[MUSIC]
I really want to thank Irv Grousbeck, and Peter and Stefanos Zenios, the co-director
of the Center of Entrepreneurial Studies, for organizing this conference.
Is just a terrific idea to bring everyone here together.
Collectively, the foresight and the leadership in this room,
going back really to the 1980s, is pretty extraordinary.
And it's really created a distinctive and
alternate path into entrepreneurship and a novel but
now very well proven path to leading and growing small, medium sized companies.
And the ideas and the expertise and the research that are embodied in this room
have also created a model for investing that's undergone just explosive growth.
And I think just looking around you can see many of the pioneers and
many of the current leaders in this area.
Here at the Business School we have been teaching case studies based on search
phone companies for many years in two of our core entrepreneurship classes
that were both grew out of the thinking of Herb,
managing growing enterprise and formation of new ventures.
Peter and David Dodson taught the first class anywhere on search
funds entrepreneurial acquisition,that was taught here in 2009.
And then later Stanford and Peter supported the first international
class that was offered at IESC in Barcelona.
And that curriculum really sets the standard, has set the standard for
other business schools offering entrepreneurship through acquisition.
And many, many schools have followed that lead.
Across the US there are now searchers for
something like 4D graduate programs in 25 different states.
And many of you also know that the GSB produces the note on search funds or
the Search Fund Study,
which is the biennial research paper that has been going for 20 years.
More than 20 years, 1996 it started, that reports on the performance and
the demographics of the asset class, and it's a fantastic resource for
the entire community, CEOs, investors, researchers.
Okay, so why am I here today?
So I've been looking forward to this conference, actually for
several months and when they called me to participate, I was really excited.
And the organizers said to me, look we're trying to line up a lunch time speaker,
and we want to get a leader from a really important Stanford institution,
part of Stanford that gets national, even international attention.
And I thought,
well obviously you're calling me because what could be a more important institution
of greater prominence than the Graduate School of Business?
And they said, we really want you to introduce the speaker.
>> [LAUGH] >> We think we might be able to get
David Shaw.
David and I actually attended Stanford at the same time and
we both grew up, I think hoping to be professional athletes and
that is basically where the similarities end.
>> [LAUGH] >> When we were at Stanford, David played
on the football team, he played on the basketball team, he was on the track team.
And I was in the stands for all three sports.
And then David went on to just a spectacular coaching career.
He came back to Stanford as a coach in 2007 under Jim Harbaugh.
He became the head coach in 2011.
And now, for the last seven years, he's back down on the field.
I'm back up in the stands, and it has been glorious watching his teams on the field.
A few days ago, I was looking on the Stanford football website and
I found a quote from David.
He was addressing his team and he said, it's not enough to be good or pretty good.
Let's think about how good we can be.
Let's reach the limits.
And I thought, what a great thing to say that a group of talented young people.
Whether they're headed on the football field or
into a finance class or helping the world to be entrepreneurs.
Let's reach the limits.
So big theme of today's conference is leadership.
And coach Shaw is someone who leads by example on and off the field.
When he was asked about his aspirations as Stanford coach, David said,
he hopes to leave a long string of players
that constantly say coach Shaw changed my life by being a great example.
And he helped me be a better football player as well.
And I think that's what Stanford is all about.
It's about creating an atmosphere where students and players are supported,
they're inspired, they're energized to do their level best.
So I'm really pleased to welcome coach Shaw to the GSB.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Hello everyone, good to see you all.
You have food and I don't, that's okay.
>> [LAUGH] >> I'm going to be pretty quick here.
I want to touch on just three little things that I associate with leadership.
They're little but they're big to me and
I don't think any of them are Earth shattering.
But I want to express the way that I look at them.
And then I want to take some questions,
because to me that's the most enjoyable part of speaking to a group of people is
getting idea of what you might want to hear from me.
So first thing, I want to talk about taking over which many in the room have
taken over but from my perspective of taking over the football program.
The most important thing to me was establishing
what was most important for everybody, which makes a lot of sense.
But at the same time,
what was also really important as we know, perception becomes reality.
The people that I was now in charge of
needed to see me demonstrate that they were important.
What they wanted was important, their success was important.
I think that gets undersold in my business because college football is so
big right now and the head coaches are some semi celebrities.
When we take over we have to,
there's a phrase everybody use, uses put my stamp on the program.
So I think what happens so often when people take over anything,
the first inclination is to show everybody that I'm in charge.
Which is great, they have to know you're in charge.
But guess what?
You just got the job, they know you're in charge.
So the deal now for me, the most important thing early on for
me, was to say, okay, I just took over a program and
I'm night and day different personality wise from the guy that I took over from.
So I'm going to fight the urge to say,
let me show you how different I am than that other person.
The urge for me was, here are the things that we did before that work,
here are the thing that didn't work,
we're going to try to fix these things that didn't work.
And keep doing the things that do work and maybe even do them better.
So early on for me, it was important for
me to show them that it was their success that was my priority.
As I was reminded when I got the job from a friend of mine, which still sticks to me
this day, which was, hey, you got the job you wanted now just go do it.
You don't have to prove anything.
You have the job.
You're in the position.
Now just look at the things that are important and
set the path for the organization.
Second thing, which I think it's blown out of proportion to a certain degree.
And I think it's one of the most misunderstood things about leadership.
And that's the word that everybody uses, which is culture.
There's one way I think of culture, right?
Which is culture is basically the conglomerate of every bone that's in
the area that you're referring to, that's the way I think of it.
Because what most people think of culture is, we're going to establish a culture and
we're going to bring people in to stay in line with our culture.
That doesn't happen, doesn't happen ever, ever.
The culture gets established by who is in the culture, so
you establish the culture by the people that you bring in.
So you have ideals, you have things that you want to accomplish,
you have ways that you want to operate.
The people that you bring in, they have to believe the same things.
They have to want the same things.
You can't bring someone else in and change their ideas of the way that things should
be because eventually, they're human beings.
So it sounds a little different.
So in my world, I know it's called recruiting in everybody's world but
we need guys that are great football players.
We need guys that are great students.
We want great human beings, all right?
That's the trifecta, we want all three.
But if they don't buy in to what we do and how we do it,
it's a waste of time for him, it's a waste of time for us.
Because our culture will be set by the daily practices of the people
that live there.
If they don't work as hard as we need them to, if they don't prioritize
the scholastic part of being a college football student, student athlete.
They are not going to make it here.
And they may drag a couple of other people down.
So for me, and some people still don't quite get it the way that I look at it,
but to me it's the whole ball of wax.
You don't change human beings.
You have to find the right ones to bring them.
And sometimes you have to push out the ones that don't belong.
Because the culture will be set by the daily practices and
attitudes, words and actions of everyone that is there.
Third one to me, third and final one to me, before I take some questions,
is goal setting.
Which is paramount, this is very, very important.
Tangible, achievable goals need to be expressed,
and sometimes tweaked and changed, but initially established.
This is what we're trying to accomplish, and here's how we measure it.
There's another side of it, which is just important, if not more important.
In our world, we call them process goals.
We talk a lot about being process oriented.
Where you just set your goals and then okay, how do we achieve those goals?
We believe if your process is right, it's almost like you can't help but
achieve your goals.
For us, once you established the goals, the focus is never the goal.
The focus is on our daily practices that help us reach our goals.
We are process oriented.
How do we do the things that we do?
And we focus on our process.
How long are we meeting?
What are we covering in our meetings?
When we practice, how are we practicing?
What exactly are we practicing?
Do we need to look at this?
Do we need to look at that?
Okay, how well does this guy do this?
Okay, we need to change something so that he can get better at this one thing.
We don't wake up every single morning and
say we gotta win the Pachler Championship today.
That's months from now.
We can't do anything about that now.
What do we do about it today?
So it's great to have those goals and everybody know what the goals are,
but then once you set the goals you leave the goals alone.
Leave the goals alone.
How do we get there, today, tomorrow, the next day, the next day?
So that's to me a subtle but very, very important thing.
Especially dealing with young people in this day and age right now.
Which all of us over the age of 30 are saying,
what the hell is wrong with these people, right?
The people today are so
goal oriented, they're trying to get to the goals as fast as possible.
And as we know sometimes, that is the fastest way to fail.
It is the fastest most spectacular way to fail.
Because often, even if you do get there quickly, you don't know how you got there,
and it is a quick drop.
Whereas when you are process oriented, what happens very,
very often, is as you systematically reach your goal, you realize,
we might have set our goals a little bit too low.
Let's re-establish our goals.
Or let's change the focus of our goals, because we love the process, we love what
we're doing and it's leading us maybe in a direction that we didn't know but
we love what we're doing so let's adjust our goals.
because what you find out when you did that is eventually, the goal is, I can't
say inconsequential, but the goal gives everybody direction to a certain degree.
But it's the process.
It's what I'm doing every single day.
And one of the process goals that I have, that I work towards,
is everybody that works for me likes walking in the door every single day.
We don't stress and strain about, God, we gotta achieve this.
We know what we want to achieve.
Gosh, we've gotta have an environment that people want to come work, and
they want to come do their jobs.
And they enjoy the people that they work with.
That's important to me.
I believe that's one of those factors that helps us get to those lofty
goals that we set.
>> [APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC]