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Eric Schmidt: I'm Eric Schmidt, Class of 1976.
Eric Schmidt: I was an electrical engineering major because there was no
Eric Schmidt: computer science, now there is, and I am now the CEO of Google.
Eric Schmidt: It seems to me that people go to college, and then they join
Eric Schmidt: their firms, and between the ages of 25 and 35 they learn a lot.
Eric Schmidt: And then, all of a sudden, they want everything not to change.
Eric Schmidt: And inevitably something new comes along: a new idea, a new fashion, a new country,
Eric Schmidt: a new war, whatever, that upsets everything.
Eric Schmidt: So the lesson to be learned after years of watching this is
Eric Schmidt: that the norm must change.
Eric Schmidt: What we want to do is we want to constantly reinvent
Eric Schmidt: ourselves. Now it's easy to say that.
Eric Schmidt: How do you do it? In our case, we encourage our
Eric Schmidt: employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever
Eric Schmidt: they are interested in, not what their boss wants them
Eric Schmidt: to work on. Out of that, most of our great new products have come.
Eric Schmidt: Many different leadership styles work.
Eric Schmidt: There's not one leadership style that is the way in which
Eric Schmidt: corporations, institutions succeed.
Eric Schmidt: You'll have passionate, charismatic and disorganized leaders.
Eric Schmidt: You'll have boring and rational and precise leaders.
Eric Schmidt: What really matters about a leader is their commitment to
Eric Schmidt: getting to the right answer and to doing it in the right way.
Eric Schmidt: And however they get there, if they get to the right
Eric Schmidt: answer, people respect them.
Eric Schmidt: Along the way, you'll have conflict and you
Eric Schmidt: can resolve it in many different ways. If you don't seek out the
Eric Schmidt: conflict, you won't excel.
Eric Schmidt: Because without the conflict, at least the ideas in conflict,
Eric Schmidt: you won't hear the best ideas.
Eric Schmidt: When I thought about where to go to college,
Eric Schmidt: everyone assumed I would go to a technical school,
Eric Schmidt: someplace where people with my interests would go.
Eric Schmidt: But I was attracted to Princeton precisely because
Eric Schmidt: engineering was not its primary focus.
Eric Schmidt: And I believe that the value of a liberal arts education just in
Eric Schmidt: general, just learning about the world
Eric Schmidt: and learning about other people, would serve me in some inchoate
Eric Schmidt: way, some way in which I really didn't know.
Eric Schmidt: And that's proven true --
Eric Schmidt: that the skills and in particular the social
Eric Schmidt: experiences and exposure to the non-technical part of the
Eric Schmidt: world as a young person, made a huge difference for me.
Eric Schmidt: In my case, I met a brilliant professor who got me interested
Eric Schmidt: in computing and got me interested in the foundations of
Eric Schmidt: the kinds of things I did after I left Princeton.
Eric Schmidt: So it was the combination of critical thinking and the fact
Eric Schmidt: that you had such good access to professors who you could really
Eric Schmidt: talk to, that as a very, very young
Eric Schmidt: person had a huge impact on me.
Eric Schmidt: My name is Eric Schmidt, and I'm a Princeton Engineer.
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