 Professor the Honourable Gareth Evans, Chancellor of the Australian National University. Professor Brian Schmidt, Vice-Chancellor. Distinguished members of the official party, graduates, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for the wonderful honour that you have bestowed on me. I'm very humbled by the action I didn't expect it and I will wear the honour with great pride. Thank you very much Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor and all members of the university. Can I add my congratulations to all the graduates who received their graduating certificates today? It was wonderful to be here and it was wonderful to see what an international university, the Australian National University has become over the years. I think it's a great thing that we have seen so many students, sorry graduates from so many different countries. May I say that you've now got great skills, skills that you will use in your own communities, in business, in government, in academia, in research. I think it's very important though that you face the next challenge and I would submit to you one of the great challenges you face into the future is that much will be expected of you as leaders in the fields that you are so skilled in and it will happen very very quickly indeed as soon as you go into a job I'm sure many of you will be leaders. So let me give you a few pointers as to what I found has worked very well for me through the years and I have five fundamental pointers, five fundamental principles that I frame all my leadership around. Let me say at the outset leadership is the lifeblood of every successful organisation that I haven't seen. I have seen excellent leadership deliver outstanding results far beyond the expectations of myself and others. Conversely in both the military and in civilian life I've seen poor leadership result in very poor outcomes and in the case of the military mission failure. So it's very important that you master leadership as you go forward with the rest of your lives. The first principle is clear direction. If you're a leader you need to give direction to your people, you need to have a vision. It will generally be the vision of the company or the organisation but you fundamentally go where the vision is and it's up to the leader to be able to articulate, communicate and explain that vision to the people that you interact with who will be following you and following your lead. In more operational circumstances such as I found myself in Kiev in the Ukraine a couple of years ago when I was asked to lead Australia's response to the great disaster of MH17 and the loss of almost 40 Australian lives. What I found was that it was vitally important to let everybody know what my intent was on a daily basis. By that way we were able to adjust what we needed to do on the basis of how things had developed over the previous day or the previous few days. So vision and intent are the important things and it's also all about communicating and explaining them to your people. The second principle is culture. I think everybody in the room would know that culture is incredibly important. I've found the sort of culture that works for the organisations that I've been in and that I have led is a people-based culture, putting people first. It's people that deliver the outcomes that you will need as leaders. Therefore you need to create a good relationship with the people and the culture needs to reflect that. I think the culture always needs to be values based and I always put a high price on the values of professionalism, integrity, courage, innovation, teamwork, collaboration and respect. And by respect, I mean respect for everybody who is in the organisation, irrespective of ethnic background or gender. Gender or ethnic background are never discriminators in the organisations that I have led and if there was any sense of that in the organisations that I led, I worked very hard to eliminate them from the organisation. I think the pursuit of excellence is also very important in that sense. So the next principle is leadership itself, strong leadership. I've mentioned putting people first but the best way to lead people is to lead by example. Do as I do, not do as I say. You will have to set the standard and you should do everything that you would expect your people to do. I've always found that safety is something that's vitally important and you as the leader of an organisation always needs to put safety first because at the end of the day the health, the well-being of your people relies on a safe environment so there needs to be a high priority on that. And can I say that I've found that if you work tirelessly for the welfare of the people that you're privileged to lead and you empower them, they will follow you to the ends of the earth and I found that in the military environment and in the civil environment. It's a very powerful thing. I think the other thing about leadership is there's no place for negative leadership, no place for intimidation, coercion or bullying. All leadership needs to be positive and it's the only emotion that should be evident is the emotion of passion, passion for what you want to achieve, passion for how you are going to encourage your people to achieve those outcomes. And I think more and more as the complexity of our environment evolves leadership needs to be a collaborative activity. Collaboration is much more powerful or leadership through collaboration is much more powerful than the old idea of a single leader telling everybody to go this way and that way. At the end of the day the complex problems that you will be facing require an input from all of your expertise and it really is a collaborative form of leadership that I think is required in the modern era. My fourth principle is communication. The best form of communication is a small group or one-on-one, one-on-one or a small group eye-to-eye, face-to-face. People can connect in those circumstances and I would submit connect much more effectively than through computer or social media. It's very, very powerful, it delivers the best results. And I think the other thing you've got to be very good at as a leader is you have to have the ability to listen. Listening is vitally important and when I was leading difficult cultural change I used to go out and walk around my people on a daily basis and I would feel the pulse of what was going on by listening to the people. It was much more about listening than transmitting and I think communication, listening is the most important part of the game. Finally, the final principle is creative and constructive relationships. I have never seen anything positive come out of an adversarial relationship. So I have always worked to have a constructive relationship that over time becomes a trusting relationship. A relationship that is full of integrity and trust will deliver fabulous outcomes, particularly when you get to the stage where you start to partner and work collaboratively. So it all comes from having a constructive relationship in the first place and what you get is trust and integrity and fantastic outcomes over time. So that's really all I want to say. There's some simple little rules, experience if you like, principles that I have given you. I hope they are helpful to you as you go out on the wonderful lives that you have in front of you. It'll be a great journey. It will require leadership at all levels, never ever underestimate that somebody beneath you could also assist you in your leadership journey in achieving the outcomes you need to achieve. And at the end of the day, I think the higher you go, the further you go, the more collaborative your leadership will become and again that will deliver great outcomes for you, be it business, government or indeed academia in a research environment or in a teaching environment. So good luck, congratulations again and it's been an absolute pleasure to be with you today. Thank you.