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№ 2011.017 — Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Commencement address
Ursula M. Burns
Chairman and CEO, Xerox
At MIT's 145th Commencement, Xerox chairwoman and CEO Ursula M. Burns urged graduates to set their sights on changing the world and leaving the planet better than they found it. She emphasized that making a difference need not be grandiose, citing examples like working for organizations that create decent jobs, raising a family with good values, or mentoring a child. Burns, who is also a parent of a graduating student, praised the Class of 2011 as among the best and brightest.
Key moments
- 01 Calling on graduates to leave behind more than they took away
- 02 Defining meaningful impact through everyday acts like mentoring or raising a family
- 03 Urging graduates to believe in something larger than themselves
- 04 Expressing pride as both speaker and parent of a graduate
Visual speech map
Ursula M. Burns at MIT, 2011
A commencement address about changing the world, everyday service, responsibility, belief beyond the self, and leaving more than you take.
- 01 Xerox leader
- 02 Parent speaker
- 03 Best and brightest
- 04 Change the world
- 05 Everyday impact
- 06 Mentoring
- 07 Values
- 08 Leave more
Position
The speaker arrives with two kinds of pride
Burns addresses MIT as a chief executive and as the parent of a graduate, giving the charge both institutional authority and family immediacy.
Her business role frames impact as an operational responsibility.
Personal pride keeps the speech close to the graduates' lived moment.
The graduates are named as unusually capable and therefore unusually responsible.
Standard
Changing the world is the baseline
The address asks graduates to set their ambition at the level of consequence: improve the planet rather than simply extract opportunity from it.
Capability should be measured by what it changes for others.
Graduates are urged to attach work to something larger than private success.
Education creates an obligation to leave conditions better.
Scale
Impact can be ordinary and still matter
Burns resists a narrow heroic model, showing that decent jobs, families, mentoring, and daily choices can each be world-changing acts.
Organizations can dignify lives by creating stable, decent work.
Values passed through households become civic infrastructure.
One guided child can alter a future in concrete terms.
Charge
Leave behind more than you took away
The closing ethic is plain and durable: measure a life by contribution, responsibility, and the courage to make a difference at reachable scale.
The ledger of a life should tilt toward giving.
Public good begins with choices close at hand.
The world changes through many specific commitments.
Transcript
The full transcript is hosted by the original publisher. Commencement Archive links to the source rather than republishing copyrighted text.
Read the full transcript at source →Provenance
Verified from official archive