stevebuscSteve Ballmer may no longer be CEO at Microsoft, but the energy he brought on stage during his 34 years at the Redmond company is certainly still alive.

“You’ve got to be more fired up than that,” Ballmer told the 2014 USC Marshall School of Business graduates last week after being introduced. “Try that one more time for me. I want to hear the class!”

Ballmer, who retired from Microsoft in February, returned to USC for his second commencement speech in three years. But instead of addressing the entire senior class like he did in 2011, the 57-year-old spoke to a group of MBA graduates this past Friday.

“This is a big deal for me,” Ballmer said. “I’m an MBA dropout. This is as close as I ever got.”

The former CEO is also at a different stage in his life this time around, no longer running the ship at Microsoft and figuring out what he wants to do with the next stage of his life. Ballmer said he’s spent a lot of time reflecting on what it means to invent yourself — something he knows the MBA grads will be doing soon enough.

“It’s a process that all of you are now going through,” he said.

His speech included six pieces of advice to help the students prepare for “inventing themselves,” and creating value at their jobs and careers. Ballmer actually outlined his speech on Twitter before the commencement, marking his first tweet since this past November and just the 17th overall from @stevebmicrosoft.

“The outline of the speech is there in case you get lost,” he said. “And that’s not a joke. I fit the whole thing in 140 characters so somebody better look at that.”

Without further ado, here’s the transcript from his speech, starting with his first of six pieces of advice:

1. Ideas matter

LightBulbDollar“I talked about this a little bit when I spoke three years ago, yet as I was really going through what I needed to say to you, I have to reinforce this notion that ideas matter. People think business is about leadership, they think it’s about working hard, they think it’s about a lot of things — which it is. But at the end of the day the ideas that you have will power the organizations that you join. They will create the value. A great team, great energy and great hard work will never make up for a bad idea. Now, bad ideas can also fall flat on the floor for a lot of other reasons. Windows and the power of the microprocessor — great idea, great idea. And ideas matter.

Even if you turn around and look at your own personal lives, the idea — what you choose to do — does matter. You don’t have to make a right choice or perfect choice now as you graduate, but what you really need to do is constantly ask yourself: Am I pursuing the right idea in my life, in my career, for my company — is this really something that will create value? Because at the end of the day, if the idea is wrong, you will fail.

My favorite new analogy — there’s an old movie, too old for this class, called Thelma and Louise. Two crazy gals who kind of get off the rails and at the end of movie they drive off a cliff. Very charismatic in the movie, and I think to myself, MBAs should stop and reflect on the fact that if you followed Thelma and Louise, you still died. You went off the cliff.

Leadership and organization and hard work matter, but ideas matter.”

2. Hit the weight room

Photo via Flickr user Bozdoz.
Photo via Flickr user Bozdoz.

“I apologize in advance for the sports reference, but I would say get in the weight room — the weight room of life. What do you do in a weight room if you’re an athlete, or a retired senior citizen like me? You prepare. You prepare. You build new capabilities. You get stronger. You get faster. You figure out how to get leverage. Yet in your business lives, those are precisely the right messages.

One of the things that I think has made Microsoft the company that it is today, is that we weren’t afraid to get in the weight room. In the late 80s, we had plenty of customers and investors who told us we would never be ‘an enterprise company.’ Today, many people think the bulk of the $350 billion of value in Microsoft is in our enterprise business. We weren’t afraid to sit there, even before we had it figured out, and just work to prepare to get better, to build new capabilities. Whether we’re talking about what you need to do for your startup, for the hospital that you join, or for yourself personally, you have to build new capabilities, new quickness and new leverage.”

3. Storytelling

ballmer5“You really need to learn how to tell a story — particularly with MBAs. I do find that a lot of people coming out of school focus on the ‘what we should do,’ and don’t spend enough time learning how to tell the story of why their idea brings value to others. The number of storytellers in the world is very, very small.

I don’t know what exactly I will do next in my life, I don’t know, I’m not sure. I don’t have an idea. But I’ve been spending a lot of time in the weight room reading up on the U.S. government budget healthcare cost of debt. And I say that to people, and nobody one knows what the heck I’m doing, I can’t explain, I don’t know.

Earlier this week I came up with way to explain it. As CEO of Microsoft, I was responsible for signing on something called our 10Q. Every quarter you had to publish it. It had to tell a story of your company. You had to get up in front of analysts. I didn’t do that very well — I did it well, just not very frequently —but nonetheless every quarter you put out a statement, you explained  yourself, you told the story, what’s good, what’s bad, what’s working, what’s not working. The U.S. government doesn’t put out a quarterly statement. There’s no regular story from our government about what’s working or what’s not working; where cost really is going and where it’s not; what the president is trying to do. The State of Union is a long list, and whether you like republicans or democrats, you still don’t get a simple and succinct story.

I started telling people this week, I want to work from publicly available information on putting together a 10Q for the government. People said, ‘Oh, we get that.’ That’s a story. A story that you can start telling and people understand. You can have brilliant idea for your startup — you’ve got to become a storyteller. Some of you will say, ‘I’m not an expert at telling story, I’m not a great public speaker.’ That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a clear, simple, concise way to convey the value of the ideas that are in your head. I think it’s one of the most under-appreciated skills in business. It’s one of the skills we did talk about explicitly at Microsoft. And if I could wish you one new capability to go build, it would be the capability of storytelling.”

4. Treasure time

Photo: Alan Cleaver
Photo: Alan Cleaver

“You might think I’m talking about work/life balance, and I am. You might think I’m talking about time management, and I am. But I’m really encouraging you to just step back, if not daily, weekly, monthly, and think about your time.

I went to a speech once that was given by a guy from Microsoft who’s one of our business partners, and he told the story about the history of the clock and how it got invented. I was getting very fidgety. We needed to sell these people something, we needed to tell them why our product is good, we needed to tell them why they’re going to make a lot of money selling our product. This guy just kept going about the history of the clock. He gets to the end of story and he said, ‘I wanted you to understand time. It’s your most precious asset.’ I hated the speech and here I am quoting it to you today because it made a real difference in my life.

I keep a spreadsheet with a time budget — how I want to spend my time — and I manage to the budget. When you’re thinking about the important things to go do in your life or in your business, you have to decide time references. When should you be patient and when you should be urgent — there’s no right answer. Is a startup supposed to succeed in 60 days or 10 years? There’s no right answer to that question, there really isn’t. But unless you’re constantly, as leaders in the world tomorrow, questioning what is the right time frame to use in thinking about the various investments you’ll do…

I know the first major decision you’re going to make about time. All of you will take a job, and you will have to decide how long before I know I love this? Is it six months, is it a year, do you stay after it for three years, five years, 10 years? What does your career look like? You don’t need to know today. But you should think about it explicitly. You should think explicitly, am I being too urgent or too patient? How do I process and really think about time?

I was meeting earlier this week with a guy I worked with in my first job out of college at Proctor and Gamble on Duncan Hines brownie mix. We used to play wastepaper basketball on Duncan Hines brownie mix. He just spent a day in Silicon Valley and we were talking about the culture in the Valley and people were asking him what he thought  of twitter. Is it overvalued, is it undervalued? Jeff and I looked at each other and he said it before I could: “Nobody’s going to know for 10 years. The time frame before you can really assess some things is far longer than you think. I’m not making a recommendation, I’m merely asking you to please treasure your time.”

5. Hardcore

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES in 2011. (Microsoft photo)
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES in 2011. (Microsoft photo)

“Be hardcore. I kind of wear brand hardcore on me. I would think that would be a little bit of my reputation at Microsoft. People say what the heck do you mean by that? Be passionate. That’s being hardcore. Be tenacious. That’s being hardcore. Be optimistic about what you can achieve in your own careers, in your own lives, in your startup, in the companies you join. Be optimistic. Be what I could call sharks. That’s’ a dangerous thing to say so let me explain. Another old, old movie, Annie Hall. There’s a great line where Annie Hall or somebody says, ‘Relationships — in this case between men and women — are like sharks. They move forward or they die.’ Hardcore people are like sharks. They move forward or they die.

You have to be constantly pushing yourself to look for the next thing, do the next thing, find the next thing. Not the thing that’s very different, but to ask the next question, do the next examination, be tenacious, be passionate, stay optimistic. There’s a whole theme there that I think is a far more fundamental source of success for business and for careers than you can ever imagine.”

6. Fun, luck

Steve Ballmer with current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Steve Ballmer with current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

“Last but not least, have fun. You’re not going to have fun every minute of every day — I don’t care what job you take, I don’t care how well rewarded you are, I don’t care anything about that — it won’t happen all the time. But you better be having fun in what you do.

The truth is, a lot of success won’t just come from ideas and being hardcore and being in the weight room. A lot of your success is going to come from luck. I know that was true in my case and I know frankly it’s the case of almost every successful entrepreneur I met in the tech business in the last 34 years. People will make it seem like it was the grandmaster plan, in all cases, of an all knowing and all seeing genius — that and a lot of luck is what really leads to success.

So given that you’re going to have to have a lot of luck, you better be having a lot fun. Don’t take the next job or don’t do the next startup because you should. Do it because you want to, because you can think of nothing better, more exciting, more energizing to get up everyday and go do than whatever it is that you selected.

Be patient when you get the first signs that it’s not fun, because time must be measured. Constantly be improving yourself because only by improving yourself will you maybe find that next idea. I’m sure there are many people in this audience who’d like to do a startup, yet the first law of doing a startup is you got to have an idea. But if you’re having fun, if you’re building capabilities, if you’re treasuring your time, if you’re building your muscle and being hardcore, the good ideas will come to you.

stevebusc1As I look at next phase in my life, I need a new idea, something I’m fired up about. I’m going through a process very different in some ways, but not very different in others. I’m learning new things, I’m studying new topics. You’ve done most of the hard work now. You’ve come back. You’ve taken your graduate degrees in business at great sacrifices in many cases to all of you and to the families that are here today. You will find something that really switches you on, that fires you up where you have an idea, where you have the capabilities, where you have time frame and the tenacity to really go out and make a difference. I wish you well with that and I wish you well with that particularly today at this commencement from this university.

My son is going through the graduation process — one or two classes, that’s no big deal, in the sense of time, it’s no big deal. But what I love about USC, is the spirit of this place is consistent with the values that I think are so important for success. And I said this at commencement three years ago, and I’ll say it again. The simple two word expression, “Fight on,” is about being hardcore. It’s about looking for new ideas. And whether you tell the story of the Trojans in English, or you say it in Greek, or you say it in Latin, it’s all about people like you with amazing capability and capacity, and most importantly the determination to be hardcore and to fight on.

Congratulations. Have great careers, great lives, and if you need a job — steveb@microsoft.com.”

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