Jonathan T.M. Reckford gave the keynote address to the graduating Class of 2024 at their graduation ceremony on Saturday, June 15, 2024.
Dean Jonathan Levin: Today’s graduation speaker Jonathan Reckford has been helping to build communities around the world, literally, as the CEO of Habitat for Humanity since 2005.
After earning his MBA at the GSB in 1989, he worked for the first part of his career at leading companies including Marriott, Disney, and Best Buy.
When he got a call about the leadership opening at Habitat for Humanity, he realized it was his dream job. He could take everything he knew about leading and growing organizations and use it to help millions of people.
His path of responsible leadership is inspiring. So are his ideas on how to live a good life.
Please join me in welcoming Jonathan Reckford.
Jonathan T.M. Reckford: Thank you, Dean Levin, for that kind introduction — and congratulations to the graduating class of 2024!
I’m so honored to be back here. Thirty-five years ago, I sat where you are today, prepared but not fully aware of the path that lay ahead.
Just before coming to Stanford, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to live and work in Asia for a year through a Henry Luce Scholarship. I ended up doing marketing for the Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee and found myself coaching the Korean national rowing team. This allowed me to fully immerse in the culture by living in the training camp with the Korean coaches and athletes.
After that life-changing experience, I arrived here on campus — straight from traveling around Asia — with a bit of reverse culture shock. Things got even harder when my mom passed away during my first semester. I had to take several weeks off — and even considered dropping out — but the school and my friends were so supportive, and I remain grateful to the Stanford community for the compassion and understanding.
You are all blessed to be part of an incredible school, surrounded by smart, passionate and driven peers, professors and mentors. Though much has changed over the past 35 years, this remains the same.
During my time here, I was fortunate to develop a great core group of friends, as I’m sure many of you have as well.
A few days before graduation, six of us went to Sonoma and bought good bottles of wine to save for our weddings. Five weddings in five years meant most of those bottles went quickly. But we had to wait 30 years for that last bottle. We are ecstatic he held out for the right one!
After three decades, it turned out the bottle wasn’t even that good — and the storage fees were ridiculous — but our friendship that began as graduate students here at Stanford did age well and endures to this day.
Earning your graduate degree is a huge milestone, but it is also just one more step forward on your path in life. However, the people you surround yourself with, the challenges you decide to pursue and the values you embrace today will have a profound impact on what you do tomorrow.
So, as you embark on the next season of your journey, I ask you to think about three questions…
First, what values will define you?
I learned early on that, ultimately, your success will be measured not by what you have achieved, but by who you are — your true character.
You are a group of high achievers, and high achievers are especially good at reputation management. But one of the greatest risks of reputation management is allowing a gap between your public persona and your inner self. That gap is where all the bad stuff happens.
You’ll be shocked that I’m going to use a housing analogy, but if your family, career and service are the house, your values are the foundation on which those are built. You don’t see the foundation, but it is essential to the integrity of the home. There will be storms, and when they happen, they reveal the strength of your foundation.
The values that define each of us are incredibly personal. I’ve lost jobs and faced intergenerational challenges with mental health and depression in my family — but for me, my identity in my faith has allowed me to keep perspective on my temptations to put too much stock into my possessions, career and reputation. In fact, it was the willingness to give up all three that eventually led me to my dream vocation at Habitat.
After Stanford, I held a number of corporate leadership positions until I was out of a job after a merger and unable to work due to a ferocious non-compete clause. I was blessed to be able to spend more time with my family and be a stay-at-home dad, but I struggled to let go of an identity that was tied to my occupation.
It was then that I discovered the importance of white spaces — those times of learning and growth that don’t show up on your resume. I used the time I had to travel and volunteer, which led me to India, where I worked with the Bhangi, the poorest, most marginalized group in the country. It was there that I realized how much good could come from relatively small interventions. I knew that conditions in the world demanded positive change on a much larger scale, and I wanted to be part of that. I then returned home and went through a long and often frustrating period of waiting for the right opportunity.
As I traveled my uneven path, I realized that God cared more about my character than my job and that I needed to refocus on that before finding my vocation. That led unexpectedly to being asked to be the administrative pastor of my local church, a move everyone I trusted for professional advice thought was career suicide. For me, that period of waiting and then serving the church turned out to be the perfect complement to my corporate career in preparation for Habitat — which came calling a couple of years later when I wasn’t looking.
Remember my group of Stanford friends I mentioned earlier? These friends have always led me in the right direction, held me accountable and certainly kept me humble… When the announcement went out that I would be speaking here today, several of my buddies reached out to me. One said: “Looking forward to hearing your remarks, which I assume will be something to the effect of ‘don’t sell out like my roommates did.’”
Another suggested I speak about “how inspiring your roommates were in helping shape your path.” While that was said in jest, it is very true. We started as housemates and have done life together ever since, from vacationing to watching our own kids grow and go off to college. Some of my classmates now even have children following in their footsteps here at the GSB. I hope for each of you that you have at least one friend with whom you can be fully yourself and who loves you enough to always tell you the truth, as well as lift you up when you struggle.
This brings me to my second question — Who are you going to follow?
Just as important as the value of friends is the value of role models.
Picking the right role models is critical to the growth of your character — and character is critical to picking the right role models.
During my time at Habitat, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know President Jimmy Carter, someone who has always shown the world what true integrity looks like.
President and Mrs. Carter began working with Habitat in 1984, and for 35 years they worked alongside more than 104,000 volunteers in 14 countries to build thousands of homes and inspire millions more before their retirement from public life in 2020.
During one of the Carters’ earliest builds with Habitat, they led a group to renovate a six-story apartment building in New York City. In the group was a newly married couple, who decided to volunteer with Habitat instead of going on a honeymoon. The group was staying in the basement of a local church, which had set aside a Sunday School classroom for the Carters. They offered it to the newlyweds and slept on the floor with the rest of the group. Not typical behavior for a former president, and his involvement put Habitat on the map.
I’ve been with President Carter with some of the most and least powerful people in the world, and he’s always the same — a great mark of integrity.
According to leadership expert Warren Bennis, leadership is a three-legged stool of competence, ambition and a moral compass. All three are critical and hold each other in balance. If you lack competence, you can’t be effective. If you lack ambition, nothing gets done. The most dangerous are the destructive achievers — those that have competence and ambition but lack a moral compass to point them in the right direction.
President Carter has successfully balanced all three elements of leadership, and his remarkable life of humble service will always be inspiring to me and so many others.
My first and perhaps most influential role model was my grandmother.
Her name was Millicent Fenwick, and she was quite a colorful personality. She was a civil and human rights pioneer and a New Jersey congresswoman who encouraged me from a young age to care for the lost and left out in the world — and she did it in her own unique way.
If you have ever read the comic strip Doonesbury, the character of Lacey Davenport was modeled after my grandmother, who had a very imposing presence.
Prior to her public life, she had written the best-selling Vogue Book of Etiquette, and in order to graduate to the “grown-up” table at her house, one had to be able to sit up straight, hold one’s fork properly and discuss the economic development of sub-Saharan Africa. Let me tell you, as a 10 year old, that was both fascinating and terrifying!
Almost every time that I saw my grandmother, she would recite her favorite Bible verse, Micah 6:8:
“He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
And to walk humbly with your God.”
That passage of Scripture and my grandmother’s unconventional determination to fight for social justice were profound influences on my life — and they still are.
Graduates, you have your own family members who have influenced your path and helped you reach this milestone — and it’s wonderful to see so many of them here today. I know they are so proud of your achievements and have faith in you.
Always surround yourself with those who bring out your better angels, and choose carefully who you follow and allow to speak into your life.
This leads me to my third and final question — What problem will you help solve?
My grandmother would often ask me what I was going to do to be “useful.”
There is no shortage of problems in the world, so how will you be useful?
Now, I’m not telling you all to run out and join nonprofits because we can’t solve the big problems without the private sector. Big problems require multi-sector solutions. Plus, we need some of you future corporate leaders to help fund Habitat and other good causes!
The line between the business and nonprofit worlds is also increasingly blurred, with companies becoming more focused on social impact and community engagement and nonprofits like Habitat becoming increasingly diversified and sophisticated. Stanford recognized that early on. Back when I earned my MBA, it was one of only two business schools that thought we needed professional management of nonprofits, which is now a mainstream view.
Also, while Habitat is known as a nonprofit builder, many people don’t know that we also have billions in mortgages, run over 1,000 retail stores and created the affordable housing asset class in global microfinance — so the skills you’ve developed at Stanford are needed in every sector.
And you don’t need to decide what you are going to do — or what you will solve — right now.
Legendary leader John Gardner finished his career teaching at the GSB my second year. He told me: “It doesn’t matter what you do in your 20s. Just think of that as continuing education, and learn everything you can. You’ll eventually figure out what you’re really supposed to do.”
Finding what you’re really supposed to do — your vocation — can be a life-long pursuit. It’s finding that right combination of passion + ability + a worthy cause.
Habitat is my vocation, but it took a while to get here. The path certainly wasn’t straight for me, but looking back, the route I took makes sense.
According to theologian Frederich Buechner, you will have finally found your vocation when the deep gladness of your heart and the world’s great need meet.
So as you now seek your own vocation, I encourage you to keep asking yourself those three questions:
• What values will define you?
• Who are you going to follow?
• And what problem will you help solve?
I’d like to end by offering you this traditional Franciscan blessing:
“May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people, so that you may wish for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.”
Congratulations Class of 2024. Godspeed for lives of joy and impact.
