For Professor G. Richard Shell, the culmination of 16 months of world travel and introspection brought him to a crossroads: “When someone asks you to be a monk, you have to make a decision.” Fortunately for Penn students, he chose to leave the South Korean Buddhist monastery where he had been living to return to his native United States, where he later joined the Wharton School faculty.
Shell, the Thomas Gerrity professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics and Management, was the featured speaker at the “Business of Life” lecture hosted Monday by the Wharton Council and the Undergraduate Division of Student Life. He regaled an audience of about 90 students with the journey around the world he took to determine his aims in life, with stops in Greece, Cyprus and India. That trip helped transform him from a directionless recent college graduate into one of the foremost experts on the topics of negotiation, persuasion and strategy. After the close of his trip, he earned his law degree from the University of Virginia and forayed into the legal profession before turning to teaching.
Shell focused on guiding students to ask questions of themselves — questions which he felt constitute the “exam” for “business of life,” the ongoing process by which students discover themselves and determine what they want to do in the future. The first of these questions, “Who are you?” might be the most difficult to answer — Shell himself spent “a long, long, long time answering the first question.”
Shell introduced his presentation as “a graduation speech in October, only no one is graduating.” The message he communicated to his audience was simple: take a moment to reflect upon your choices and determine whether you are following your own path, not the path you are expected to follow.
Shell called on students — specifically those in Wharton — to examine their direction in life and to evaluate whether they are passionate about the futures for which they are preparing, instructing students to search for a calling instead of a career.
He managed to breathe fresh insight into the subject: “It’s a challenging lecture to give, but he made it fresh and humorous,” Wharton sophomore and Wharton Council member Tim Flank said. Other attendees concurred with Wharton senior Suruchi Srikanth, who said that the lecture “resonated really well with some concerns that students had.”
A video of the lecture will be available on Wharton’s SPIKE for those who missed the presentation.
