Eric Schmidt: I'm Eric Schmidt, Class of 1976.

Eric Schmidt: I was an electrical engineering major because there was no

Eric Schmidt: computer science, now there is, and I am now the CEO of Google.

Eric Schmidt: It seems to me that people go to college, and then they join

Eric Schmidt: their firms, and between the ages of 25 and 35 they learn a lot.

Eric Schmidt: And then, all of a sudden, they want everything not to change.

Eric Schmidt: And inevitably something new comes along: a new idea, a new fashion, a new country,

Eric Schmidt: a new war, whatever, that upsets everything.

Eric Schmidt: So the lesson to be learned after years of watching this is

Eric Schmidt: that the norm must change.

Eric Schmidt: What we want to do is we want to constantly reinvent

Eric Schmidt: ourselves. Now it's easy to say that.

Eric Schmidt: How do you do it? In our case, we encourage our

Eric Schmidt: employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever

Eric Schmidt: they are interested in, not what their boss wants them

Eric Schmidt: to work on. Out of that, most of our great new products have come.

Eric Schmidt: Many different leadership styles work.

Eric Schmidt: There's not one leadership style that is the way in which

Eric Schmidt: corporations, institutions succeed.

Eric Schmidt: You'll have passionate, charismatic and disorganized leaders.

Eric Schmidt: You'll have boring and rational and precise leaders.

Eric Schmidt: What really matters about a leader is their commitment to

Eric Schmidt: getting to the right answer and to doing it in the right way.

Eric Schmidt: And however they get there, if they get to the right

Eric Schmidt: answer, people respect them.

Eric Schmidt: Along the way, you'll have conflict and you

Eric Schmidt: can resolve it in many different ways. If you don't seek out the

Eric Schmidt: conflict, you won't excel.

Eric Schmidt: Because without the conflict, at least the ideas in conflict,

Eric Schmidt: you won't hear the best ideas.

Eric Schmidt: When I thought about where to go to college,

Eric Schmidt: everyone assumed I would go to a technical school,

Eric Schmidt: someplace where people with my interests would go.

Eric Schmidt: But I was attracted to Princeton precisely because

Eric Schmidt: engineering was not its primary focus.

Eric Schmidt: And I believe that the value of a liberal arts education just in

Eric Schmidt: general, just learning about the world

Eric Schmidt: and learning about other people, would serve me in some inchoate

Eric Schmidt: way, some way in which I really didn't know.

Eric Schmidt: And that's proven true --

Eric Schmidt: that the skills and in particular the social

Eric Schmidt: experiences and exposure to the non-technical part of the

Eric Schmidt: world as a young person, made a huge difference for me.

Eric Schmidt: In my case, I met a brilliant professor who got me interested

Eric Schmidt: in computing and got me interested in the foundations of

Eric Schmidt: the kinds of things I did after I left Princeton.

Eric Schmidt: So it was the combination of critical thinking and the fact

Eric Schmidt: that you had such good access to professors who you could really

Eric Schmidt: talk to, that as a very, very young

Eric Schmidt: person had a huge impact on me.

Eric Schmidt: My name is Eric Schmidt, and I'm a Princeton Engineer.

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