Thursday, June 15, 2006

bad commencement keynote speech


oh man.. i was at a college graduation today, and the keynote speaker was the ceo of some fairly large company (depicted at the left). he had us hooked on his idiocy from the beginning:

he started his speech by saying that he was a really busy man, and he didn't have time to write the speech, so one of his staff wrote it, and so if anything is wrong with the speech, don't blame him, blame his staff.

what a beginning. the speaker to inspire the next generation of business people tells them that they should delegate to their underlings, and if anything goes wrong, blame them.

it gets better: at the particularly corny moments in his speech, the speaker paused to note that what he was about to say wasn't actually written by him, so again, blame the real writer.

at one point he got into a verbal exchange with an audience member whose last name was fani (he asked for the student's last name) and then made a butt joke.

is there anything good to say about this speech? well, we had a good time laughing at the speaker... the picture above seems appropriate since we think he wasn't completely sober. however, i feel really bad for the graduating class. at least their valedictorian gave a solid address.

ps if any of you hate this blog entry, don't blame me, blame the ceo

3 comments:

twm said...

That's aggravating. What a bad message to send out to people that are about to go out and make a difference. What makes me especially annoyed is that this guy completely abdicated (sp) responsibility to someone else! What was the point of him being there? His godly presence? What a useless moron. And furthermore, by abdicating responsibility he was basically saying that he didn't give a rat's ass about being there. Ouch. He didn't even have time to check the speech over so he could say he wrote it. People like that should get their kneecaps shot in.

Anonymous said...

I don't see why you are surprised at this. Usually CEOs and other management people say that their salary is so high because (1) they have so much responsibility and (2) that if they mess up they'll be fired.

Neither is true since they rarely assume the responsibility (but delegate it), and they are rarely fired, and if they are they usually get another job within the week, since the CEO club looks after each other

om said...

i'm surprised because even though i agree with what you're saying about irresponsibility of CEOs, and the slim chance that they will actually take any blame (well, at least as illustrated by some high profile cases), the fact of the matter is that the keynote speaker at a graduation should give an inspiring speech, not a speech that illustrates how incompetent and irresponsible he is.

furthermore, i don't think all CEOs are like that, and in fact i believe many CEOs are worth every penny!

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