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This paper examines the pedagogical value of Steve Job's Stanford University Commencement Address for understanding and teaching about careers in the 21st Century. The address is organized around "just three stories." This paper will show how the first story draws attention to different sources of learning and the need for authenticity. It will then show how the second story illustrates what it is like to experience and manage a career change, with a specific focus on involuntary job loss as an opportunity for growth and reinvention. The third story connects to the career as a 'calling' and circles back to authenticity as both a motor and anchor for careers. In addition to these themes, a note of caution should be added that the speech overlooks the contextual and individual barriers in contemporary careers. Finally, combining the three stories and introducing a further theoretical component, the paper shows how the speech provides an opportunity to illustrate the "intelligent career" framework.
Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford University provided important insights into his life experiences and his views on themes as diverse as innovation and creativity, love, family, and death. However, for management scholars its greatest strength may be its capacity to help understand and teach about people's career experiences and trajectories. This includes, for example, the need to make sense of and find authenticity in a career, the impact of other stakeholders on that career, changing career direction, learning from events in the past, and using them to fulfill aspirations for the future. The audience was a group of young graduates who were just starting out in their own careers, their families, and university staff and faculty. The speech was written with graduates directly in mind and with a focus on what they might learn from Jobs' experiences, and how they might be able to incorporate that learning into their own future. In addition, a closer look shows that it speaks to the career concerns of a much wider audience.
At the beginning of the address, Jobs stated that he wanted to tell three stories from his life: "That's it. No big deal. Just three stories." Yet, as management scholars interested in how people experience and manage their careers, the stories each revealed...