you can do much better. it is these three fundamentals that are universal. there are others as well. what is it that really sets leaderships apart from another. leaders rely on decision-making on the very important personal input of their value system, things that matter to them. many leaders go so far as to actually develop guideposts. let me share some key guidance. to encourage you to think about

this notion of values based decision-making and to pose the question for yourself. what are my values customer i believe in the importance of trust in relationships. i want to make sure the decisions i make can contribute to increasing that trust at both the personal and interpersonal level. you must communicate very openly and honestly. trust is integral in meeting commitments, getting done what you commit yourself and your organization to get done. those who depend on you must have confidence in your reliability. this applies to just about any relationship that you have whether it is business or in your personal life. leaders must build trust with multiple stake holders.

trust across globally diverse teams and trust with public officials and trust with your customers and trust with your shareholders. we all know that we must meet our commitments to continue to build that trust. trust is important in any team environment. this is most likely the leadership opportunity you will have early on. working in a team or leading a team. i have seen a lot of differences between teams that collaborate on the basis of trust and those that struggle to do that. those that work on the basis of trust are able to act with higher speeds and are able to make better decisions or perhaps their most able to work during tough challenges that always come from working on -- tough

challenges that always come. i have worked to decide what actions will encourage trust. innovation takes many forms. they can take the form of business process and improvement in the form of customer service. the interesting thing about innovation is that it brings change. change that builds bigger and excitement in an organization. companies, any enterprise, needs innovators and diverse thinkers. that way they can exploit the opportunities that go along with change. that is not to say innovation is always welcome in every enterprise that you will encounter. simply because innovation means change in inherently attacks the

status quo. any time the status quo is attacked, you might expect a response. i have seen some organizations that drive good innovators out of their systems because they are not capable of dealing with the change that results. fortunately those organizations usually do not last very long. if you find yourself in one of them, recognize it and get out. innovation is an important process that leads to the creation of the future of any enterprise. my bias in decision making -- accept the discomfort that comes with change.

my third guidepost is one of the hardest in any decision-making. that is the commitment that your decisions will drive true value creation. this is directly relevant to the concept of shareholders and what they expect out of a for-profit enterprise. it also applies to nonprofit enterprises and it relates to the values that all enterprises will expect. on the business front, the concept is clear that you want to use the resources of enterprise to get out more than you put in. that is how you create value. and concept, the return on investment that captures this notion pretty well. you think about what businesses do and if they are returning less than their capital. if they're returning less than

the cost of capital, they typically do not make it very long. as i return more rise and grow those that return more rise in roe and continue to create the future. -- and grow, they continue to create the future. each of us are given a unique amount of human capital and each of us are given a limited time within which to invest that precious resource and do something good with it. if you think about value creation in that context on personal opportunities, i think it is helpful to guide your own decision-making about the steps that you take going forward and to help bring the basic actions that you choose. on a personal basis, i find the concept of value very helpful.

let me sum up -- successful leaders rely on the three fundamental strengths -- passionate commitment, knowledge, and expertise in what the organization does and how it does it, and uncompromising focus on ethics and integrity. in addition, most leaders have strong, personal values. relying on values-based guideposts, a challenge of making those important decisions, these priorities lay a foundation for continuing long-term success of an enterprise. they help create a vision and

help to build an inclusive community and they foster open communications and trust and excitement in the organization. leaders are the builders and the stewards. they have to be based on values. thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you today. i hope they are helpful as you shape your own leadership approach. congratulations on your graduation from this outstanding university. thank you. [applause] >> former president bill clinton was the commencement speaker of the graduation ceremony at howard university in washington, d.c. the former president's speech is about 30 minutes.

[applause] >> thank you for meeting me outside. as the father of a grown daughter, i wonder if you shared my experience. it is humbling and rewarding and occasionally frustrating to have a child who knows more about everything than you do. i think she thought she did when she was in high school, but eventually it was true. i'm honored to be here. thank you for the degree. thank you to the governor for his introduction. we have been friends for a long

time. we served together. i was impressed by his leadership as a governor and also when he went back to serve as mayor. i asked him, don't you enjoy being there? he said, yeah, but the good news is you're closer to the people. the bad news is your host enough for them to strangle you if you mess up. [laughter] it is great to be here at howard. in 2009, i was inducted as an honorary member at an organization. [applause]

i'm not quite that old although i look it. i'm also glad to be here because of the record of this great university. i want to try to talk about not only howard's leadership and preparing people for science and engineering and technology at not onlyic careers -- the record of the medical school, and i have to say this, also the phenomenal success you have a producing female surgeons.which i am impressed with. more important is all the different principles.

thank you for the community service you have been here while at howard. thank you for your interest in doing this around the world. i had pulled from the records the number of commitments involving howard university students or faculty made through the clinton global initiative network. there were 10 different commitments. the most recent of which is that howard is one of 13 medical schools committed to retraining the healthcare workforce in rwanda. [applause] it was devastated by genocide. all the hospitals except the one in the capital city were destroyed.

i working with my friend, dr. paul, helped to rebuild it. but they do not want to take in any foreign assistance from anyone to do anything after 2020. they had to have hospitals and people trying to work their and clinics and community health workers. they asked us to put together a plan to do it. dr. eric goolsbee, head of pepfar, the president's plan to deal with aids and other life- threatening diseases agreed to finance this for a year now. you should be really proud of howard. every one of these schools including howard are committed to doing this work for three or four years for only seven percent overhead. the lowest in history of any foreign assistance programs. you should be proud. [applause]

you will save countless for decades and decades. i am well aware that the commencement speech is the least important part of this day. i congratulate all of you who are here. your parents and your friends and your loved ones. thank you to those who taught you. unlike most older people here, i remember who gave my commencement speech 45 years ago next month. i remember exactly what the speech was. we were like this on the lawn at georgetown. it started out to be a clear day. then a huge storm cloud came over.

the lightning began to dance in the sky. a howard graduate, the mayor of washington, d.c., stood up at the podium and look at the sky and the students and said, and congratulations. if we did not get out of here, we will all drown. [laughter] if you want a copy of my speech, i will send you one. good luck. if you want a copy of my speech i will send you one. off we went. what did i learn from that? the most successful commencement speeches are brief and highly relevant.

, thank you forre the memory. when you leave here, it is important for you to remember that you have been empowered to do something most all who ever lived could not do. the economic challenges virtually all of you have the power to choose what you will do to earn a living. thaty sound self-evident most people who have ever lived including billions of people on the face of the earth today never had that choice. ony simply did whatever was hand to put food on the table

they had a family to support, their families. you have a choice. the only bit of personal devices this. try to do something that will make you happy. doingeople are happiest what they are best at. you have been given that gift. gift howardultimate has given you. this is the most enter dependent world. butsee it not just in trade travel and increasing diversity. pretty soon there will be no majority. 2050 there will be no majority in america. we will just be one big group of people all that will have to think of something to hold

ourselves together. it is very important. the second thing i want to say is this. the world has many challenges. there's too much inequality. but come on a college with too much debt and wonder if they will be able to repay it. we work with that much of a pay rise. it is manifested all over the world by a global jobs crisis for young people. spring occurred in egypt and you saw the incredibly articulate young people, one of the reasons they were there that every year the university system turned out 400,000 college graduate and the economy

never produced anywhere 400,000 jobs for college graduates. there's a lot of inequality in this world. this is how all the wonderful open borders could lead to what happened at the boston marathon. looking for ahere college education, seem to be doing well. the only wayhat their lives can have in meeting -- meaning is to take someone else's lives away. they were not empowered. just about a year before another young man tried to blow up a car

bomb in times square new york. he and his wife have college degrees. he had a job and a home mortgage. like a lot of americans he lost it. most of us were raised to face failure in the face of this and pick ourselves up and go to work. i hope you will do that. the only wayught his life could matter is if you to go a the lives of people he did not even know. the first decision we have to make before we can get to all of the policies and things that would change the world for the better is to share the future, to try to create a world of shared prosperity. where everybody can be a part of a community as long as they

believe in certain values including equal treatment and the opportunity to begin again. this whole thing comes down to what do we think the future will be better if we face it with open hands or closed fist? that hardenedngs me when -- heartened me when president obama asked hillary to be state and she said yes and they developed this amazing withdship which i watched, great interest -- come on guys.

they have this huge campaign. down to the end. he was big enough to ask her to be secretary of day. she was big enough to take it. they trusted each other. the both acknowledged differences in their positions were not that profound and there is a world out there that world we helaled and a had to try to make place for the world we believe in. it was amazing. woodrow will world you will new world with my foundation, and all these politicians i used to know would marvel at this. they said, -- this is the way this is supposed to work.

we have differences, would have an election and it is over. people people join hands and work together. washington is dysfunctional today largely because people can't find anything to work together on. they think our differences are more important than what we have in common. wait for the next election, maybe you will gain power. i say that because everyone of us has to make make a decision like that every day. you can't live in a world that is interdependent, where the walls come down, and borders look like nets. you cannot keep every bad thing out anyway. unless most people believe that what we have in common is more important than our interesting

differences. it turns out that there is not only a religious basis for this and all faiths, the quran says that all output different people on the are not that they might despise one another that they might come to know one another and learn more on another. the torah says that he who turns aside from a stranger might as well turn aside from the most a by god. the christian bible says you should love your neighbor as yourself. it is the second most important commandment after loving god. the dom a pot of the buddhist says that if -- you are not

truly human unless when you see the arrow piercing your neighbor's body, you feel as if it had pierce yours. in addition to that, we now know that it is scientifically true. i spent $3 billion of your money to finish the sequencing of the human genome. [applause] all the people and the scientists will tell you what has happened. it is the best money we have ever spent. it has generated best -- massive economic prosperity. we have learned patterns that make little children susceptible to certain kinds of cancers. medicines have been developed which have saved their lives. we have just begun. the most important thing for all of you is that when the genome was sequenced, we learned that every -- look around this crowd, every non-age related difference you can see, including race and gender, are all rooted in one half of one percent of your genome.

we are all 99.5% the same. because of our ability to do genetic history, we have found interesting relatives. you know. which has made for funny things. -- some politicians found out in their lineage embarrassments of their current politics. the most important thing is, we are 99 point five percent the same. we all spend 99.5% of our time thinking about the half of percent of us is different. don't we? all of us. you walk down the street by store windows, you see your reflection, you think i wish i was taller.

that is also focusing on the half percent. the half of percent matters. a gate einstein the biggest brain -- a gate einstein the biggest brain. that .5% means lebron james is hard to stop at the striving for the basket. . the .5% matters. so does the 99 -- so does the 99.5%. as why this service counts. when you leave here, i want you never to forget for the rest of your life in good times and bad that you live in an interdependent world, and we have to pull it together, which means you have to do something sometimes for somebody else because they are just like you are. that is really important. [no audio] [applause] it is very good economics.

a few years ago, and american journalists wrote a book called "the wisdom of crowds." he chronicled all these experiments, which come down to this. if i pick 20 of you at random from this crowd, and i put you in a nice room, and the person with the highest measured iq in this entire crowd, the biggest genius, when into another room, and we kept feeding questions in there, had you solve this problem, that problem, how can we end up road hunger -- world hunger, how can we create more jobs for young americans, how can we employ the long-term unemployed people who don't have high school diplomas. over time, the room would make better decisions than the room with the genius. it turns out, there is economic

and social imperative that compels those of us who understand it to work together. quaid -- creative cooperation works better than constant conflict. we forget that. if you can't share the future, unless you share responsibility for building it. i implore you to look for opportunities to do that. [applause] the last thing i would say is that you are living in a time that is changing focus -- so fast, it is more likely than not a even if you start off fast, something will happen that you will find frustrating. you have to be able to begin again.

you have to be able to begin again without blaming somebody else, in a way that isolates you from them. perhaps we will never know what tipped the scales of those young men who did the terrible thing the boston marathon. perhaps we will never fully understand what happened to that young man who drove the car bomb into times square. all the others who found that all their cooperation options were close, and the only way they could say hey look at me, i met her, i mean something, to take somebody else down. if you were going to avoid that, you have to be able to begin again. the thing i liked about being here today is that you still like to laugh.