Dean Kathryn Graddy: So we are so fortunate to have Barbara as an alum and as a friend, which is why it is my distinct honor to present Barbara Clark with the 2023 Dean's Medal.

Barbara Clarke: Mark Twain, the famous American author, said, If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.

And that's sort of how I've been feeling, working on, thinking about what I was going to say today, because there's so much I want to say.

I always have a lot to say, but people are standing and, you know, we're going to try to keep this short.

And thanks so much for the introduction and the bios, so now I don't have to go through any of that stuff.

So I want to sort of basically talk today about a couple of things, one of which is how we've all, you've all been studying capital markets and assets and things like that.

I want to talk about social capital and in particular how you can use social capital for what I think is the biggest lesson to learn in business, and a lesson that unfortunately I keep having to relearn myself.

So I want to talk a little bit about how the biggest lesson I have learned in business is, in order to have choices, you need to have options.

And all of the times when things have gone really well, it was because there were lots of options and when things didn't go well, it's because I didn't have enough options.

So I'm going to tell you stories. Don't tweet some of them out.

So anyways, but as background, an important thing to know about me is I'm an Irish Catholic from Boston, very proud of my heritage. My family's been living in Boston basically since the 1870s.

They came over from Ireland as tailors, laborers, and then they worked their way up to being truck drivers and railroad workers.

And then finally, my parents, both my parents went to college and then, hey, look at me now. Right.

So anyways, it's really important, an important part of my story. Another important part of my story is that my parents are high functioning, but very abusive alcoholics.

And so I know a lot of you out there. I'm happy to see so many of you with your families.

I know that you may have difficult family relations and just know that that's a big part of your story and you shouldn't ignore it. And it's something to take into account when you are going through the world.

So find your people, the people who support you, because that will help you.

So a couple of stories I want to tell are about times I used my social capital and times I used, you know, I had some of the lessons that I learned.

So one of the things, as an investor, I'm sure all of you have done case studies where you look at companies that had, you know, too highly concentrated markets. They had one big customer and then they lost that customer. So I see that every day and that goes to the story. So I'm not going to really talk about businesses.

I'm really going to talk about like how we ourselves sometimes don't create all the options that we really need to make.

So and it's funny, I've been mulling like the order of the stories to tell them in, but one of the stories I think is important is when I was 31 years old. And so, as you know, I came to Brandeis in the fall of ’89, the what happened in the fall of ’89? Berlin Wall.

I graduated in 1991. We were a country at war. We had a recession and inflation like, does stuff ever change?

But anyways, so when I was 31, I was very successful as somebody. As was mentioned, I started my career at KPMG in transfer pricing. I don’t know how many of you actually studying that? But I have taken some classes right? When I was doing transfer pricing, there were like 35 people in the entire country doing it, and now it's like thousands of people.

It's been going on for decades. So I was in the transfer pricing practice. I'd had been very successful. I was one of the youngest senior managers. I had worked to open up the, I was in D.C., I worked to open up the New York City office. I went to Boston and then I was in London.

And there in London it was when I was thinking about coming back to Boston for a number of reasons, most of it personal.

I was pregnant with this one right here, my daughter Isabella, and I wanted to come home, and so I was pretty excited. They were pretty excited to have me back. They were like, You can be the head of transfer pricing in Boston. And I was like, That's pretty awesome.

I love the staff there. Had a great team, really diverse as far as their knowledge and everything seemed really good, except there was one big problem and that was the existing head of transfer pricing in the Boston office.

This person was a terrible, toxic person. He was a very abusive, he was an abusive person, was verbally abusive to the staff. He even got into fights with the fellow partners at client meetings. I mean, he was really a terrible person. And as we've all, this is many, many years ago and we've all seen this era of MeToo and holding people accountable. And how do you do that?

Well, this is a long time before any of that stuff was happening, but I knew that I didn't want to go work in a toxic environment.

And they said, Don't worry, Barbara, You know, you won't report to him, report to you, you won't report to him. You'll be totally fine.

And I'm like, But it's still going to be a terrible work environment, especially for my staff.

I don't want to, I don't want to be a part of that. And so I thought to myself, I had options. I had already gotten several job offers from other transfer pricing practices and that's when I used those options.

And I said, I have choices. I have social capital. I've huge social capital. I have all the people I've worked for, the partnership, the staff.

I've built this for years and I'm well respected. And that guy has to go, because he's not right for our company. It's not what we want to do.

And so I said that little 31 year old me didn't know what you know, what could happen? Because what was the worst that could happen? They would say, no, he's staying that be like, thank you very much, I'm going elsewhere.

But I won. They fired him and the staff was elated, relieved, and my social capital just increased after that.

I mean, some of those folks are still people I'm in touch with today, many, many decades later.

So that was a time where I had my options, used my social capital and used it for good because we shouldn't be tolerating workplaces where people are disrespectful and abusive.

It's absolutely there's no job that should be doing that.

So then so that was a lesson I learned. And then I promptly forget this lesson a couple of years later, still in the transfer pricing practice. And all of a sudden I've kind of plateaued at work.

You know, I was not super interested anymore. I mean, many of you will get to it and I've been doing it for 12 years and I refer to this as like at the end of my career, at at the time I was at PricewaterhouseCoopers, I didn't know is the end of my career at the time, but I was plateaued.

And so the mistake I made then was I hadn't built up enough social capital outside of PricewaterhouseCoopers or even KPMG to really help me navigate the next phase of my life.

And so I made the really big mistake of telling my boss that I didn't want to be partner.

And so that was a big mistake because at the end of the day, you have to be in the game till you're out of the game.

And by telling my partner that I didn't want to be partner started this whole cycle where I ended up, they stopped investing in me.

I ended up they started to not give me great projects to work on.

And I started they started to even want to take away my clients and I was like, Oh, that's not a good idea because I love my clients and working with my staff is great.

And so it my job actually, which was kind of I had plateaued at now start to get worse.

And what I didn't have it then, which I know people have access to now, is I didn't have an executive coach.

I wasn't part of a network of people outside my company. I had a huge network inside my company.

There are organizations like Chief, which you can form great networks with folks.

So I didn't have that social capital to really help me navigate that time.

So on a beautiful sunny day in May, much like today, I was just like, There's got to be more to life than this. I got to get out.

And so I quit my job, which wasn't a great idea because, you know, I could have leveraged a lot more my network and tried to do things.

But don't cry for me because I was a senior manager. I had a great exit package, so I was able to like, you know, I was totally fine.

So that was a situation where I'm like, just a few years ago I had used my social capital and now I'd done this and I was like, Oh man, that's not great.

So one of the areas that I use my social capital a lot now is in the area of investing.

It's really important that for the companies I invest in that they know, those CEOs know that they have my full support and I will use my full network.

And it can't be something as simple as, Oh, if I can send an email to connect a couple of people.

No, I've learned the hard way that that doesn't work. That's not how you use your social capital. You have to actually do the work.

I one time organized a breakfast for one of my companies. She's a CEO of a financial services company.

I organized a breakfast in Boston for about a dozen investors, and they all came to this meeting and I could not believe how mean and terrible they were to my CEO.

And we now refer to that as the Mean Girl Breakfast.

And well, and this was the thing I had heard about, but saw it firsthand.

And I feel really ashamed that I actually had to see it before I really, really believed it because that CEO, she was a six time serial entrepreneur, she had raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital.

They treated her like she didn't know what she was talking about. She had no credibility.

And the issue with that was, I think it was, she was a black woman, a very successful black woman.

And these women just wouldn't give her any credibility.

And so if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, she would never have told me.

She would have said, oh, I went to this investor event, and, you know, they just weren't interested.

But to see it with your own eyes, how really negative people can be and toxic, that's when I decided, Oh, I need to up my game.

I need to make sure that when I go to these meetings, maybe I've prepped them in advance or I need to shut down some of these things, the way that people were talking like like question them.

Like, why are you questioning her credibility? Haven't we already said that she's a six times serial entrepreneur?

That entrepreneur has gone on to raise, you know, tens of millions of dollars.

She's received money from the Rockefeller Foundation and many other really top notch investors.

But it was a difficult lesson for us all to learn that you can't just send emails out and say, hey, come meet this entrepreneur, you have to take that extra step.

And so that's something that I pride myself on, that I take that extra step.

And I hope that you all know that right now you're standing on a ton of social capital.

You all have tremendous privilege. You've come to a great school, you have your great network.

Many of you have come very far away, and I think that that's a great skill.

My own daughter went to school in California.I didn't take it personally, and I really was happy for that experience.

It was really interesting that many of the parents kept saying, How can you let your daughter go to California to go to school? I'm like, How can you not?

Because she wanted to have her own place and California is her place.

She's been living there for eight years. So with that, I encourage you all to build your social capital.

It you know, as I would joke sometimes, like you never know where it's going to lead you.

You know, you might end up with a great job. You might end up with great friends. Tou might end up with like great recipes for lemon pasta or something.

But I think it's really important not just to accumulate it, because when I when I sort of stomped my foot and said that this person has to go like my social capital didn't go down.

And I know it's not true for everyone, sometimes you stick your neck out and something bad happens.

But it increased. And I think using your social capital is something that you can continue to nurture and continue to grow.

You have an amazing network here. There's an amazing, amazing alumni here.

And so I encourage you all to do that and stay connected to the university and continue to build those, sort of, that deep, interconnected web.

So thank you very much.