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№ 2000.003 — Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Commencement address
Carleton Fiorina
President and CEO, Hewlett-Packard
Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard and an MIT Sloan alumna, frames life as a journey that rarely follows a logical path, drawing on her own experiences quitting law school and working her way from secretary to CEO. She urges graduates to engage their head, heart, and gut in decisions, to love what they do, and to honor those who supported them. She also describes a redefined model of leadership for the Information Age, emphasizing empowering people over controlling them.
Key moments
- 01 Crowdsourcing speech topics via email from the graduating class
- 02 Her own winding path from medieval history to law school dropout to HP CEO
- 03 Advice to listen to head, heart, and gut and to 'love what you do, or don't do it'
- 04 Reframing leadership as empowering people, citing HP's 'rules of the garage'
Visual speech map
Carleton Fiorina at MIT, 2000
A commencement address about nonlinear careers, head-heart-gut decisions, loving the work, and leadership built on empowering people.
- 01 Email prompts
- 02 Medieval history
- 03 Law school exit
- 04 Secretary to CEO
- 05 Head heart gut
- 06 Love the work
- 07 New leadership
- 08 Garage rules
Path
A useful life rarely follows a straight plan
Fiorina turns her own route from medieval history to law school dropout to Hewlett-Packard CEO into an argument for staying alert to unexpected openings.
Questions from graduates let the speech begin as a conversation rather than a polished executive script.
Leaving law school becomes evidence that quitting the wrong path can be a disciplined decision.
The secretary-to-CEO story makes ambition feel incremental, built through choices rather than certainty.
Compass
Decisions need head, heart, and gut
The central advice rejects purely logical career planning and asks graduates to use analysis, values, and instinct together.
Reason matters because difficult choices still need facts, consequences, and disciplined thought.
Love for the work is treated as fuel, not sentiment; without it, success becomes brittle.
Instinct is the accumulated signal from experience when the spreadsheet cannot settle the answer.
Leadership
The information age changes power
Fiorina contrasts command-and-control leadership with a model that gives people context, trust, and room to contribute.
Knowledge work rewards leaders who unlock initiative instead of narrowing it.
The task is to create conditions where talent can move faster than hierarchy.
The rules of the garage make innovation practical: believe, contribute, invent, and share.
Gratitude
Achievement is never solitary
The charge to graduates includes honoring the people who made the day possible and measuring success by what it enables for others.
Family, teachers, and peers are part of the accomplishment, not background scenery.
Influence carries an obligation to widen possibility for the next person.
The speech closes with agency: choose work you can love and leadership that empowers.
Transcript
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