Convocation 2025: Celebrating the newest Kellogg Executive MBA graduates
On June 14, the 2025 Kellogg Executive MBA (EMBA) graduates gathered in Chicago to celebrate their shared journey of resilience, leadership and transformation. While convocation marks the end of their rigorous academic pursuit, it also signals the continuous commitment to lifelong learning.
To commemorate this milestone, we welcomed Barry McCarthy ’96 MBA as the 2025 convocation speaker. A Fortune 1000 company board director and CEO, McCarthy’s own path embodies the values of bold thinking and purposeful leadership that define the Kellogg experience.
Below is his convocation address shared with the newest alumni of the EMBA Program.
Dean Cornelli, Dean Kaplan, EMBA Directors Feldges and Masferrer, distinguished faculty, graduates and families, it’s an honor and privilege to be with you. Congrats, cohorts 136 & 137 — you made it!
Most of my family is here today, celebrating with you, too. Several are Wildcats, including my 90-year-old mother, an alumna from the Class of 1960. Our son becomes the third generation Wildcat when he joins the Kellogg Class of 2028 in August.
To the families of graduates – congrats to you, too. You share in this achievement. None of us could be here without family support. Thank you.
Graduates, you’re unmistakable Kellogg Leaders now. Not only is Kellogg at the top of every global ranking, but Kellogg Leaders are high-impact, high-empathy, creative, innovative and collaborative. Kellogg Leaders run to the fire to lead transformation, not just manage or administer what already exists.
Kellogg is a prolific leadership incubator, too. At last count, Kellogg helped create 73 of the current Fortune 1000 CEOs. I’m one of them. I’m CEO of a NYSE-listed company called Deluxe. We’re radically transforming a 100-year-old check printer using the lessons I learned at Kellogg.
In the next few minutes, I’ll share a bit about my career, three leadership lessons, a transformation mini-case study and a challenge for you to choose to transform something that really matters.
Starting a Career
I started my career at P&G, in one of life’s great ironies, as a shampoo salesman. I am grateful that P&G sent me to Kellogg. It was the inflection point of my career.
Next, I joined Wells Fargo, where I created the modern ATM. Then I started a micro-payments company in the Silicon Valley to efficiently take small payments for digital goods – songs, photos, etc. I was too early, but Apple iTunes made it work a decade later. I then went to Verisign to fix their internet payments business and position them for acquisition by PayPal. Then I joined First Data, now part of Fiserv, the world’s largest payment processor. I was the only senior exec to survive from before the KKR-led LBO through the IPO and beyond, serving seven CEOs in 14 years.
While at First Data, I invented a product that was the earliest form of mobile payments. It was a sticker with a microchip for the outside of your phone. Well, it was a dumpster fire. I probably should have been fired. But it prepared me for an unexpected call -- from Apple. The sticker failure uniquely positioned First Data and me personally to play a key role in the launch of Apple Pay.
When I got the call about becoming the Deluxe CEO, I laughed. I told the recruiter I had just spent the last 14 years trying to eliminate checks. Over time, though, I saw a quality set of assets that could be transformed for growth.
Three Big Lessons
I offer you three leadership lessons I’ve learned through these experiences:
First Lesson: Run to the Fire.
Careers and communities are built by seeking to transform or fix hard problems – by running to the fire, not running from it. Kellogg taught us to fight fires. So, run to the fire. Find the difficult, messy problems that impact people, communities or businesses. Those problems probably aren’t glamorous. They may not be Instagrammable and might not make a sexy LinkedIn post. But the hardest transformations are almost always the ones worth doing.
Second Lesson: Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Being uncomfortable is what’s required to deliver true transformation. If you run to the fire to solve big problems, it’s uncomfortable and yep, you might get burned. In fact, you probably will, just like me. But that’s okay. Simply apply those learnings to solve the next big challenge.
Discomfort is the price of growth, and failure is the down payment on success.
Third Lesson: Be like a duck.
Great leaders are graceful under pressure and always inspire confidence. Just like a duck. Sometimes a duck crash-lands on water and even goes under. But they bob back to the surface and simply shake it off. Other times, they may look calm, but their feet are furiously paddling under the water. Graceful under pressure and always inspiring confidence. Be like a duck.
The Deluxe Transformation
Let’s be clear, applying these three lessons isn’t easy or for the faint of heart.
When I became the 9th CEO in Deluxe’s 100-year history, the company was synonymous with check printing — and suffering organic revenue declines, which had persisted for decades. I ran to a big fire, was plenty uncomfortable, and many days needed to remind myself to be like a duck.
We had to change to survive. We chose a radical transformation path, leveraging our 100-year history as a leader in paper payments to become a leader in modern digital payments and data.
Today, Deluxe processes $3 trillion in digital payments, roughly 15% of the U.S. GDP. We’ve built one of the largest marketing databases of consumer and small business information in the US. We serve 4000 financial institutions, four million small businesses, and even the Federal Reserve runs our software.
In 2025, we expect to deliver our 12th consecutive quarter with profit growing faster than revenue.
And, we’re providing a quality living for the families of nearly 5000 fellow Deluxers who, in turn, donate their time, talent and treasure to improve our communities.
No, we’re not done — yes, we’ve made plenty of mistakes — but we’re proud of our continuing progress.
Give me the case study
Here’s the mini-case. We’re leveraging three Kellogg principles to drive our transformation: vision, engagement and culture.
- Clear vision. We started with an inspiring vision to reinvent a proud, 100-year-old company for the next generation. Move from paper payments to digital payments and data. We are “Champions for business so communities thrive.”
- Engagement. The team needed to believe they could do it. We started with a series of short project sprints to deliver a rapid series of successes. We made it personal by making every employee a shareholder. One of my favorite moments was receiving a handwritten note with a picture of a newborn baby. Our employee said he had never owned anything. His apartment was rented, and his truck was leased. But now he was an owner in Deluxe and had a start on his newborn’s college fund.
- Culture. We are building a team of collaborative firefighters. We call it One Deluxe. We are servant leaders who run to the fire and win or lose together. We added a novel benefit we call Volunteer Time Off. This enables every employee to take up to 5 paid days off to volunteer in our communities. We added group volunteer activities and, as an example, in the last month, we packed 200,000 meals for our neighbors struggling with food insecurity.
Through Vision, Engagement and Culture, we’ve made Deluxe more than just a job. Deluxers are part of something bigger than themselves. We deliver for customers and shareholders, so we can deliver for our communities too. What we do matters.
If a bald shampoo salesman can transform a 100-year-old check printer, certainly you can transform something important, too.
What are you going to transform? What fire are you running to next?
Finally, I want to talk about you.
The measure of your life won’t be the size of your paycheck, the title on your business card or the number of followers on your LinkedIn page. It will be the lives you’ve impacted, the careers you’ve helped others build, the businesses or non-profits you’ve transformed and the communities you’ve strengthened.
What are you afraid of? What’s holding you back from choosing to transform something big that really matters? Worried about getting burned running to the fire?
I say, “So what?” You’ve already made a mark in your career. You’re a unicorn talent, or you wouldn’t even be here. And now you have the ultimate pedigree, a Kellogg MBA.
You’ve earned the right to be fearless. Please, don’t waste yourself. Don’t waste the privilege of this Kellogg education. Believe in yourself. Lean in. Be bold. Reach. Get uncomfortable and choose to make a mega-scale impact.
I will conclude with a simple question: “What are you waiting for?” Now get out there and go run to the fire!
Thank you.
Scenes from Convocation 2025
Read next: Dean Cornelli’s message to the Class of 2025: “Your ideas will change the world.”