Interview: John Hennessy
President of Stanford University

We understand you grew up on the East Coast. How did you end up at Stanford?

John Hennessy: When I started working on my Ph.D., two wonderful things happened. First of all, I found an interesting Ph.D. topic very early on in my graduate career, and it was just because something very unusual sprung up. Microprocessors were just coming out. It was the very beginning of the microprocessor age, and a research scientist from Brookhaven National Lab came over to the university, over to Stony Brook, and explained the interest he had in using microprocessors to solve a complex real-time control problem. And I began brainstorming with my Ph.D. advisor, and we thought about how to build a software system that would enable you to write this kind of software more easily, so I started on that research project. Happily and fortuitously, just as I was finishing up my Ph.D., this area exploded. Two of the major giants in the field started publishing papers in this field, and here I was, completing a Ph.D. in this field that all of a sudden had become tremendously important. So I hopped on the interview trail, convinced I wanted to be an academic. I ended up interviewing at 16 different universities. My wife was panicked that I was going to take her to some place where there are more cows than people, but my very last interview was at Stanford, and I knew that if they offered me a faculty position that I would go there, and that happened, and it was fortunate for both of us.

You also found yourself at ground zero of a revolution in technology, didn't you?

John Hennessy: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely at ground zero.

I think part of -- certainly my success and lots of other people -- is realizing that the time is now, that you're at a point where an opportunity lies to really change the direction that a field is going and take advantage of that and be bold. Take some risk. Be a pioneer as the field is opened up and is created. And I think that's what we were willing to do, and it made a big difference.

The reduced instruction set computing (RISC) technology that you developed in the 1980s has revolutionized the computer industry. What were you thinking at that point? When you started working on this, did you feel you were taking a risk?

John Hennessy: Oh, we certainly thought so.

Integrated circuit technology was reaching the level where you could think about building a real computer, a 32-byte computer, on a single piece of silicon, a single chip. There were people who believed that you would just take what had been done earlier on many separate chips and transfer that over without rethinking the space, the design space, how you might make use of the fact that everything is on one chip. We stood back and asked the question, "Does this change the ground rules? Does this change the guidelines?" And for the first six months, I ran with a group of graduate students and a couple of other faculty members -- purely a brainstorming session -- to ask about how the ground rules might be changed. What did we know that could change things? I don't think we realized how big a change it would make in the field at the beginning. I think we just had some faith that this paradigm shift would create the opportunity for a big change, and we jumped on that faith and took the chance that it would happen. We really didn't know, probably for six or seven years, how big the change was really going to be.

When you believe in something, how do you cope with the nonbelievers? How do you cope with the skeptics, the naysayers?

John Hennessy: That's a great question. That is a wonderful question.

We had the nonbelievers. In fact, after we had finished our research project in 1984 -- 1983 and 1984 -- we first tried to convince the established computer companies to pick up on this technology, without success. What was most amazing to me is that we saw a glass -- we would argue it was three-quarters or seven-eighths full. They saw a glass that was half empty, and it wasn't clear how to fill it the rest of the way in terms of where the technology could go. And I think because we had worked on it, we had the faith that the remaining problems that would need to be solved to commercialize this technology could be overcome, but others didn't have that belief. Happily, I think one of the most important things was there was a collaborating team at Berkeley that was doing similar work along the same time, and we reinforced one another. Because we were both discovering similar things and we both believed it very strongly, you weren't out there alone -- a lone voice in the wilderness but there was somebody else who believed it as well. I think that convinced us to take a chance and really try to move this technology into the commercial space on our own. But when we went to talk to investors, they were very uncertain about this possibility and whether or not it would really work. We really staked our reputations and everything we believed on it, and we found one group of investors who were willing to take the chance.

That was a risk for you, wasn't it? Staking your reputation on this idea?

John Hennessy: Oh, absolutely.

It was a risk, and I think leaving the university for the 18 months or so that I left was a big risk. We could have published our papers. They would have been completely accepted and this technology may have just sat on the shelf for years. But I think because we were willing to take that risk, not only did we have a much larger impact much sooner than we would have otherwise had, but I think actually the understanding of the technology and our understanding of what the problems were -- we gained a tremendous amount in that period of commercializing the technology, of filling the glass the rest of the way, and that was a wonderful learning experience for me as well.

Along the way, did you have any doubts or a fear of failure? Were these things you had to deal with?

John Hennessy: Certainly fear of failure at some points, which is why I would try and do this while you're young. When failures aren't -- when you know that it's a time you can afford to take risks in your career. Much harder to do it when you're older. Much harder to do it when you're older. You're already established in a field. You're well thought of. Branching out to a new field and doing something that's highly risky is harder when you reach a certain point in your career. Certainly some self-doubts. A few times my wife probably thought I was crazy. And lots of hard work, and you're wondering, "Are we going to be able to carry this through?" And of course, when you decide to commercialize it, lots of other issues besides the importance of the technology come into the picture. Can you build the team? Can you manage it? Can you finance it? Can you sell the technology to people? And those turned out to be some of the major challenges. In fact, the technology challenges were probably the easy ones in that part of the process.

Did you ever imagine that you would become an entrepreneur?

John Hennessy: I didn't. And here is where the role of mentors comes in. After we had more or less completed the project and we were not getting a lot of interest from the commercial computer companies, one of the founders of Digital Equipment Corporation, Gordon Bell, came along and prodded us and said, "You need to get this technology out of here. Maybe I'd be willing to help you finance it, or help you find financing for it." He convinced us that was the only way it was really going to get out and impact the world the way it should.

So you founded the company MIPS to market that technology, and it's become a very successful business. As an academic, what did you learn from that experience in the business world?

John Hennessy: Oh, I think it taught me a tremendous amount. Particularly, it has made me a much better classroom teacher. It taught me a lot of people skills. It taught me to be decisive. In academia, we sometimes like to delay decisions until we know all the facts and the decision is clear, black or white. Well in industry you simply cannot afford to do that, because you never get to that point, and the pace of business moves much quicker. So it has enabled me to deal with -- particularly -- more complex organizations, where you have to make decisions, where you don't have all the data, and where there's a trade-off to be made. But it also made me a much better classroom teacher. Sometimes in academia it's easy to become isolated from the real world, and it gave me a great appreciation for how much effort and energy it took to take a research concept and turn it into a product, which was just phenomenal. We spent lots more money in that part of the process than we had to spend in doing the basic research. Lots more manpower went into the latter half, and that gave me a tremendous appreciation for what industrial colleagues have to go through. I think that has helped us build a stronger relationship between academia and industry going forward.

Did it teach you something about leadership?

John Hennessy: Surely.

Leadership is really about convincing people to move in a direction that they really want to move, but they sometimes can't see quite how to get there. And I think you certainly see that in a company, especially a small young company, where you need every single person's help -- focus -- to really get over the problem. You need people. In a small company you don't have enough employees to put one employee on each problem. You need people who will be willing to move around and challenge themselves. In the very end, when we were getting ready to ship our very first product, I realized that we didn't have enough people working on the software to generate testing for the microprocessor, to ensure it would work. So I jumped in and wrote a key piece of software, and I think that really helped not only teach me some things about testing software but really inspire the rest of the people.

I think good leaders lead by doing. They lead by being committed to the project, and by getting involved in it, and really be willing to do it. I tried to take that into my leadership roles in the university. For example, despite the fact that I'm the university president, I advise five freshmen in the university, and I'm teaching this summer in sophomore college, which is our introductory experience for sophomores returning early in September for a two-week intensive course. I think that really reminds you that you lead by doing. People skills are obviously the critical thing in leadership, and being able to deal with people in a way that respects the contribution that every single member of the team makes. A company does not work, a university doesn't work, unless everybody contributes their piece -- the students, the faculty, the staff -- and the same thing in a company. Everybody from the person manning the receptionist desk, to the person cleaning the floors, to the person doing the design, to the CEO, each person has a role. That role -- each one of those roles -- is critical to making that company successful. When we started MIPS, every single employee had stock options in the company, because we believed that every single person should be motivated to see the company be successful.

And look what you wrought!

John Hennessy: It was fun, too.

What was it like growing up on Long Island when you were a kid? What was your boyhood like?

John Hennessy: My father was an engineer. He worked during a time right after the Sputnik went up. There was obviously a tremendous demand for engineering talent. I still remember that, as a professional, he sometimes worked the graveyard shift, and if you imagine engineers working the graveyard shift, it shows you how different it was in those days. So my mother did a lot of our education at home and ended up reading to us a lot at night, because my father would be working late.

I had the great benefit in high school of finding a math teacher who really took an interest in me and was willing to push me and get me to work harder, and said to me, "Well, you have a great mind but it's a little bit lazy." And that really made a big difference to me, because she really pushed me, and urged me to work hard, and forced me to accelerate my math education by taking two math courses in one year, and that was a real benefit. And then, in my junior year in high school, I fell in with a buddy who had a growing interest in computing as well, and we started building our own computer. It turned out it was a tic-tac-toe machine. We built it out of surplus parts that we bought for cheap. Pennies. I mean, the whole machine probably cost $30, but it cost hundreds of hours of labor to actually build. We covered it with black contact paper so it looked mysterious, and lo and behold, it could play tic-tac-toe very well, and beat people at tic-tac-toe. That was really my first big opportunity to get my hands on hardware.

We did all the mischievous things that young kids do, set off rockets and almost kill yourself a few times, of course, in the process, but it was an adventurous time for me growing up there.

Were you a good student when you were a kid?

John Hennessy: I would call myself a good student from high school on. I think I was not adequately challenged in elementary school and through junior high, and as a result, I tended to get by with what I could get by with. Then finally I found some mentors and teachers who would really challenge me in high school, and that made a big difference to me.

So this math teacher was important?

John Hennessy: That math teacher was a key person, and then the person who provided us with some mentorship as we engaged in our science project to build a computer was key as well.

Do you think there was any significance to your moving from public schools to a Catholic high school at that time?

What was probably most important for me -- because I had not really applied myself during either elementary through 8th grade -- was a shift in institutions, and that really made a big difference to me, because when I moved to high school, I moved to a Catholic high school. I found it was a new opportunity. I could reset the record, and I found some people who were really willing, and they challenged me more than I was challenged earlier and wouldn't let me just relax. They looked at my grades, and they looked at my test scores, and said, "You're not working to capacity," and they were right. I wasn't. So I think that shift of environment, together with some people who were willing to push me harder, made a big difference, and that was what was critical.

What about books? Were there any books when you were growing up that were important to you?

John Hennessy: Well, I certainly read. In fact...

At a young age, I remember my parents bought me a set of encyclopedias, and I started reading them. Now you think reading encyclopedias is not terribly inspiring, but I found it tremendously interesting, and that really laid a broad foundation for knowledge across a wide variety of fields, and that's something I've always enjoyed. I've enjoyed having some insight and some understanding, not just about my own field but about lots of fields, and talking to scholars and people who work in a variety of fields. Today, it's still one of the things I most enjoy, is getting out and talking to the faculty at Stanford about the work they're doing in everything from medicine to English to economics. It's one thing I've found enjoyable, and maybe reading encyclopedias set the foundation for doing that.

What else were you interested in as a kid?

John Hennessy: As a kid, I spent my summers going to summer camp. I was interested in the usual kinds of pursuits that young boys engage in, sailing and playing tennis and getting involved in games, and I did a lot of that. More in individual things rather than teamwork. That was where my athletic skill sets were, and where I found the most enjoyment.

At what point did you realize what you wanted to do with your life?

John Hennessy: When we did the science fair project, which I did with a good friend of mine, Steve Angle, I realized that I had a real interest in technology at that point, and really getting involved in technology. We really didn't know what we were doing. We could have gone out and read some books -- college textbooks of course. But we could have gone out and read some books, and probably cut the amount of time we were spending on the project -- that we had to spend on it to make this thing work -- in half, but we were a little bit naïve. Nonetheless, perseverance, hard work brought us to the right conclusion, and we had something that worked, something we could take great pride in, and I think that really convinced me that I was interested in technology as a field, and going into something in the computing area.

Was it because this was a new technology? Because there was a new frontier to explore?

John Hennessy: I think that was certainly the case. I think it also played to something which I've always enjoyed, which is problem solving. You could really think about this as solving a problem. Computing is really about problem solving. All of engineering is about solving complex problems, using mathematics and science as your tools. And that's probably what I have enjoyed the most, and why I found that project interesting, and why I decided to pursue that career direction.

So when you went to college, did you already know you wanted to go to graduate school, and that this was the direction you were headed in?

John Hennessy: Well, probably when I got to college, I knew I was interested in computing.

I started out in electrical engineering, but then I had the opportunity to get more involved in computing, and two things happened that really shaped my life. One was I had the opportunity to be an assistant in a programming course after I had completed the course, and that really kindled my love for teaching and working with other students, and helping them understand what was wrong with their programs and how to make the software they were writing work properly. The other thing that happened is I had the opportunity to work on a research project with a faculty member to build a computer, and that really kindled my interest for being involved in research and working on things in that direction. And about my junior year, I decided that I wanted to pursue graduate work in computer science and that I wanted to go on for a Ph.D. So the first thing I had to do, here was an electrical engineer whose math background was completely in calculus and differential equations -- which it would be for an electrical engineer -- who wanted to go on to a computer science degree and had no discrete math, no logic. So I turned around and jumped into a junior level math major course without the prerequisites, which was a startling experience for me. I had never worked so hard in my life. All of a sudden I was working very hard, because I was now jumping into a different field, but I really enjoyed it. That convinced me that I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, and I started off in that direction.

Growing up, did you have any heroes or role models?

John Hennessy: Well, certainly my father. If you're an engineer and your father is an engineer, he's one of your role models.

I think that was a time when obviously there was tremendous growing interest in technology. It was a time when certainly John F. Kennedy was considered a major leader for the country, and lots of young people growing up with me thought of him in that way. But I think it was also a time when we realized technology and science were going to really set an agenda for the future. So the people who were involved in that, astronauts certainly, it was a time when space was a very exciting part of what was happening in the country. And we all, I think, admired the astronauts and thought about what they were doing and aspired to do something in that realm. For a lot of us it came out in different ways, but I think we thought a lot about that.

Did you think about becoming an astronaut?

John Hennessy: No, I didn't. I became intrigued by technology earlier, and that was more intriguing than trying to fly a space mission. Now today, given the opportunity to go up into space, I think we'd all happily take that opportunity.

There are a lot of bright people with a lot of potential out there. They've got the smarts, but they don't succeed. What do you think made you succeed where others have not?

John Hennessy: Probably three things.

I'm passionate about what I do. I really love it and that makes it easy to do it. It's not work. It's something I enjoy. And I've never thought of it as work. Certainly all of us from time to time face that challenge where you're so tired it's hard to get out of bed and do what you have to do, but 90 percent of the time I'm there because I want to be there and I enjoy what I'm doing.

Persistence, I think. Sometimes you just have to really believe in yourself, persevere, push hard. And if you're convinced your ideas are right, don't give up. Keep going until all hope is lost. Sometimes there are times when you won't make progress on something and you have to recognize that, but don't give up prematurely. I think it's too easy.

And, I think, being willing to take risks. This not only is the technology industry, and much of what has happened in technology about being willing to take risks, but I view risk taking and being pioneers as really something that is in the culture of America. And when I look at an institution like Stanford, it is something that's really made it unique. It has grown up in the West. It has thought of itself as a pioneering institution, and it has been willing to take risks. Not all those risks will be successful, but the ones that are successful have such impact and make such a difference in the world. I think that's probably the thing I've been willing to do, is take a number of risks that people have been doubtful about the wisdom, but the ones that have been successful have really had that kind of impact. And the ones that haven't, by and large, have been small investments of time and energy that didn't work out, and that's okay. You can have those as well, and I think that's a lesson that I've really learned over the years.

How do you deal with disappointments or setbacks?

John Hennessy: Move on.

Try to have enough things on the plate that you can feel good about working on something else. I think the other thing I take solace in, in that kind of situation, is if you've really put your best forward into it, then you can be happy with the results. You feel like you've tried your best. You've really put your effort into it. And maybe it didn't work out. Maybe it was something out of your control. Maybe it was a risk that you took where some potential call on technology or some direction you wanted to go wasn't quite right. But if you tried your best, then you can take some comfort in knowing that you really did try to make it work, and maybe it's just not there this time.

You'd already experienced success in research and teaching, and in business. Did you ever imagine yourself becoming the president of a major American university? Was that a logical next step?

John Hennessy: No, I never imagined it.

The years I spent as a regular faculty member working with students, teaching, working with my research, have absolutely been the happiest years of my life. I really enjoyed that, and enjoyed that engagement with students and colleagues. What really helped me make this decision, and agree to take on this job, was the fact that when you've been at an institution for 20 years, your loyalty to the institution, and your devotion to it, really grows, and your willingness to help the institution out. Clearly, for an engineer to jump into the provost's job, let alone the president's job, was a major leap. It meant that I had to be comfortable talking to colleagues across the entire institution, from the law school to the business school to the medical school.

I began to be engaged doing that when I was the dean of engineering.

One of the things we did was to build a bridge to the medical school, to engage in a new program we had been building at Stanford called "Bio-X." That's an interdisciplinary program based on the biological sciences but bringing together not only biology, biochemistry, genetics, and the engineering disciplines as well: electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering. That gave me the feeling that I could work across those boundaries. I could interact with colleagues on a broader front, across the university, and it gave me some confidence, together with the experience that I had had from the industrial world, that I could really take this leap of faith and try this new challenge, which it certainly is a new challenge. I think I found that every time you rise to a new challenge, if you can bring to that challenge, and think about how all the experiences you've had along the way -- from being a junior faculty member, your first encounter teaching students, and how nervous you are the first time you walk into a classroom, and how you manage to overcome that, to your research, to spending time in industry -- and learn from all those things and bring them all to bear, I think it gives you some confidence that you can deal with a variety of new situations which you encounter in the provost office or the president's office.

It must have been daunting to wake up one morning and find yourself President of Stanford University.

John Hennessy: Absolutely.

The outgoing president, Gerhard Casper, told me something which was absolutely correct, it turned out. He said, "You won't quite realize what the job is like until you're sitting in that chair being president." And he was absolutely right, despite the fact that I had been provost and had worked very closely with the president. You're in the position where the buck stops here, and whether it's a concern that the students have, a concern that the alumni have, a concern that a faculty member has, or whether it's the challenges of worrying about a university of the size and scope of Stanford, it is a challenge. And I think one of the things that makes universities remarkably different and unique from companies, is that there really is an expectation that people will see the president, and will have the opportunity to interact with the president, and if you're in a big company you very rarely see the CEO. You see these many layers of management. Universities have much flatter management structures, so there is much less distance between the students and the faculty and the university administration, which is exactly how it should be. Exactly how it should be. But I think that also means you're constantly on the spot. You're constantly being asked questions or being asked to make important decisions.

As president of a university, you're sometimes faced with conflicting priorities. There are all kinds of issues and vested interests to deal with, and you have to make decisions that are not going to be popular with everybody.

John Hennessy: Correct.

How do you deal with criticism or controversy over those decisions?

John Hennessy: One of the things I do is I look back to the founding of the university. I read the university founding grant. I look at what the Stanfords wrote about the university. I look at what the very first president, David Starr Jordan, wrote about the university. I think about these hard decisions in the context of two things. First of all, "How does this decision affect the core mission of the university, its mission to collect, discover and disseminate knowledge? How does it affect research and teaching?" The second thing I do, which is probably as hard or even harder, is to try to think in terms of a 50- or 100-year context, because as a university president, you have an obligation not only to the current generation of students, but the generations to follow. And so whether it's development, or how you spend the resources of the institution, or how we make important trade-offs about admissions, you have to think in the context of generation after generation after generation. The obligation that I have to future generations of students, future presidents, and the future university community, the faculty will have 100 years from now. That sometimes means that you have to make decisions which will make some people very unhappy and very angry, but which are the right decisions for the long term for the university. So you're a target for a lot of things, and what you have to do is have confidence, and of course, have a council of people who will reinforce that decision and agree that it is the right long-term decision for the institution, so that when you make it, you know you have the faith in yourself that it is the right decision.

Why do you think they came to you? Why did they say, "Hennessy is the guy to do this?"

John Hennessy: That's a good question. I know what they wrote in the description of what they were looking for in a president. I think certainly they were looking for somebody who could work across the entire institution, who could communicate with the wide range of constituencies that a university president has to communicate with. They were certainly looking for somebody who had a strong record of scholarship, and a strong record of both teaching and research contribution. I think they also wanted someone who they felt could deal with the management aspects of the presidency, because after all, we have a $1.7 billion budget. Part of the job is managing that $1.7 billion enterprise. Now of course, a lot of that effort will be distributed down to your staff, but in order to really run that enterprise well, you have to be able to know how to hire people who can make the important decisions across the institution, whether it's managing the endowment, deciding how we finance something, worrying about admissions, or worrying about our faculty appointments. And I think the last criteria they had was honesty and integrity and the ability to be true to your word and keep the commitments you've made. Those were the requirements, and I guess I fit the bill.

Did you consider not taking the job?

John Hennessy: I considered, when I was asked, whether or not I wanted to be a candidate, whether or not I should do it. I think probably the big step for me, and this is an interesting story, the big step for me was when I took the provost job, because many provosts become university presidents. If not at their home institutions, at other institutions. It is the second-in-command job. I knew that President Casper was probably not going to stay for more than two or three more years. I didn't expect him to step down in a year, but I probably knew he wasn't going to stay for more than two or three. When I was contemplating the provost's job, I actually went to a talk at a yearly celebration we have called "Founders Day" that celebrates the Stanfords' contributions in founding the university. The talk that year was given by Provost Condi Rice, who was then the outgoing provost, although there had not been a successor named. I had been asked to do the job but hadn't made a final decision. She gave a talk which talked about the role of education in American society and how education had saved her grandfather, who was an African American sharecropper in the South, and how it had set their family off on a different course. And although I always had felt education was important, here was a statement that was very convincing about the role of education in the American system and how it could really improve everyone's lives, and that pushed me over the edge. And I, of course, had to be willing to consider the possibility that I'd take the president's job once I took the provost's job, but after I heard Condi's wonderful speech, very moving speech, and the importance of education and learning, I decided to take the provost's job.

Speaking as an engineer, a computer scientist, what is the role of technology in education? What is it now and what should it be?

John Hennessy: Clearly, technology is reshaping lots of disciplines in important ways. It's, of course, affected lots of the traditional disciplines, engineering and the sciences, although the dramatic growth of the use of technology in the biological sciences is simply astounding. The main reason we've been able to do the human genome sequencing so fast is that we brought a combination of computing and robotic technology to the job, and sped the job up by orders of magnitude. And instead of having graduate students and post-docs and lab technicians running around with little test tubes, we were able to put the whole thing under robotic control and speed it up tremendously.

What I find most fascinating is to see the impact that computing is having on the humanities and the arts right now. It's truly astounding. We have one fascinating project where a faculty member is using laser scanning technology and computer technology to reconstruct completely realistic, incredibly detailed models of Michelangelo's sculptures, and this has enabled two things. First of all, it means that we've now got a permanent digital record, so if anything should ever happen to that work of art, we can create it in its full fidelity. And the precision is down to the level of individual chisel marks, so you can actually see the kind of chisel that was used for various parts of the sculpture. But equally importantly, it means that you can now construct a three-dimensional virtual reality replica, and that people who can never get to Florence can actually see the David in fully accurate detail, and art students can now see it at a level of detail that they can't see in the museum, because they can't walk right up next to the statue and see what it looks like at that level of detail. We see this happening across the board. Access to manuscripts, which before required you to travel to an ancient library at Oxford or at the Sorbonne, are now available online. And I think we also see it in teaching. We see lots more information becoming available online. We see people changing their educational patterns.

One of the things that I've been really excited about is to see lots more interesting continuing education as people realize -- and it started with the technology fields and an interest in technology, engineers -- education is a lifelong thing or you become obsolete. So we started to see engineers coming back to take courses. Well, it's hard, once you're in a career, to actually drive over to the campus and to come in the middle of the day, so we saw them taking courses online. And these were students who already had master's degrees, who were already practicing engineers for 10 or 15 or 20 years, coming back and taking a course on networking, because they've just gone to work for Cisco, for example. So I think that's an important change as well. The next stage, I think, will be continuing education, so that people can go back and take that course on Shakespeare that they never got to take, or environmental science if they're interested in it, or archaeology, because they'd be interested in going to Rome and seeing what the Forum really looks like, and I think that will be as exciting as the other things happening.

Is there a downside? Is it possible to become too dependent on technology?

John Hennessy: I think the downside of technology is that it can sometimes allow people to interact in a way that isolates them from other people. I've never felt comfortable discussing a really tough decision, a really hard topic, delivering bad news -- or good news for that matter -- using technology to deliver that news. I'd rather sit down and look somebody in the eye and deliver that. I think, as our young people become more and more dependent on technology, what they need to remember is that it's not a substitute for human contact and it simply can't replace it. You cannot communicate nearly as well. Now perhaps 50 years from now, we really will be able to do 3-D reconstructions, and you'll be able to communicate between China and the U.S. as if you were sitting in the same room, but we're a long ways away from that today.

This could lead to some difficult choices.

John Hennessy: I think you see that in various cases. Computing technology is becoming so inexpensive that if you look at the cost of supplying somebody with a computer versus supplying them with the same number of books that they would be able to get access to online, it's not clear how to make that tradeoff anymore.

What do you know now about achievement that you didn't know when you started out?

John Hennessy: I've learned that there probably are some issues surrounding luck and timing that I think are not as obvious unless you've actually been there. Now I say luck and timing, because it's not all luck. Clearly part of it is being aware that this is a unique time. The luck piece is that you're there at that point in time that you have the basic opportunity to do something unusual and to really make a difference. I think spotting that opportunity is absolutely key, and I think most people would tell you that, but being aware that you're in the right place, and the right time, and that you are there, I think is partly luck, and those opportunities come along. They don't come along just once. They come along from time to time, but you have to watch out for them. It takes longer and requires you to be more persistent than I think is immediately obvious. When we finally realized that the work we had done on RISC was going to really be pervasive, that probably took five, six, seven years. I mean, we really had to slug away. Even though you generally think of things in the technology spectrum as moving much faster to the real world than say the basic sciences. Even so, it took us five, six, seven years to really get that confidence. So we had to be persistent, and we had to have confidence through that, and I probably didn't realize that it was going to take that long when I started.

Is there anything you haven't done that you'd like to do?

John Hennessy: Oh. There are a lot of things I'd like to do that I passed up the opportunity to do. I find the current revolution in the biological sciences and the transformation of biology into a quantitative science -- into a science that really uses much of the same skill set that I've learned as an engineer and a computer scientist -- to be absolutely fascinating. If I could come back again and start my career again, I'd be so tempted to go into the biological sciences now, because the opportunities for impact are truly phenomenal. That's a little hard to squeeze in my schedule while I'm still trying to run the university, but I find it so fascinating that I at least like to engage my colleagues, and have some thrill of watching them accomplish the tremendous things that are being accomplished in that field.

Looking ahead into the 21st Century, what do you see as the biggest challenges facing us as a nation?

John Hennessy: As a nation, I think we probably face a real challenge to ensure that we don't split apart as a country, that the economic disparities across this country don't continue to widen in a way that divides us, that we use our diversity and the tremendous strength of the human capital that we have in this country in a productive fashion. I think that's probably our biggest challenge going forward. We obviously have a lot of new technologies too that we'll put in place, and in the same way in which the atomic age was born and there was tremendous danger, we are going to invent things in the biological sphere that have moral and ethical implications that are as deep and as challenging as those that we faced in the birth of the atomic age. Hopefully, we've navigated that -- the atomic age -- successfully. Certainly I grew up in an age where we built bomb shelters and we had drills, bomb drills, and we thought about fallout and all those sorts of issues. I think we now have to navigate a set of questions which will be equally difficult doing them correctly. Getting the right balance between helping people lead better lives and ensuring that we keep an ethical standard and a moral responsibility that we can look back on with pride, I think, is going to be key.

There's a program at Stanford where students meet with members of the faculty and ask them one question: "What matters to you, and why?" Can you answer that? What matters to you and why?

John Hennessy: That is a good question. I have been in this program, "What matters to me and why?" I gave a three-part answer, as you might guess. It's hard to answer in one part. I think, first and foremost, making a difference, making the world a better place, and I think that's what I certainly encourage all my students to do, is to try and make a contribution to the world that makes it a better place. Second, to find something that you're passionate and enthusiastic about. Find something that you love to do. And, third, to maintain a high standard of personal integrity. Do what you say, say what you mean. Particularly in a leadership role, and this I probably can't emphasize enough, in a leadership role that is so critical. People have to believe that your word, your commitment, is as good as gold, and I think it's probably the one thing that I've found to be absolutely critical.

People will come and sometimes ask for things, and sometimes the answer is no. Well, if the answer is no, it has to be no. The answer shouldn't be yes if later on you don't think you'll be able to deliver that. And I think that has been key, particularly in leadership roles. It means sometimes you have to disappoint people, but better to disappoint them than to be in a situation where you haven't carried through on something that they were counting on you doing.

What does the American Dream mean to you?

John Hennessy: I think the American Dream is about opportunity. It is really about giving every individual in this country, every citizen, the opportunity to accomplish something, to use their skills and their abilities, their perseverance, their hard work, to make the world better, to make a difference, to contribute something. It is really that contribution, that contribution is its own reward, and I think if you can make a difference, and you can look back on what you have achieved, what you have contributed and take pride in it, then I think you've realized the American Dream.

Looks like Stanford is in good hands.

John Hennessy: Thank you.

We really appreciate your taking the time to speak with us today.