 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Michael Barr. I'm the Joan and Sanford Wildean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. It's terrific to see you all here. Thank you for coming. My particular thanks to President Schlissel for being here this afternoon. It's a great honor to have you here. I want to start by giving a very warm welcome to a good friend of the University of Michigan and to the Ford School in particular, and that's Hank Meyer. Hank and his family through their family foundation have established a fund in honor of Senator Arthur Vandenberg here at the Ford School. The fund the Meyer family has established will be of tremendous support to our school, enabling us to host distinguished visitors, workshops, and other educational programs. It will support an annual series of major public events named for Arthur Vandenberg, and today's talk is the first in that series. The Vandenberg Lecture series will focus on global issues and will serve as an ongoing tribute to Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who worked across partisan lines to construct some of the most significant and enduring foreign policies of the 20th century, including the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the creation of the United Nations. You may know that Hank just wrote a beautiful book about Senator Arthur Vandenberg, called Man in the Middle, about how Vandenberg changed his mind about America's role in the world and became a staunch advocate for a bipartisan and engaged foreign policy. Hank, please accept our deepest gratitude to you and to your family for your support of the University of Michigan. Let me just say a word about our format. After my introductions, our featured speaker, Secretary Penny Pritzker will be joined in conversation with Ellen Hughes Cromwick. You are all invited to use the question cards you've been handed to write down your own questions for Secretary Pritzker. Shortly before three, we'll move into Q&A. My Ford School colleague, Professor Betsy Stevenson, and two Ford School master students, C.J. Meyer and Emma Waitzman will select and read the questions. Ellen Hughes Cromwick, in addition to being our moderator today, was the catalyst behind Secretary Pritzker's visit to Ann Arbor today. The Secretary spent the morning in a series of meetings and tours with business leaders, startup firms, investors, and university leaders, all focused on propelling the future of work, mobility, sustainability, and growth in the Big Ten region. Ellen convened the day in her current role as Senior Economist and Associate Director of Social Science and Policy at the U.M. Energy Institute. Previously, Ellen served as Chief Economist at the Commerce Department and before that Chief Global Economist at Ford Motor Company and an adjunct professor at the Ross School. Thank you, Ellen, for your tireless work, collaboration, and vision in making today's event happen. And finally, to our featured guest speaker, it's my great honor to introduce the former Secretary of the Commerce, a distinguished entrepreneur, civic leader, philanthropist, Penny Pritzker. Pritzker served as U.S. Commerce Secretary in the Obama Administration. She was a core member of President Obama's economic team and served as the country's chief commercial advocate, leading the administration's trade and investment promotion. She launched a highly successful initiative to attract foreign direct investment to the United States. She negotiated the U.S.-EU privacy shield, chaired the presidential ambassadors for global entrepreneurship, and served as the administration's point person on manufacturing. She developed a strong workforce and skills development agenda and began revamping the important work of the Commerce Department on data. She is a highly successful business leader, having founded quite a number of successful business leaders. Pritzker today is the founder and chairman of the PSB Partners and Pritzker Realty. She is the former chairman of the Board of TransUnion, a passport member of Hyatt Hotels, William Wrigley Company Marmot Group, and LaSalle Bank. And she is a truly global leader. She is the incoming chair of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, and the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, and she is on the advisory council of the Hamilton Project, among many other wonderful things. Please join me in welcoming today Secretary Penny Pritzker. Let me turn it over to Ellen. Thank you, Dean Michael Barr. Thank you very much for your generosity and hosting this wonderful gathering today. And we are just so delighted by the turnout. Thank you all for coming. I think you'll very much enjoy our honored speaker today, Penny Pritzker. Penny, you have accomplished so much in your career. And I guess maybe we could just start, if you wouldn't mind, talking a little bit about your journey through the whole period up to 2013 before you launched as a cabinet secretary in the Obama Administration. Well, I'm not going to start at childhood, or as my parents used to say when they'd asked me about my day when I was growing up, you know, we could skip that you brushed your teeth part. Anyway, so I will start with in 2006, then Senator Barack Obama approached me about becoming chair of his, finance chair of his effort to run for president, which I thought was something that was just absolutely no way I could do. I had teenage children at a full suite of companies that I was running. My family was in the middle of a major restructuring, and I was trying to be a good wife and mother on top of all the civic and philanthropic things I was involved in. But fortunately, my husband, basically when I told him, you won't believe the most, you know, I got asked whether I was open to doing this. And I said, I just, there's no way. And he said, you know, we've got to talk about that. Come home. And I said, I'm on my way home. And I walked in the kitchen of our home and my husband started knocking on the door of our kitchen to our kitchen. And I said, what are you doing? He's always one for the dramatic flair. And he said, this is destiny knocking on the door of our country, and you've got to find a way to help. And so that night at dinner, I explained, I said to ask the kids, because we're a small family. I said, you know, our friend Barack Obama, and I had gotten to know Barack Obama probably, I don't know, 10, 12, 14 years earlier. Because Michelle Obama's brother was the basketball coach of my kids when they were five and seven. It's amazing how you meet people. Anyway, I said to the kids, you know, Barack would like me to be his national finance chair. I've never done anything like that. I'm not a particularly big political fundraiser. But here's what I do know. If we do this, if I do this, it means how many nights a week I'm away from home now, which was probably at least one night a week. I'll be away from home at least another 50 to 60 nights a year during this two year period. And the kids said, Mom, this is a great idea. You should definitely do it. So I'm not sure what the message was there. But the other thing I said to them is it'll really be a family affair because this will suck all. I could not quit my job and this will suck all the oxygen out of the room. And so we're going to have to all be in on it. And the kids basically said, Mom, you got to do this. And so I was, you know, for two years I was a part of a groundbreaking campaign and literally started when there were 11 of us. And three phones and two desks and holes in the wall to build, you know, an amazing national effort and introduce the country to Barack Obama. And ultimately for him to win. I then served on his economic recovery advisory board. And you recall, and it's really hard for some people to remember. And for others of us, we will never forget as long as we live. We were losing 600,000 jobs a month in this country, maybe more. Our banking system was on the verge of collapse. The auto industry was bankrupt and our country was really near collapse. And so be having the privilege as a not someone in the administration but as an outsider to advise the president on that. Those efforts to deal with those challenges was really extraordinary. And then I was on what was called the jobs council, which was really, we got the economy stabilized. We meaning a lot of people worked on this. Betsy I think was involved in others. But then it was, we had, you know, huge unemployment and needed to figure out how we're going to get companies to start hiring again. Anyway, I did that. So I was outside of the administration working on behalf of the administration. And then in 2013 in January, shortly after the inauguration, the president asked me if I would come see him on a Friday afternoon, which I did. And he asked me then if I would be interested in becoming commerce secretary. And, you know, we talked about what did that mean as part of the journey. And he said, you know, said, first you're going to have to go through confirmation. First you have to get through all of our ethical hurdles. And, you know, you have to comply with everything the Office of Government Ethics requires of you. That was novel, or it feels novel now. Anyway, but then it was, and I'll get back to that. It was actually important, but then he said, look, here's, there's really three things I want you to do in this job. He said, first of all, I want you to build a bridge with the business community. His relationship with the business community at that time was not very good. In fact, it was rather strained, and he said, I want you to build a bridge to the business community. I want you to make sure that voice of the business community is heard in our policymaking. Second is I want you to be part of my economic cabinet. And third is I want you to be the chief commercial advocate on behalf of American business, both domestically and around the world. He did not mention the 47,000 person organization I was also in charge of leading. But he told me the bar was low there, so I should, he felt I could do that part. So, you know, then you go through a period and about six months later, I was both, in May I was nominated and then in June confirmed. And I'm not a politician, I've never served in government, and I had the honor of a lifetime to serve our country and to represent the United States of America, both in working across our country but also around the world. And it was an amazing experience. You know, I'd like to follow up a little bit on that in an issue that has really emerged in the last several months. And that is the tension now around protectionism that we see evolving here. And I know how hard you worked on many of these efforts to undertake commercial diplomacy and trans-specific partnership agreement that you worked diligently to bring into the fold so many countries on a very historic agreement. And this challenge that we have in our country around the tension between globalism and how important it is to have trade open and free trade and what a benefit that is to our society. And yet at the same time, some of the adverse consequences, if not treated properly with policy, job losses in certain vulnerable industries. Given the tariffs that we've seen now implemented on steel and aluminum, remember in January we had solar panel tariffs put on. Can you comment a little bit about that and, you know, what you see as the potential way forward? Can you solve all those problems? Let me step back for a minute and then try and put that in context. So one of the things, you know, you get sworn in and how do you actually lead? I had never been in government. I didn't know how to do this. How do you do it? But what I did have is I had a business background. Those of you who are going to public policy school, you have a real advantage. You've got, you're learning from people who've been there before. You're studying history. That had not been my background. I was a business person by background. So when I came into the job, I did what I knew how to do, which is I said to my team, I said we're going to take the first 100 days and we're going to focus on three things. We had to get people in place. We had a ton of vacancies, so we had to do that. Second is we're going to go on a listening tour. We're going to go talk to our constituents. So we divided the country in eight sections arbitrarily and we went out to each part of the country and we went on a listening tour. And then the third thing we're going to do is we're going to develop a strategy. And what was interesting, it didn't matter where in the country we went, we kind of heard the same thing over and over again. Help us get market access around the world. We want trade agreements. We can't find the skilled workforce we need. Help us with that. Help us in terms of continuing the investment by our country in advanced manufacturing. And one of the highest priorities of the administration was we need greater job creation and I kept saying governments don't create jobs. We create the conditions for the private sector to create jobs. So we took on foreign direct investment. You remember we used to talk about our strategy, so we put a strategy together. And we, which entailed trade, said the Department of Commerce, we're going to focus during the balance of president's term on trade and investment, trade agreements, foreign direct investment, innovation, advanced manufacturing policy, digital policy. What do you do about privacy, broadband access, cybersecurity, free and open internet? What's the policy around that? Data. How do we make more of our data available? You were very instrumental in that, Ellen. Environmental intelligence. We run the Weather Service, so making sure that we're doing the best we can at environmental intelligence. And the fifth part of our strategy was operate the place with excellence. The reason I give you this as background is we then took our strategy, we went over to the White House. Betsy I think was there and others. And we said here's, in a PowerPoint, here's what we think the Department of Commerce can do to further your agenda. First you meet with all the people and then we met with the president and he blessed the strategy. My point in telling this story is there was no out of the blue what were we doing. It was, we spent a lot of time both developing, listening to our customer, which is basically the business community, listening to the administration's priorities, putting a plan together and then saying we're going to go execute that over the three and a half years that we were so fortunate as a team to be in government. And with that, so the idea that you're going to surprise people, it's a problem in government because government doesn't know, it's a battleship. I mean this thing is, it's massive and to move organization like that to have it be effective, you have to be really clear and you have to have a steady hand over time. And so you ask me about tariffs and steel and all of this. Our answer to the steel problem was first we did the highest number of anti-dumping and countervailing duty findings ever in the history of the Department of Commerce, like 171 on steel and aluminum. So we put the tariffs in place. Second is we globally went to the OECD and other global organizations said the world needs to come together and we need to fight who's producing, overproducing steel, which is China. They produce excess capacity four times what we produce in steel in the United States. That's their excess capacity. So they're screwing up the steel market. That's not wrong, yes they are. But the way you address it is you have to get the whole world to come together to push back because otherwise you'll see other countries will behave differently and so you have to bring the world together to fight against this. Anyway, I mean that's how I think we would have approached this challenge. The challenge is real, but how do you address the challenge? So that's one specifically what do you do about steel? But there's another challenge that's not being addressed and I think you're alluding to this. We have real angst in America about the future of our families and their ability and for young people and people in middle age, what does work look like? What does a career path look like in a time when the world is changing so much, when there's automation, artificial intelligence, automated vehicles, autonomous vehicles. We drove in one today. I mean those things are real and they're going to have real impacts. And what we need to do is come together as a country and say we're not doing enough to create opportunity and access around the world for our companies that create jobs here but we're also not doing enough for the people who are feeling real angst and feeling left behind and that's the barbell approach I think that would be actually and we've done that in the past. The United States of America was the first country in the world that said we're going to mandate every person in America is going to go through a high school, get a high school education. We can redefine how we train people and what we do. We have that kind of bold capacity to say okay this isn't working. We got to address these problems. And this whole city rural thing, we need to make sure rural America has broadband. We need to make sure that it's easy if you don't want to stay where you are, you can move to it. We have to make it easier to do mobility. We have to remove barriers. There's a lot we can do. You're giving me hope. I'm an optimist. I believe in the future of the United States of America and I believe particularly in the young people here that you guys, there's paths forward. And Penny, you've just hit on such an important element to the future that you demonstrated during your leadership at commerce and that was the whole area around reaching across the aisle and deploying building relationships and doing it in a bipartisan way and thinking globally as well. But then using data, having data and analysis as a foundation for that effort. Could you talk a little bit about that because it just seems like that was so important and is and will be in the future? So when I was going through, well, President Obama and I, this great photo, when he nominated me, it was my birthday. And so we're standing outside in the Rose Garden. My family's in front of me is very exciting. And he says, and Penny, for your birthday you get to go through confirmation. And so there's this picture of me with my head thrown back laughing. But going through confirmation is a phenomenal experience because you get to meet. I met 55 senators. Mostly I met Republican senators. I knew a lot of the Democrats from my background and from the campaign and from other things. So I really spent a lot of time getting to know the Republican senators. Why? First of all, what all of you know from your own life is relationships matter. It really matters that you develop a rapport with people if you want to get something done. Even if you disagree with them, you know, it's very important. And I learned that not only from my father, but also from one of your great alums from Michigan, Ira Harris. He really always reinforced that to me. But while I was going through that process, Ted Cruz was a new senator. So his office was in the basement, which he was quite perturbed about and felt it was, you know, insulting that he would have to meet me in his office which was in the basement of the building because his real office wasn't finished yet. But he said to me, and I'll never forget because it kind of got really close to me and he said, Penny, I want you to know something. He said commerce is a bipartisan issue. And I thought to myself, I had no idea what he was going to say because politically we probably don't agree on a whole lot of things. But I was like, okay, I can work with this person. We can find common ground. We can figure this out. And we can try. My appropriator, my head appropriator is a guy named Chairman Culberson. He's a tea party guy. So if you were to say President Obama is here, Chairman Culberson would kind of be here. And the first time I met him, it didn't go so great. But I worked it. I worked hard at developing a relationship with him and really understanding him and what was important to him. And he came to support the things that I tried to use data. I tried to use evidence as to why investing, let's say, in the census early was important. Or why it mattered that we, the Weather Service, get new satellites so that we could report the weather accurately. Which meant spending extra money. And what you realize is if you bring an attitude of I'm not here to embarrass you. I'm not here to demean you. I'm not here to fight you. Chairman Culberson and I absolutely disagreed on one thing. And it was really interesting. He called me and he said, if I can get a law passed before you take this action, will you follow the law? I thought that was the bizarre thing I'd ever been asked. I said, of course, Mr. Chairman. That's my role. It's my duty. It's required of me that I follow the law. I said, okay. I said, but if you don't get the law passed, you know we're going to take this action because we've talked about it. It was something to protect the, he and I agreed that we needed to protect the Internet. We disagreed on how to do it. And so it was an action I was going to take. And I said, but you know, come this date, I'm going to take this action. If you can't, don't get it done. You know that. And he said, I understand. We absolutely disagreed. We had an absolutely civil engagement about the entire thing. I ended up doing one thing and he didn't like it. But we never, he didn't hold it against me. We moved on. We had work to do together. So I think part of it is we have to do one, you have to invest time in those relationships. And right now people don't spend time in Washington. People, it's kind of a Monday afternoon to Thursday town, except if there's a crisis, like we don't have a budget or we're going to shut the government down. But that's it. Otherwise they come, they work 24 seven for three and a half days and then they leave and go home. So it's not a lot of investing in relationship and not a lot of, and then there's a lot of, and I didn't totally understand this when I went into government. A lot of our representatives and senators, you know, the leaderships, you have to, if you don't follow the lead of the leadership and you decide to go rogue and be independent, you could pay a big price, your committee assignments, your priorities for certain benefit. I mean, you could be punished and it's kind of the cold reality, particularly in the house. And so that's why, you know, why do you not see more fracturing of opinions? That's part of it. Civil discourse is another issue. And I think we all have a responsibility back at home, kind of away from that environment to hold our representatives accountable, that that's not okay with us by how we vote and by the fact that we should meet with them and talk to them about the issues that we think are important. Because certainly they're being met with and talked to by the interest groups, but you're ultimately the voter. You're more important. So I think it's hard work, but I think it's doable to build across, not on everything, but on a lot of things. I think that's good advice for all of us and for our students here in the audience. I think on this DACA issue, I really think there's a bridge to be built there. You could tell there's a deal. It's just I haven't figured out the exact right deal. But frankly, if there was a deal, if there was enough votes in the House and the Senate, I believe whatever was proposed, the President would sign. It's a question of relationships. It's a question of leadership too and priority. Speaking of leadership, you at the Department of Commerce placed a significant amount of effort and emphasis on commercial diplomacy and diplomacy worldwide as an instrument of our foreign policy, of our national security. And I don't know how many countries you visited in the three and a half years at Commerce. It had to be, Kyla probably knows, dozens and dozens. 38. Okay, 38 countries. And some of many times. Yeah, multiple Red Bulls. There. Can you talk a little bit about that, the importance of that, why you emphasize that as part of your strategic plan that you were implementing? So President Obama made, he understood something and therefore as working for him, he understood that our economic and commercial power could be as potent as our diplomatic and our military power. And so his team and what's interesting, his national security team, we partnered with them and we were deployed around the world to countries to build more bridges and whether it was with China trying to open more markets and more opportunity for our companies or even I got dispatched once to Seattle to give a speech in front of President Xi about intellectual property theft and you had to stop with the intellectual property theft. Basically that was the message. So nice Microsoft big fancy dinner, hundreds of people and I'm like the skunk at the party. But how do you deliver that message and not burn all your bridges? At the end of that speech, the head economic advisor to President Xi came up to me and said we heard you. We understand. Mexico. Vice President Biden basically asked me to lead what was called the high level economic dialogue on his behalf. He was the titular head but I was the executioner team. It was about improving border infrastructure, increasing the amount of travel between our countries, making sure that American companies had access. They were opening up their energy sector to foreign investment. Making sure our companies had access, improving entrepreneurship in both our countries. With India, we proposed to our own senior leadership and then to the Indians with approval of the President that we elevate our commercial relationship with India to be equivalent to our strategic relationship. It was very interesting that there was one person in the Indian government, not Prime Minister Modi, who fought this and then a year later, that person, we were all together at our strategic and commercial dialogue and the person stood up and said how proud they were of the fact that we had elevated this relationship and I thought that just knits us more closely together with a very important ally, Africa. We had many initiatives across the Obama administration to increase, to engage more with Africa. But the thesis that we had was let's increase trade over aid because we weren't getting more money from Congress. So let's do more trade and knit us together. So we had two big African business forums. We did a number of bunched travel. Entrepreneurship. We created the President's Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship. The President signs one of those pieces of paper and says, okay, voila. We had 20 American entrepreneurs who, you know, the founder of Kind Bar, Tori Birch, Julie Hannah, who founded Kiva, and Rich Barton from Zillow. And they agreed to be ambassadors around the world, meeting in other countries. And they would go with the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense or with me or with the President and talk about entrepreneurship and the importance of entrepreneurship. You know, we created something called the Commercial Diplomacy Institute at the Department of Commerce to train our people to be better and able to engage across the world. You can't do much unilaterally. And commerce is a great way to create multilateral relationships. And that's what TPP is about. It's about creating rules. Rules that look a lot more like the way we would like rules to look than, let's say, some other countries. Rules of trade and engagement that bring your countries together. Wasn't it Tom Friedman that says you don't usually have a war between two countries that both have McDonald's? I mean, it's... We know that. All of you know that from your global travel. So why did we do it? I mean, as much fun as it is to travel that much, it can be exhausting. Why? Because it's really a critical way to help knit the world together. And better we're talking and trading than we are fighting. I want to come back home for a minute here and talk a little bit about some of the work that you have been doing, co-chairing the committee and task force at the Council on Foreign Relations about the future of work. And I know at commerce you, with the team, had developed a lot of different initiatives around advanced manufacturing institutes to upskill and trade workers and the development of apprenticeship programs. And now with this study that I believe is coming out next month, you may not be able to tell us everything in there, but I know you have been very much looking at this issue of how do we transition? How do we make sure we've got the workforce for the future? As you saw today, we have in the Energy Institute two battery labs. We have M-City. We have a lot of faculty doing research on clean technology and the future of mobility. And now with this study, could you talk a little bit about what are those solutions? How can we move to that better place? So we believe and I believe that one of the central issues and frankly it's a generational issue for our country is how do we create a better pathway for all Americans to adapt to thrive in a changing, a rapidly changing environment, which is what we have. With the advent, globalization is just more so. Artificial intelligence is just at the beginning stages. Autonomous vehicles are here and they're going to be present in our lives. Automation is very much affected opportunity in manufacturing for people. So what do we do? And that was the assignment that Richard Haas from the Council on Foreign Relations gave John Engler and me. It was come back with a report. Governor Engler and I are kind of action people as opposed to report people. And so what we created is a menu and the audience for that menu is really the following. There's people in the federal government, people at the state and local government, business leaders, the academic institutions, everybody from K-12, community college, universities, et cetera. And there's really six or seven major themes of recommendations. I'm not going to give you the laundry list. Please read the report. It comes out April 9th or 10th. First is you've got to have a strong economy. So we've got to have more opportunity. Full employment is good. A strong economy is critical. So what do you do? You need foreign direct investment. You need policies that encourage that. You need more entrepreneurship. You need trade agreements that provide access for American goods. You need infrastructure spend. You've heard all of that. Second is we have to maintain our technological leadership. We cannot take our foot off the gas pedal. You've got to continue investing in R&D. We've got to continue to... We have a comprehensive immigration policy because, frankly, 40% of the Fortune 500, 40% of those companies were either started, but were started or being run by somebody who is either a first-generation immigrant or the child of an immigrant. Immigrants are phenomenal entrepreneurs. It's not that I'm not an immigrant in my generation. I'm an entrepreneur. We have plenty of entrepreneurs who are not immigrants, but we certainly don't want to turn off that. Third is we have to promote growth and income opportunity everywhere. What do I mean by that? We have to have policies, both at the state and the federal level, that make pay work, tax credits and things for those who are on the low end of our earning scales. We have opportunity zones. You should read about, you know, this new tax bill has opportunity zones. You should read about these opportunity zones. It is a policy for distressed communities that we should be taking advantage of. And there's a great incentive. It may be the biggest incentive in the tax bill. We need to strengthen the link between education and work. That can make some people in universities squirm because we want freedom of expression. We want freedom of exploration. But we also need to recognize that we need things like much more career counseling in, frankly, middle school and grade school. There is no career counseling. There's college counseling. There's no career counseling. And families and individuals are yearning for this. We use technology to make it easier to understand, hey, I want to be a cybersecurity expert. What do I need to know to do that? We need a lot. And then there are pilots, and we talk about the pilots going on in different parts of the country. What we want is governors to say, hey, that's happening in Colorado. This is happening in Delaware. This is happening in Michigan. Take those ideas. We're going to have more than 30 new governors next year. Opportunity to take up these ideas. We have to overhaul transition assistance. And that's our fancy government words. We have a wholly inadequate system for dealing with those people who are left behind when their job goes away. And we need to have a system that promotes lifelong learning and more flexibility to be able to invest in that. We have to remove barriers to opportunity. In 1950, 5% of jobs required a license in a state. Today, 30% do. So in two income earning families, military families, when you move, you know, because you're a trailing spouse, it doesn't matter gender, they may not be able to get a license. They may not be able to get, you know, we've got to make that easier. And then our benefit system, the seventh big category is about benefits. Our benefit system was created when you went into a job and you kind of stayed in that job for a lifetime or maybe had two jobs. That's not going to be, certainly my children who are in their 20s, that's not their reality. They're going to be, on average, have 10 to 15 jobs. We need to recognize 55 million Americans work either on contracts or in the gig economy. We need a benefit system where you can earn partial benefits, et cetera, et cetera, and stack benefits. So we need, there's things we can do. You know, our students here are so talented and have picked up on one of the points you just made, which is this kind of, how do we apply what we're learning? And we've got teams working on microgrid projects for the city of Ann Arbor. We've got these map, so-called map projects in the Ross School. And, you know, kind of dovetailing on that could, you know, kind of follow up a little bit and talk about how, you know, what advice you would give students that, you know, keep doing that, but, you know, how do you stay active? How do we make sure that we're progressing like, get out the vote, for example? Could you give our students a little bit of advice? Yeah, first of all, I'm optimistic because of the students. I'm optimistic because I have a lot of faith in the energy that comes with our younger population. And I would say a couple of pieces of advice and it's just sort of like worth what you paid for it, so. But it's, one is if you get the opportunity or find the opportunity to serve, do it. Or make it for yourself. Volunteer, either volunteer. I served on the school board which was a volunteer job, not an elected job. And the hardest job I've ever had. By far. By far. But, you know, you want to get to know your city, you know, get involved. And if somebody, if you have a chance or a year or two to go and work in Washington, do it. Because we need the talent, we need the perspective. And particularly folks who come from, you know, these great research universities you have a lot to offer. So take that opportunity. It will open your eyes to so much. You know, I was raised by parents to who much is given, much is expected. And all of us, you know, regardless we may have our day-to-day troubles or whatever. But we've been all given a lot. If we're in this room we're in a pretty good situation. And so I think we have to find ways to be involved. That could be, you know, get involved in somebody's campaign. Get involved in vote. Please vote. It really matters. Votes, you know, elections have consequences. And if you believe certain things you need to make sure your voice is heard. And I don't care actually where you fall in the spectrum. I just think it's important. Democracies depend on people being engaged. So I, and I would say to be honest, some of the most fulfilling things I've ever done in my life have been the things I volunteered for or being involved in government. Great. Well, we have an opportunity to take questions from the audience. And I think we have a couple of students with cards who are going to be asking. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's such a privilege to be part of this event. I'm Emma Weitzman. I'm a student at the public policy school in the law school. The first question is if you could redo your term again, what would you do differently? Well, first of all, I'm a thank you for being here. If I could redo my term again, what would I do differently? You know, but the biggest disappointment that I have of the work, I'm really proud of what we accomplished. Whether it was SelectUSA around foreign direct investment or commercial diplomacy around the world or frankly putting back together the safe harbor between the United States and Europe in terms of digital trade, which affects about $290 billion worth of trade a year or advanced manufacturing. I'm really proud. The thing I'm most disappointed about is the fact that we're connected and we, you know, I could show you a path to where this could have happened, but obviously not in the current situation and for me, that's the biggest disappointment because I think that I had a leader of one of the TPP countries from Asia said to me about three weeks ago, he said, you know, Penny is off the playing field in Asia and we're getting beaten up and it's a problem and I don't know how you get back on the playing field. So I, that's my biggest disappointment. Hi, my name is CJ Meyer. I'm a junior in the undergraduate program here in the Ford School. I again wanted to say thank you for coming and talk to us. Our next question from the audience is what can students and young people do to best prepare themselves for the future of the work and the changing landscape? Well, first of all, CJ, thank you for being here. I think that that realization is really important and being a lifelong learner is ultimately going to be the key and, you know, you guys are in a position, CJ, you are, Emma is, you know, you are developing a whole way of knowledge base but also skills that you will take with you throughout your life and you have to not be afraid to at times step back to go forward to learn new skills. Now, I mean if you're in the School of Public Policy maybe you're not going to become a doctor or you're not going to become a biotechnician, if you will but I think being, you know, willing to work in teams and understanding the importance of teams being constantly pushing yourself to learn. I mean, part of the reason we're here and I'm here with some members of my team is we're learning we're trying to understand what is the state of, you know, the most forward-leaning research in some of the areas that we're active in so that we can, you know, adapt. We're going to be an expert, no but, you know, you have to be constantly learning and but I think you guys are going to be equipped to do that. Thank you. The next question is, how does a cabinet secretary balance commerce priorities with a president's agenda? So, I'll tell you a story. When President Obama, I was in that meeting first meeting where he was asking me whether I would become willing to become commerce secretary. Basically, at one point he said to me, you know, Penny, you've been running your own business now for several decades. You do understand that it's okay to disagree behind closed doors, but if I make a decision, you're going to be able to you get that that's my decision and that's the way it's going to be and you're expected to go out and carry the water for my decision. And he said, can you get comfortable with that? And I thought to myself you've never worked in a family business so I said, Mr. President, I can get comfortable with that. The point was when we developed the strategy which we called our open for business strategy, it began with what were the president's priorities and then what we were trying to do was to say, how could we broaden or deepen his priorities and at the same time do what is the job of the secretary of commerce, which is to represent our open business, our number one stakeholder. And I have to confess another story, I went in first day I'm going to begin to be trained for the nominating process or acclimated and whatever and I asked people, I said who do you think is our number, who do you think are our stakeholders? What's the constituency that we need to under I need to make sure I build bridges with and they're like the White House and the Hill and the think tank community and the this and the that and I said what about the business community? Oh yeah, the business community, I said no, no, no. The number one stakeholder is the business community because our job in government is represent them and help them and for me that was one of the biggest parts of my job to actually help the department understand we were really a service organization in service of the business community. Our next question from the audience is America's steel industry is hurting if you disagree with the steel tariffs, what would you do to help American steel? And American steel is hurting and American steel workers and American aluminum workers are hurting and as I said earlier the Chinese are dumping more steel in the world than four times as much steel that they're dumping and not using around the world than we produce in our country to give you the magnitude of the problem but as I said earlier I really believe the way to address this is you've got to bring particularly the developed countries together and the developing countries together to say this is not okay you can't in essence and Premier of China who is the number two Lee said to me we're going to use our policies to take our excess capacity around the world they don't use the word dumping but and so the way to address it is first of all is to get the global a global the countries of the world to come together and say this is not okay and put pressure on China and I think that that was working but now we're going to have a new dynamic thank you this is the final question we have time for and it comes from the audience is there any value to having a business person in the executive office and can the government be effectively run as a business I think whether your background is a business or otherwise I think there is absolutely room in our country to have a leader from many different types of backgrounds I think that there is a difference between running a government and running business and people thought it was amazing as a business person that I figured out how to be able to lead in government because it's different our democracy requires building consensus nothing happens by one person alone you have to build consensus the truth is as a CEO you have to build consensus also you have more levers and you have more ability to just say you know what no we're going to actually go do this in government you don't have that luxury so you have to be able to develop the skills to bring people along and sometimes you can bring them along by incentives I need you to do this if you do this for me I'll do that for you sometimes you do it by you know broadening sometimes you do it by coercion whatever but you need to bring people along in a democracy in a different way that you bring people along in running a business and that's and and the consequences is a leader or different I mean you know in a business you can be removed by your board you know vote of the board you're gone much more complicated to get removed in government because you know you need half of the house and two thirds of the senate or like three quarters of the cabinet or something very complicated but you know so very different governance structures and mechanisms now are there things we learn in business that are absolutely applicable to government yes how do you lay out a plan how do you motivate you know do you have bonus you know the same kind of bonus structure no but I didn't find that was at all an impediment to motivating and motivating this 47,000 people at the department of commerce I found that what they really wanted was leadership they wanted to know where are we going what does success look like and how do you know and what do I need to do to achieve that success that's kind of human nature yes so you can have some bad actors every organization could have a bad actor that's not different or the same so I think there are talents that one has in business they're absolutely applicable but the government is a very large complex organization with many more facets of people in different roles that you need to bring along and you have to have either the temperament the tenacity the capability to actually bring folks along that's how our democracy is structured and so often that could be different but I don't think you're either qualified or not qualified because you are a business CEO to lead the country I don't think that's the relevant thing I think it's really the skill sets wonderful great questions and I wish we had more time well thank you all very much thank you thank you so much Secretary Pritzker and Allen