What an honor it is to be here today and to celebrate your accomplishments. Graduates, you are an inspiring sight, and I’m excited to be able to share a few thoughts with you.
Some 27 years ago, President Gordon B. Hinckley shared a thought that I’d like to affirm today:
Education is the key to economic opportunity. The Lord has laid a mandate upon us . . . to acquire learning “by study, and also by faith” (D&C 109:14). It is likely that you will be a better provider if your mind and hands are trained to do something worthwhile in the society of which you will become a part.1
You’ve all done that. You’ve been trained well. You’ve gained a great education, and it has prepared you to compete in the modern business economy today. You’ve also taken religion courses, served in your wards, and built a closer relationship with your Savior, Jesus Christ.
I’ve found that career building and kingdom building are not mutually exclusive. In fact, when brought together, they create a powerful combination. Today, I’d like to share a few principles that I have applied in my life that can help you in your career as well:
- First, don’t bifurcate your life.
- Second, work hard.
- And third, counsel with the Lord in all thy doings.
1. Don’t Bifurcate Your Life
What does “don’t bifurcate your life” mean? It means don’t divide your life—don’t separate it into two parts. Have the courage to bring yourself as a disciple of Jesus Christ into the office.
This was brought to my attention a few years ago when I was working at Gap Inc. and was selected as one of four executives who could potentially become a CEO. To invest in my professional development, the company arranged for an executive assessment and then career coaching from an executive coach. Stephen Drotter, who cowrote the book The Leadership Pipeline, did the assessment. After that assessment, which, to be honest, was brutal, Terry Gilliam was assigned to be my executive coach.
Terry observed me at work for a few weeks and then came to my home to watch me engage with my family. He ate dinner with us, hung out with us on the weekend, and went to church with us. He saw me leading in the ward, serving, and worshipping.
I knew that after this observation period I would have a coaching session with advice on how to improve as a leader. So early one morning, Terry sat me down in my office at Gap, which overlooked the San Francisco Bay.
I was initially excited to hear what he had to say but was somewhat disappointed when he said he had only one piece of advice. I thought, You spent all this time with me, and you’ve only got one thing to say to me?
He said, “Don’t bifurcate your life.”
I looked at him. I didn’t really know what he meant.
He simply said, “Just bring the guy who was at home and church to work.”
I thought about that. It was really interesting. “You come to work ready for battle, wearing your armor,” he explained. “You’re very focused, clinical, and analytical, but you’re impersonal. You don’t let people get to know you, and you don’t know them either. At home and at church, you’re very warm, genuine, caring, and sincere. Bring that person to the office.”
He shared with me that great leaders can lead not just the minds of the people but their hearts as well; if I learned to lead people’s hearts, they’d follow me anywhere.
It was the best career advice I’ve ever heard. It seemed simple, but it was hard to implement, especially given my career thus far. I’d worked in some pretty tough industries—automotive and aerospace—and I wasn’t sure that I could bring the two parts of me together.
But I had some great examples. The first was my boss at Old Navy, Jenny Ming, one of the brand’s cofounders. Jenny was the matriarch for the whole business. She was an amazing leader, a first-generation American who would bring her home-baked cookies to our executive team meetings. After my first performance review with her, she stood up and gave me a hug. I’d never had a hug after a performance review—I didn’t know how to handle it. But I was grateful for it because it was very authentic and sincere. I’m so grateful for her servant-leader example.
The best example all of us have is our Savior, Jesus Christ. He knew His disciples intimately. He knew them personally. He knew their families. He knew their imperfections and their weaknesses, and He wanted to help them, serve them, and love them.
He gave His all for them, and as the Savior and Redeemer of the world, He gave His all for us. My hope is that you will partner with the Lord in your career by bringing your whole self to the office as a disciple of Jesus Christ. As you do this, you will be blessed.
Remember, don’t bifurcate your life!
2. Work Hard
This principle has been around since the beginning of time—since Adam and Eve came to the earth. Once Adam and Eve partook of the forbidden fruit, the Lord cast them out of the Garden of Eden. He told them: “By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” all the days of thy life (Moses 4:25).
So it is with us. We’ll need to work hard to provide for ourselves and our families. The principle of hard work is an eternal principle. As Elder F. David Stanley, a member of the Seventy, said:
Hard work is a blessing of God. It involves going after it “with all your heart, might, mind and strength” (D&C 4:2). That alone is the difference between the average and the excellent.2
Each of you already knows how to work hard. You had to work really hard to get into BYU. Then you had to apply to get into BYU Marriott. Then you had to work hard to graduate. You clearly know how to work hard. Your muscles are trained and ready for what’s ahead. And guess what? You’ll get to work hard in your careers.
I love to work hard, and I knew early on that I was going to have to outwork those whom I worked with just to get noticed.
When I graduated with my MBA, I went to work at Ford Motor Company. My peer group in finance at Ford Motor Company came from schools like BYU, Harvard, Wharton, Columbia, Berkeley, Stanford, and other amazing schools—not little old Babson College where I went to night school. My wife and I had two kids at the time, and night school worked best for us.
To make my mark at the company, I knew I was going to have to work hard. At Ford we were encouraged to go to the factory and get manufacturing experience early in our careers. Most of those folks who I graduated with—and those working at Ford who came from fancy schools—had no intention of getting their hands dirty at a factory. But I did—as did Mark Hansen, a fellow Ford finance MBA who is now a faculty member here at BYU Marriott.
I was transferred to the Indianapolis plant, and I was an area controller as the finance guy for one quarter of the plant. That’s about a half-million square feet, which is the size of eight football fields.
A few months later, I also volunteered to work as a midnight shift foreman on the factory floor, which I did for the next three months, pulling 16-hour double shifts.
I’d go to work early—technically late at night—and work as a foreman during the midnight shift. Then I would shower and get dressed to work the day shift. I was also serving in the ward bishopric at the time, so I was super busy. But I wasn’t sleeping anyway.
Why wasn’t I sleeping? A few weeks after we moved to Indianapolis, my wife, Linda, gave birth to our third child—our daughter Kelsey. She was born with an irreparable heart, which was going to require a full heart transplant. As we prayed to find out what was right for her, we made the difficult decision with the Lord to bring Kelsey home and let her die with us, which she did early one morning 13 days later.
I was brokenhearted, but with the saving and healing power of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and with my knowledge of the plan of salvation, I found that hard work helped me to heal.
As I look back on this challenging chapter, I see three takeaways. First, working at the Ford factory taught me more about business than any other workplace. Doing dirty things and hard things at work helps you better understand how the whole organization works.
The second takeaway came from pulling a double shift. The people at Ford saw that I knew how to work hard, which helped accelerate my career going forward.
Last, these experiences reminded me that I can do hard things—and you can too. Life is hard at times, and pushing through hard times allows us to stretch and grow. After you get your foot in the door, employers really don’t care where you went to school, but they do care that you know how to work hard and want to work hard for them.
The Lord appreciates those who work hard too, so work hard and He will bless you and your career.
3. Pray Daily for Direction
In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Alma gave the following advice to his son Helaman: “Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings” (Alma 37:37). I’ve followed this advice throughout my nearly 40-year career.
Five years ago when we all went through COVID-19, each of us had our own experience. I was chairman and CEO of At Home Group, a home decor retailer. We had been growing at a 20 percent clip for a decade—so fast that we were plowing our profits and our extra cash back into the business. When you have a high-growth business, it burns through a lot of cash.
All of our sales were transacted in our stores, and for a variety of reasons, we had no e-commerce. Once COVID struck, we closed all of our stores and suddenly had no revenue and thus no cash to pay for our product, our employees, our rent, or construction of our new stores.
I remember a conversation I had at that time with Gregg Nabhan, the vice chairman of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. He said, “Businesses weren’t wired to survive without revenue.” We had no revenue and no idea when we could reopen our stores.
During that time, I counseled with the Lord about this situation. In fact, I got up early in the morning—just as I always do—to read my scriptures. But then I read two additional quotes to myself out loud every day to give me the courage to move forward at a very challenging time. The first was from President Hinckley:
It isn’t as bad as you sometimes think it is.
It all works out. Don’t worry.
I say that to myself every morning.
It will all work out.
Put your trust in God,
and move forward with faith
and confidence in the future.
The Lord will not forsake us.
He will not forsake us.
If we will put our trust in Him,
if we will pray to Him,
if we will live worthy of His blessings,
He will hear our prayers.3
The second quote is from King Solomon. In Proverbs 3:5–6 he shares: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”
After I read those things to myself out loud, I would kneel to pray. I would follow the adage “Pray as if everything depends on God, then get up and act like everything depends on you.”
I was so grateful for the strength that I received from those personal devotionals. I prayed with all my heart and then got off my knees and worked to help At Home survive. I encouraged my entire executive team to do the same, including my chief information officer, who is Hindu. I said, “We all pray to the same God.” We all prayed for direction, and direction came.
I took no salary for more than eight months, and I cut my executive team’s salary in half. We furloughed all store employees except for four per store, laid off a significant number of home-office employees, and called all of our partners and asked for patience in paying them. Those actions left us with about 10 weeks of cash. We were a public company at the time, and fear was raging across Wall Street. Our market cap dropped $1 billion in a four-week period.
Needless to say, it was stressful. But the Lord was in the details, and it all worked out, just as President Hinckley promised. There were 10,000 employees counting on me. I was hoping the Lord would hear my prayers—and He did. Ideas and creative solutions came. We rolled out e-commerce in weeks versus months and opened our stores by municipality when each city would allow it. You all were stuck at home and decided to decorate. Thank you! Since we had warehouse stores full of product, our business rocked once we reopened. We had a record year that year, doing more than $2 billion in sales—record profits as well as cash flow.
We were able to pay everyone who we owed money to. We brought back all of our employees and compensated them for the time that they weren’t working. We paid all our partners back. We paid off all of our short-term debt and a portion of our long-term debt—which totaled more than $250 million—in just six months. Our stock shot up as well. The Lord was listening and was willing to provide a miracle at that moment.
The Lord wants to be your partner, and as you counsel with Him in your career, He will direct your path. As a side note, my family and I have learned over the years that the Lord used my career to get our family where we needed to be. The job was just the facilitator to build the kingdom of God.
In conclusion, you entered BYU to learn, and as BYU Marriott graduates, you’ve been instructed in Christlike leadership. Now is the time to leave and to serve. I pray that you will have amazing careers and lives. I know that if you partner with the Lord in your careers and follow these three principles—don’t bifurcate your life, work hard, and pray daily for direction—He will bless you beyond measure.
My wife and I have felt blessings in our lives in so many ways, and I can trace some of those blessings back to learning and applying these principles. The Lord has made more of me than I could have made of myself and has allowed me a career I could not have dreamt of. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
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Speaker: Lee Bird
Adapted from a BYU Marriott convocation speech given April 25, 2025.
Illustrations by Brett Ryder
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About the Speaker
Having worked nearly 40 years in consumer retail, Lee Bird has held leadership roles at Nike, Gap Inc., Old Navy, Gateway, Honeywell, and Ford Motor Company. He served as chairman and CEO of At Home Group from 2012 to 2023. He earned his MBA from Babson College and his bachelor’s degree from Ithaca College, where he was also an All-American swimmer. Bird currently serves on several corporate and university boards, including the BYU Marriott National Advisory Council, and is a stake president in Dallas. Bird and his wife of 38 years, Linda, have eight children and six grandchildren.
Notes
- Gordon B. Hinckley, “Living Worthy of the Girl You Will Someday Marry,” Ensign, May 1998, 50.
- F. David Stanley, “The Principle of Work,” Ensign, May 1993, 44, quoting Doctrine and Covenants 4:2.
- Gordon B. Hinckley, “Put Your Trust in God,” Ensign, February 2006, 63.
