't work you have to follow you you have to lead by your own example and I think leadership is something that you can gain insights from from watching great leaders and Mike sous-chefs Key is a great leader let's say in basketball and other areas and I know he's involved with Fuqua you know he's done a great job in leadership and you can learn a lot from him and from other business leaders but in the end you have to find out what makes it work for you you everybody has to come up with their own leadership skills you can't only follow somebody else you have to come up with something that works for you and it's part of your personality so you know whether I've been a good leader or not others can judge but I think that the skills that I think are important are the ones I mentioned and I think leadership is something that can't be completely taught but you can learn a lot about leadership by watching others but in the end you have to do it yourself Oh over here okay okay several times about once a quarter I go back and watch the Rice University speech we choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because I'm sorry go ahead so that the Rice University speech about we choose to go to the moon yes do you see that sort of vigor and and fervor today and if so in what areas what parts of the country in terms of what the space program or not specifically the space program but that that's sort of okay just effort okay President Kennedy's speech was one that if you go back and read he actually wasn't sure that they could get there it was seen a very ambitious he decided I'm gonna ignore my staff and I'm gonna go ahead and say this and you know of course he wouldn't have been president even if had he lived probably by the time that his goal had been set but you know we we got we got there and frequently that's now become a trite way of saying we should you know show leadership we need kind of have an effort to get to the moon and very often people who propose certain programs say this is like Kennedy's going to the moon I think very often today politicians are unwilling to take that kind of risk and set those kind of goals because some of them are seen as unrealistic the politics in Washington much worse than they used to be we may not have as much courage than some of our leaders as we did I think Kennedy's example was a good one and because we actually got there it turned out to be something that people keep citing interestingly when they did get to the moon the computer power they have is less than the computer power that you have on your smartphone you have more computer power in your smartphone than they had on all of those those launches and vehicles that land on the moon so it's hard to believe but Kennedy was very courageous in doing that they did debate it for sure and Kennedy is a person who I have admired because I grew up during the period of time and he obviously we now know more about his life than than we did before but I do think he had a sense of what leadership was about and setting goals and learning how to communicate very well and when he gave his great inaugural speech that was actually the best speech he ever gave he was actually before that a terrible speaker he tended to look down all the time he was seen as very much of a monotone and he spent many years with speech coaches practicing how to be a better speaker and so he actually worked at giving that speech and worked at many other speeches and he really practiced the art of leadership and how to look like a leader how to talk like a leader and it wasn't something that came naturally to him I'm a first year MBA student and in school we've been talking a lot about social impact investing and I wanted to see if you had seen that that's gaining traction in the private equity space and if so is it you know kind of disrupting the traditional definition of success of ROI or IRR the large private equity firms are basically driven to get the highest rate of return they can legally with doing the least amount of damage they can you know so today in the old days of private equity you wanted the highest rate of return if it jobs were shipped offshore if you had to close facilities you did some environmentally destructive things nobody paid attention people just said what's your rate of return today investors are caring more about certain things so if you have a reputation for doing the kind of things that are seen as antithetical to society's overall ambitions it might be harmful to you but generally investors are still interested in good rates of return and social impact investing is a kind of a homogenized form of investing where your rate of return is going to be much lower because you're doing something that's socially good is the theory and my observation is that people will give lip service to wanting to have social impact investing but they won't put up as much money as you might really think so it's very difficult to raise that kind of money and not for the time being I suspect it'll be limited to mana size funds but aren't going to really dramatically change the world and so I think it's a good idea and concept but I don't see it really transforming the private equity world because I think most people give you money have fiduciary responsibilities and they already get the highest rate of return they can and very few fiduciaries have the their the authority to get a lower rate of return and getting some good social product out of it so I'm skeptical that it will sweep the world though I think it'd be a good thing for people to do more of it but I don't think it will be as large a thing as some people think it will be you will speak with the CEOs of our founders of investment firms for example Bridgewater radar you they often mentioned that culture is an important distinguishing factor between their phones and other forms and you said the same thing that culture is an important differentiator I'd like to have it for Carlisle specifically I know you mentioned that when we work as a firm across different offices we work as one firm but I like to know just to three specific things culturally what is what has been that at Carlisle for last 25 years and especially how do you still shouldn't institutionalize that as a recruiting is that the way it works incentive that you create what are two or three cultural things that you think truly are unique to Carlisle okay well obviously it's very easy to have a common culture if you have one office and it's very easy to have common culture you have one business you're in if you have 34 offices around the world thousands of employees and different business lines are in it's harder and so you know how do you communicate culture how do you indoctrinate people in culture without making them you know just drinking kool-aid and not really believing or understanding what they're doing we do nothing that is so brilliant or so unique we have education seminars for four people we have senior leadership conferences junior leadership conferences meetings where we can try to convey to people what the culture of the firm is all about but we also try to spend as much time as we can getting people from one office to know people from another office and to have people really learn more of what the firm is doing but in the end you know some people will follow the common culture and some people say I just I just don't like it or I don't believe it I'm gonna leave or something it's not easy and the larger the organization you have the harder it is to have a common culture and so that's why very often cultures don't survive that long because the organization's become that big they're too big or because the generation that didn't found the firm is gone and the next generation might have a different culture it's not easy I would say we've done a reasonably good job of it not a perfect job I I can see many ways we can do a better job but I do think that trying to make people feel they're part of one firm and part of doing something useful and then let me describe that if you work for Teach for America for example it's not that difficult to think you're helping the world or at least the United States because you're doing something that's thought to be you know socially are rewarding and so forth and helping people get better education you know when you're when you're in the world of making money it can get caught up in in just measuring how much money you make and you can very often find that people will not be as focused on whether they're really making the world a better place and and so forth and I think what is important is to try to make sure that in money making entrepreneurs we try to say to people look what you're doing is important for the world because what you're doing is you're making companies better by making companies better you're making sure people are going to be employed and we have more people employed there and have healthy families are gonna have money to support their families we also have investors who are largely pension funds and to having success for the pension funds is probably good for the school teachers of the firemen's college endowments and so forth so what we're doing is not something that is seen in my view as anti helpful to society we are helping society by making companies better by making economies better by making it possible for families to have the kind of wealth and be able to get their children educated so I very hard to explain to people why in our firm what we do is actually a socially productive thing and even though we're not Teach for America we're doing something useful and I think that's a very important thing that people have to remember when they're in the money-making business that it's not just how much money you make but it's the what you're doing with the money and what other people who benefit from what you're doing will will do with the money and if it's pension funds that what they're gonna do with its presumably useful and and employing people and so forth there is a school of thought for example that says that all of the philanthropy that Bill Gates and everybody else is doing is really wasted this school of thought Scott McNealy used to run Sun is a proponent of this it says you should take your money and just create more jobs don't give away money the best thing you can do is just create jobs more jobs you create better society will be and so forth it's a school of thought particularly subscribe to it but there's no doubt that there's a strand in there of thinking that that by creating jobs and we're doing something good in the for-profit world you are helping society and I tried very hard to convince people in my firm that they shouldn't feel that they're not helping society by what we're doing one last question in my career that I'm thinking about is my impossible I heard Nelson Mandela say once and it always seems impossible until it's done so I would like to know what it was what is your impossible what it is that would what what's what's his impossible well and that I did do or that I that you that you that you made possible well if you had known me when I was at Duke you would have said the idea that this guy would be a capitalist successful and look nobody would have thought 25 years ago that I would become a reasonably well-known philanthropist or build a major company and you know it's strange I was at a Duke event recently and a man came up to me and he said you know me my name is Robert Feldman said I remember you he was a student body president at Duke when I was here and he was the big man on campus that's president student government and you know I don't he didn't know me then because I was very low on the totem pole and you know it's just a strange thing in life how you know you can't predict who's gonna get successful by traditional measures of success and who is not gonna be a successful he's actually had a good career as a as a law professor but nobody would have predicted that I did what I did and nobody may predict but some of you may achieve some of you are gonna become billionaires some are you're gonna have struggles in your life some of you may have already made more money you ever thought some of you had struggles in your personal professional lives you just can't predict one of the things that's sad to me now is as I'm 64 I read the obituaries more than I used to I never understood what my parents used to read the obituaries when I was a kid now I read the obituaries first to see if any my friends died and make sure that I'm not in there and when you see somebody that is the same age as you who went to college with you dying you kind of say how why am I so lucky to have survived and therefore it kind of propels me that you do even more than I done before because I realized we're all you know living on borrowed time to some extent and so I I try very hard to look for things that I can achieve and there are many years of my life I'm not trying to kill to win windmills I don't really want to try to do things at this age that aren't really going to be completed while I'm around I want to try to see that it's coming to fruition while I'm around so anyway I won't say that I've done anything that's impossible but probably my classmates would say that what I achieved was impossible give them what the person that they once knew so let me just conclude by saying that I think your Dean has done a spectacular job as the Dean and has really helped Fuko have become an even better school than it was and let me give you my theory about giving back to ones University in one school when I went to Duke it was a reasonably good school it was then called Harvard of the south Stanford was then Harvard of the West the implication was it was a good school but really segregated a bit into the south and wasn't a great National University and and when I got in the Duke I got in I was lucky I didn't have it I couldn't afford a typewriter I wrote it out in handwriting my handwriting is very bad and probably that's why I got in because they couldn't read my essays very well so I got in but at the time probably you know five thousand people applied to do that year this year I think about 34,000 have applied to Duke and I've told the Board of Trustees at Duke that not a single person on this Board of Trustees to get into Duke today and that's not exaggeration because the student body is much better than it used to be and and that has made everybody on the Board of Trustees and particularly me and people who graduate from Duke at my time look smarter than they are and this is what I mean when a university goes up this way people will say well this is a great University and in effect your degree has been inflated in value if a university goes down this way even if you're very smart people will think you're less smart than you were because the university's gone down so all of you have an incentive to make the university Fuqua in particular do better because the better the fuqua does more people gonna think you're smarter than you might really be so so all of you I think have an incentive to help the school Fuqua is a school that's relatively young there are no business schools in the top dozen or so in the United States are as young as Fuqua fuoco was started with a very modest amount of money and it wasn't didn't even exist when I was undergraduate here it started in 1972 I graduated in 70 and so in a very relatively short period of time by the way these things are measured Foucault has come up and all of you took a chance on fuqua all of you presumably could have done other things but the fact that you did fuqua you now have Fuqua attached to your name for the rest of your life whenever you go anywhere my experience is people ask you three things right away what's your name where you're from where'd you go to school and they judge you by where you go to school to some extent rightly or wrongly and what you want to do is have Fuqua be seen as a great school because it will make people think you're smarter than you are maybe or more accomplished so I hope all of you will give back to to Fuqua and and to do something that I think is maybe difficult for some people before the reach in your pocket sometimes or if you don't have the money give your ideas but also help with other people and the final thing I would say is that when that speaks that I referred to about John Kennedy that was a speech that propelled me going to public service and I really try to do certain things and that famous line was the line that Kennedy wrote knowing it would be famous ask not what your country can do for you he mired Churchill very much and he Churchill always had a signature line in his speech and and Kennedy always wanted to have one but Kennedy actually had a signature line in my view at the end of that speech that really to me is more significant and what he said was with a good conscience our only sure reward with history the final judge of our deeds let us go forth asking his blessing and his help but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own now all of you I would say could help a little bit with God's work if you were to help a little bit with Fuqua so I hope all of you will recognize that you will be doing God's work by helping Fuqua be even a better school than it already is but thank you very much David thank you so much for what was spectacularly entertaining informative and truly wise we we do want to give you a gift it's a little bit complicated to come up with a gift for someone like you but but we think we're up to the challenge so we know that you are on your phone a lot right so what we have for you is these I'll give you these and then I'll show you okay so what you do is you attach it to the back of your phone which builds the fuqua brand and we got it you carry it over I so then you and then you peel it off and you clean your screen I say is I'm what it does okay well I appreciate it very much I can use that and I will I will start using it and I thought it was gonna be his cards to call various places around the world but this is better so thank you all very much you

Channel: Duke University - The Fuqua School of Business

Views: 95,664

Keywords: Duke, University, Duke University, Fuqua, School, Business, The Fuqua School of Business, MBA, Durham, NC

Id: 9zJzPak4eBk

Length: 76min 21sec (4581 seconds)

Published: Wed May 14 2014