Facebook运营官桑德伯格在清华大学经管学院2015毕业典礼上的演讲
I am honored to be here today to address Dean Qian, the distinguished faculty of the Tsinghua School of Economics and Management, proud family members, supportive friends, and most importantly, the class of 2015. Unlike my boss, Mark Zuckerberg, I don't speak Chinese. I apologize. But he did ask me to pass along his congratulations. And I am thrilled to congratulate this magnificent class and I ask you to give yourselves a round of applause.
When Dean Qian invited me to speak today, I thought, come speak to a group of people way younger and cooler than I am? I can do that. I do that every day at Facebook, because my boss Mark is 15 years younger than I am, and most of our employees are more his contemporaries than mine. I like being surrounded by young people, except when they say, "Sheryl, what was it like at a university without a cellphone?" or "Sheryl, come over here. We need to see what old people think of this feature."
I graduated from college in 1991 and business school in 1995, which, I remind you, is not that long ago. But I can tell you: the world has changed a lot in 25 years. When I was in business school, my school tried to have our first online class. We passed out a list of names because it was unthinkable to have your real name on the Internet, so we needed screen name. And it kept crashing because the technology did not exist to put 90 people online at once.
But for a few brief moments in between crashes, we glimpsed the future – and it was a future where technology would connect us as colleagues, as friends, and as family. The world we live in today is not one I could have imagined 25 years ago. And 25 years from now, you will have helped shape the future of the world that we all live in.
As graduates of Tsinghua, you will be leaders not just in China, but globally. China is a world leader in economic growth and educational attainment. And it is not just political and business leaders who recognize China's importance. American parents do as well. In the San Francisco Bay area where I live, the hardest schools to get your children into are the ones that teach Chinese.
But the fact is: countries don't lead, people lead.
And so as you graduate today, you start your path towards leadership. And you ask yourself: What kind of leader will you be? What impact will you have on others? What will be your mark on the world?
At Facebook, we have posters on the walls – slogans and sayings that help us to try to think big and broad as much as we can every single day. I think there are very important leadership lessons in these posters – and so today, I am going to talk about four of them that I think will have meaning for you.
The first, fortune favors the bold.
Facebook exists because Mark believed that the world would be a better place if technology would connect us individuals. He believed it so much that he dropped out of Harvard College to pursue that mission. What he did was not lucky. It was bold.
It's unusual to find your passion as early as Mark. It took me far longer. When I was sitting where you are, in a graduation robe, I never could have considered a job at Facebook because there was no internet – and Mark was 11 years old. When I was sitting as you were, I thought I would only ever work in the government or a non-profit because I thought those organizations made the world a better place while companies just chased profits. But then when I was working at the U.S. Treasury Department, I saw from afar how technology companies were changing the world and changing my mind. So when my government job ended, I decided to move to Silicon Valley.
Now in retrospect, that seems very shrewd. But in 2001, that was questionable at best. The tech bubble had burst. All the big companies were laying people off and all the small companies were going out of business. I gave myself four months to find a job. It took almost a year. The first CEO I got an interview with said to me, "I took this interview as a favor for a friend but I would never, emphasize never, hire you, because people from the government can't work in technology."
Eventually, I persuaded someone to hire me, and fourteen years later, I still love working in tech. It was not my original plan, but I got there eventually.
So if you find yourself on one path but you long for something else, keep trying. And if that path isn't right, try again. Keep trying and trying until you find something that stirs your passion, a job that matters to you and to others. It's a luxury to combine passion and contribution. And it's also the clearest path to happiness.
Second, feedback is a gift.
When I started at Facebook, I knew that my job success will entirely depend upon my relationship with Mark. So before I accepted the job, I asked him for a commitment that we would sit down every Friday and he would give me feedback so that any issues he had would be aired very quickly and discussed. He not only said yes, right away he said, "Let make it reciprocal. I'll give you feedback and you give me feedback." So for years, every Friday afternoon, we sat down and told each other what we thought we could have done better. As the years went by, sharing honest reactions became part of our relationship and now we do it in real time, we don't have to wait for Friday afternoons.
Now getting feedback from your boss is one thing, but it's just as important to get feedback from the people who work for you. It is not easy to do because employees are often eager to please those above them and no one really wants to question or criticize their higher-ups.
One of my favorite examples of this comes from Wall Street. In 1990, Bob Rubin became CEO of Goldman Sachs. At the end of his first week on the job, he looked at the books, and they had a lot of gold. And he said, "Why do we own so much gold?" And someone said, "Well, that was you, sir." And he said, "Me?" Apparently, the day before he was walking around the trading floor and he said to someone, "Gold looks interesting." That got translated as "Rubin likes gold" and someone spent hundreds of millions of dollars to please the new boss.
On a much smaller scale, I faced a similar challenge. When I joined Facebook, my job was to build the business side of the company – but not destroying the engineering culture which made Facebook great. So I tried to discourage people from doing formal PowerPoint presentations for meetings with me. At first, I just asked everyone and they all ignored me. Every time they had a meeting with me, they would come in with their PowerPoint. So two years in, I said, "OK, I don't like rules, but I have a rule: no more PowerPoint in meetings with me."
About a month later, I was getting ready to walk on a stage and speak to our global sales team, and someone said to me, "You know you really should address the whole PowerPoint thing. People are really upset that they can't use PowerPoint for their clients." And I said, "Who said they couldn't use their PowerPoint for their clients?" And they said "you did." So I got on the stage and I said, "I never said you couldn't use PowerPoint for our clients, I just said you couldn't use it for me. And the next time you hear a really bad idea, speak up, even if you think it is from me, make sure you tell me I am wrong!"
A good leader recognizes that most people who work for you will not feel comfortable challenging authority, so it falls upon authority to solicit their feedback. I learned from my PowerPoint mistake. And now whenever I go to meetings, I always ask my colleagues, "What could I do better?" And I always thank the people who have the guts to answer me honestly, and I often thank them publicly to show others that I am grateful for the feedback. I firmly believe that we lead best when we walk side-by-side with our colleagues, when we don't just talk but we listen.
Third, nothing is someone else's problem.
When I started my career, I saw people who were in leadership roles and I thought, "They're so lucky. They have so much control." But when I was in business school, I took a class where they said that the more senior you got, the more dependent you were on other people. I thought my professors were wrong.
They were right. I am dependent on my sales team…not the other way around. If they fall short, it is my mistake. As a leader, my performance is not just what I can do, but is what my whole team at Facebook does.
Companies in every country have to operate in ways that are right for their cultures. But I think that there are some leadership principles which are universal – and the most important is that it is better to inspire than to direct. Yes, people will do what their bosses say in most organizations. But great leaders don't just want compliance. They want to elicit genuine enthusiasm, complete trust, real dedication. They don't just win the minds of their teams, they win their hearts. If the people who work for you one day believe in you and believe in your mission, they will not just do their daily tasks well, but they will do it with true passion.
No one won more hearts than my beloved husband Dave, who passed away suddenly two months ago. Dave was a really inspiring leader. He was kind and generous and thoughtful. He raised the performance of everyone around him. He did it as the CEO of SurveyMonkey, a great company he helped build. And he did it for me and our children.
Our friend Bill Gurley, a leading venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, wrote a post "Be Like Dave." And he wrote, "Dave showed us all exactly what being a great human being looks like… But it was never frustrating because Dave's greatness was not competitive or threatening, it was gentle, inspirational, and egoless. He was the quintessential standard for the notion of leading by example."
Harvard Business School Professor Frances Frei has said that "leadership is making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence". Like Dave, you can do this for not just yourself but for other people.
Fourth, lean in.
The Chinese proverb holds – "women hold up half the sky." And this is quoted all over the world. Women have a special role in China's history and present's. And it was wonderful to see that half of your speakers today were women.
When the world has gathered to talk about the status and advancement of women, they've done it in Beijing. In 1995, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action called for women's full and equal participation in life and decision-making and it was adopted by 189 governments. And last year, on the 20th anniversary of this historic declaration, leaders again gathered here to mobilize around what has been known and called the promise of Beijing: equality for women and men.
Yet, while we all acknowledge the importance of women, women hold a very few of the leadership roles in every country. In every country, leadership is overwhelmingly held by men. In the U.S and China and everywhere in the world, women have less than 6% of the top CEO roles and fewer leadership roles in every industry. That means that when decisions are made, our voices are not equally heard.
There are many reasons for the gender leadership gap – outright discrimination, greater responsibilities at home, a lack of flexibility in the workplace, and importantly, our stereotypical expectations. Cultures differ so much all over the world, but our stereotypes of men and women don't differ very much at all. Although the status for women is changing in China and many parts of the world, those traditional expectations linger. To this day, in the United States, in China, everywhere, men are expected to lead, to be assertive, to succeed. Women are still expected to share, be communal, acquiesce to others. We expect leadership from boys and men. But when a little girl leads, we call her "bossy" in English, or qiang shi in Chinese.
Other social barriers hold women back. We exclude women from professional networks – like Guanxi – the informal and formal socializing that helps with job advancement. This is also true in the United States, where men opt for mentoring other men in many cases.
I believe very deeply that the world would be a better place when men run half our homes and women run half our organizations and our companies. The good news is that we can change the stereotypes and get to real equality. We can support women who lead in the workforce. We can support men who get more balance in the home; more equal marriages are happier, children with more active fathers are more successful and do better in school. We can walk up to someone who calls a little girl "bossy," and say, "That little girl is not bossy. That little girl has executive leadership skills."
And I want to make this very clear – equality is not just good for women. It's good for everyone. Female participation in the workforce is a major driver of economic growth. And companies who use the full talents of the population outperform others. Alibaba CEO Jack Ma stood here last year, addressing this graduation, and he said that "one of the secret sauces for Alibaba's success is that we have a lot of women…without women, there would be no Alibaba." Women hold 40 percent of all jobs at Alibaba and 35 percent of senior management roles – numbers that are unrivaled anywhere in the world.
Great leaders do not just develop people like them, they develop everyone. So for you, for the men and women graduating today, if you want to be a great leader, you will develop the women – as well as the men, in the organizations you will lead.
Our peers can help us develop, too. Two years ago, when I wrote my book Lean In, we started LeanIn.org, a nonprofit with a mission to empower all women to achieve their ambitions. We helped form Lean In Circles, small groups that meet to support each other. There are now over 23,000 circles in over 100 countries.
The very first international Circle I ever met with was here in Beijing – a group of young professional women who are working towards their professional ambitions and challenging the idea of "shengnu," leftover women. In the past 2 years, they have set up Circles throughout China and there are Circles at Tsinghua as well. I had a chance to meet with them this morning and I was so inspired by how passionate they are about their careers and about their studies. One of their members Meng Fei told me, "it was when I first joined Lean In Tsinghua that I began to fully understand the Chinese proverb, ‘A just cause enjoys abundant support.'"
I believe that your generation will do better than mine at fixing the problem of gender inequality. I turn to you. You are the promise for a truly equal world.
Today is a day of celebration, a day to celebrate your accomplishments, the hard work that brought you to this moment.
Today is a day of gratitude, a day to thank the people who helped you get here – the people who nurtured you and taught you, who cheered you on and dried your tears.
Today is a day of reflection, a day to think about what kind of leader you will be.
I believe that you are the future leaders, not just of China but of the world. And so for each of you, I wish four things on this day:
One, that you are bold and have good fortune. Fortune favors the bold.Two, that you give and receive the feedback you need. Feedback is a gift.Three, that you empower everyone. Nothing is someone else's problem. And four, that you support equality. Lean In!
Congratulations to all of you!
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