John Knapp

May 15, 2003
Commencement Speech
Kennesaw State University

Speaker: John Knapp
President, Southern Institute for Business and Professional Ethics

Knapp biograhpy

President Siegel, members of faculty, distinguished guests and, most especially, honored graduates. It is indeed a privilege to join you in this ceremony.

Dr. Siegel mentioned my involvement with this university, and I want to say that I am grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to work closely with her - and with many of you - in developing KSU’s new initiative in Leadership, Ethics and Character. Of all of Dr. Siegel’s accomplishments over the last two decades - and there have been so many - none better illustrates the visionary leadership that she has brought to this institution.

Betty doesn’t know this, but I was at the meeting of the state Board of Regents back in 1981 when it was announced that she had been named president. At that time there was great excitement about the appointment of the first woman president of a public college in Georgia. What we could not have known then was that breaking new ground is an everyday thing for Betty Siegel. And the result is a nationally respected, growing institution that you are now proud to call your alma mater.

Certainly, Betty, each one of us owes you a great debt of gratitude for inviting us to share in your vision.

To say the least, a lot has changed since Dr. Siegel began her work here. And a lot has changed since most of you began your studies here. Not just change at the university, with new student housing and such, but great change in the world around you. And it is that on which I would like you to think with me for the next few minutes.

For discussion’s sake, let’s assume most of you completed a four-year degree in four years. I realize a few of you finished in less time, and many of you were on, shall we say, the "longer term plan." But for the moment let’s assume you were enrolled at KSU for the last four years.
When you arrived for your first class, one of society’s biggest concerns would have been a frightening thing called Y2K. Maybe you were even one of those who stocked up on food or withdrew your money from the bank in preparation for the impending global crisis. That seems a very long time ago, doesn’t it?

Consider all that has happened in the brief interval since then: a new millennium dawned. The global population passed the 6 billion mark. We endured weeks of hanging chads and a new president took office. The dot-com bubble reached its peak - and then burst. The World Trade Center towers were demolished by commercial airliners in the hands of terrorists. Wars were fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the moral failures of business leaders shook American free enterprise to its very foundations.

Is it any wonder that Y2K worries are all but a footnote in distant memory? We might well wonder if there was ever a four-year period when more social change occurred. Of one thing we can be sure, the pace of change in our world is accelerating - and our own lives are feeling its effects.

Think of your own day. If you are like most Americans you are sleeping less. Forty percent of adults report that they have trouble staying awake at work. You are probably spending more time in your car - especially here in metro Atlanta where the average commuter uses the equivalent of 31 work days a year just getting to and from work. If you are just beginning a new career, you will want to know that Americans now work more hours per year than any people in the world, including the Japanese - even as our average lunch hour has been compressed to a mere 29 minutes.

Yet as we race though the day, many of us actually pride ourselves on our ability to "multitask." We are thoroughly postmodern and have learned to tolerate and even invite constant interruptions by e-mail, pagers and mobile phones. Naturally I have mine here with me. It keeps me connected 24 hours a day to the telephone, e-mail, text messaging, my calendar and even the World Wide Web. (And, yes, it is turned off, as I am sure all of yours are!)

I don’t know how many e-mail messages you get every day, but I do know that for many business people the number is well over 100 - and growing. Last year there were 31 billion e-mail messages sent daily across the planet. Before 2006 that number will be more than 60 billion every day.

When many of you enrolled at KSU four years ago, there were 56 million Web sites on the Internet. Today there are three times that many. And the number of indexable pages on the World Wide Web has now passed 1 billion. I heard President Siegel say in a presentation last week that by the year 2020 the total amount of information available to us will double every 73 days.

The philosopher and novelist Jacob Needleman tells of a conversation with a physician known for revolutionary advances in patient care. In response to a question about his plans for future achievements, the doctor responded, "You don’t understand. I have no time! I am pathologically busy. It’s beyond anything I have ever imagined. I can’t give anything the attention it needs. . . . More and more things, good things, important things, keep coming to me. Any one of them is worth the whole of my attention and needs my time. But twenty of them? A hundred of them? And it is the same with my staff."

Some 40 years ago, Marshall McLuhan foresaw a coming tension between our freedom to pursue more knowledge and activity - and the danger of losing sight of our own humanity in the process. He said, "We are suddenly threatened with a liberation that taxes our inner resources of self and our imaginative participation in society."

Wordsworth put it bit differently, "The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. "

KSU’s theme for this academic year has been, The Courage to Lead for the Common Good. A timely reminder indeed of what we should be about. And a reminder of what we need more than ever in public life. But we would be badly mistaken to think such leadership comes easily in our increasingly digitized, globalized and super-sized society.

For too many of us, the obstacle lurks in the belief that our responsibility is to care only about the immediacy of our own work and those closest to us, and that such is all we can reasonably be expected to do, and that if we each do just that much we will have a good society and everything will take care of itself.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the 21st century, that is not enough. Our task is to raise up leaders and citizens who aspire to something more - who fully grasp and live into their potential as agents of the common good.

It has been said that it is harder to be human these days; but it might be of some comfort to know that the challenge we are describing was not entirely unknown to earlier generations. As the pace of life accelerated rapidly in the early Renaissance, there was much concern about finding a balance between that which was called the Vida Activa - the life of work and present action - and the Vida Contemplativa - the life of reflection and contemplation about the things of greater value and lasting importance.

I do not believe the problem is very different today. Our common good depends in large measure on whether each of us finds time to reflect, to ask deeper questions, to consider the larger effects and consequences of our actions. A CEO of a large corporation asked me recently, "How can we realistically expect our managers to think through the ethical implications of decisions they’re usually making under time pressure, and often in response to a steady stream of e-mails that demand instantaneous answers?"

There are no easy ways through the situation we find ourselves in today - and there were none 500 years ago. But if we are to live lives worth living, there are a couple of things worth remembering on an occasion such as this:

First, when it feels like time is your adversary - always running ahead of you, always pushing you from behind - remember that time is nothing more than the created space where you are given the freedom to do God’s work. Time is a great gift to you - it affords you the opportunity to find greater meaning and significance by serving the common good.

Second, when you feel you are being fragmented by the incessant demands of the computer, the cell phone, the pager or the electronic calendar, keep in mind that technology is not the cause, but the result, of our desire to compress more and more into every moment. We must stop asking what can be done and how fast, and start asking what should be done. We can resist the urge to press the "walk" button at the street corner or the "door close" button in the elevator and instead take a moment for meaningful engagement with other human beings.

And we can all take heart in the examples of those people we know - in all walks of life - who make a lasting difference by serving the common good. Many of them lead lives more complex than yours or mine, but they have learned the value of taking time to attend to their relationships with God, with themselves and with others.

I want to close with the words of Rumi, a 13th century poet who lived and wrote in the vicinity of modern day Iraq. "Some go first, and others come long afterward. God blesses both and all in the line, and replaces what has been consumed, and provides for those who work the soil of helpfulness."

I congratulate you on the great achievement that you celebrate today. May each of you take time to work the soil of helpfulness - and may it yield a great bounty to nourish our common good in the years to come.

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