B-School Graduating Class Gets Woke!

“I need everyone’s help….close your eyes…think about that one problem that matters the most to you….that needs to be resolved to make this world a better place….now open your eyes.”

Last year at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, Class of 2017 graduation ceremony, this was how Angad Singh Padda asked his fellow graduates to identify and relate to issues that need fixing. (See the video below of the complete, short speech.) We said a similar thing in describing our April Focus, Be Woke. One of the descriptions of “woke” is having a decent, righteous conscience and acting on it.

In his speech, Padda continued the call to action: “Dreams are not what you have when you go to bed – Dreams are those that don’t let you go to bed….Our dream is to create a world where we are all one…to create a world where there is no I, there is no me – there is only an Us, there is only a We. That is who we are.” That’s woke.

To give the graduates ideas for where to start, Padda said to take their dreams and passion and fix six of the world’s biggest problems:  “Whenever there’s a kid in Oakland who can’t afford school, that’s a problem. Whenever climate change wipes out a species, that’s a problem. Whenever a Muslim woman gets bullied because of her hijab, or a Jewish man because of his yarmulke, or a Sikh man because of his turban, that is a problem.”

Let this be the legacy of the Class of 2017: The class that not only did good business, but the class that engaged in the business of doing good.

Woke.