5 Conclusion

5.1 Summary of Key Findings

The universality of some values and themes across professions was shown by our word frequency analysis, indicating the broad appeal of wisdom principles. However, various phrases within each field revealed diverse priorities, implying the presence of profession-specific viewpoints. Sentiment analysis revealed an overall upbeat tone with differences between professions, as well as a similar narrative arc within the speeches. Key themes were found using topic modeling approaches throughout talks, with each profession having distinct thematic prominences.

5.1.1 Word Frequency Analysis Findings

The research employed a robust word frequency analysis technique to systematically explore and unravel the rich content of commencement speeches across various professions - Academia, Arts and Literature, Business, Entertainment, and Law and Politics. This quantitative method was used to identify the most frequent words, bigrams, and trigrams across the speeches.

Firstly, the analysis revealed that despite the diversity of professions, there are shared words that indicate common themes. Terms such as “can”, “people”, “good”, “one”, “life”, “year”, “know”, “make”, “think”, and “us” were found to be pervasive across the speeches. This underscores the presence of shared values and themes across the professions relating to ability, relationships, quality of life, and cognition.

In specific professional domains, unique terms depicted the distinct issues discussed. For instance, in Academia, phrases like “hbcus”, “underfund”, and “minority serve institution” highlight the emphasis on diversity, equity, and the challenges faced by academic institutions. In Arts and Literature, “make good art” and “default” emphasize the importance of creativity and challenging conventional norms. Business speeches with words like “rocket”, “big meaningful project”, and “give everyone freedom” suggest themes of innovation, significance, and liberty. Entertainment-related speeches contained terms like “edge awareness”, “let light shine”, and “character define moment”, reflecting themes of self-awareness, enlightenment, and personal character development. In the field of Law and Politics, references to civil rights, historic figures, and international relations were evident.

The analysis also identified common bigrams and trigrams across all professions, providing a more nuanced understanding of shared themes and narratives. Terms such as “tell_story”, “help_us”, “don_know”, and “make difference life” highlight the focus on storytelling, help-seeking, acknowledgment of uncertainty, and the urge to make a difference in life. These findings emphasize the shared wisdom in acknowledging the unknown and encouraging transformative actions across different fields.

Several phrases’ usage was found to be context dependent. For instance, “make difference life” was used differently by various speakers. Barack Obama emphasized service and altruism, while Steve Jobs focused on personal growth and fulfillment. Oprah Winfrey discussed using her influence to make a difference in people’s lives. These varying usages demonstrate the multi-layered, diverse meanings a phrase can carry across different speeches and contexts.

This analysis, built on frequency counts of words, bigrams, and trigrams, provides valuable insights into the commonalities and uniqueness within commencement speeches across various professions. It underlines the universal appeal of some themes, such as striving for progress, acknowledging uncertainty, and the ambition to make a difference. On the other hand, the unique words and phrases within each profession reveal the distinct emphasis and priorities in different fields. Thus, the word frequency analysis creates a rich initial perspective of wisdom within commencement speeches, bridging the gap between textual data and meaningful insights.

Concerning the first research question, analyzing the most frequently occurring unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams has provided insights into the common themes in the speeches across different professions. We have discovered that despite the diversity in professions, there are shared words and themes that recur across all fields. This could indicate a universal understanding of wisdom leadership that includes ideas of ability, relationships, quality of life, and cognition. Furthermore, unique terms within each profession revealed the distinct emphasis and priorities in different fields.

With respect to the fourth research question, it was found that the common elements in speeches across all professions, such as “make difference life”, “help us”, “don’t know”, etc., suggest a shared focus on acknowledging the unknown and encouraging transformative actions, key aspects of wisdom leadership. The different usage of some of these common phrases across speeches also was investigated.

The fifth question in this study sought to determine differences among professions. We have identified differences in the themes and most frequent terms of speeches delivered by leaders from diverse professions. The unique words and phrases within each profession reveal the distinct focus and priorities in different fields, shedding light on how wisdom may manifest differently in various professional contexts.

5.1.2 Sentiment Analysis Findings

Firstly, a sentiment analysis was performed on the speeches from different professional sectors. The analysis found that all professions exhibited a mix of negative and positive sentiments, with the overall trend being positive. It was observed that Academia was least negative, closely followed by entertainment, while sectors like arts, literature, law, and politics tended to have a higher degree of negative sentiment.

The analysis went deeper by exploring paragraphs that displayed extreme positive or negative sentiments. Positive sentiments often praised the profession or society’s accomplishments, while negative sentiments were typically critique or expressions of concern over societal issues. For example, in Academia, positive sentiment celebrated Harvard’s impact, while the negative sentiment expressed anxiety about the impact of a human-made crisis.

The analysis also found a common narrative arc among the speeches, similar to the arc of a story - it begins positively, dips as the speeches move into discussing challenges, and finally rises back as it nears the end, marking the resolution phase. Furthermore, the study identified unique characteristics in the speeches of each profession. In Academia, there was a peak of positive sentiment around the midpoint of the speeches, which might suggest more stories were included in the speech content.

Moreover, key insights were derived from connecting sentiment with the concept of wisdom leadership. For instance, the emotion of trust, which was the most positive and prevalent across professions, was linked to the wisdom dimensions of “relativism of values” and “interpersonal,” underlining the importance of understanding and respecting diverse perspectives and fostering healthy interpersonal relationships. On the other hand, fear, being the most negative emotion, was tied to the wisdom dimension of “awareness and management of uncertainty.” We also analyzed the very positive and negative sentiments in each field and made connection to wisdom. For instance, paragraph “Wallace_29” in the Arts and Literature field, underscores the significance of self-awareness, empathy, and a broader perspective that seeks the common good through balancing self-interest the interests of others and cares for humanity.

Overall, the sentiment analysis and subsequent narrative arc interpretation provided valuable insights into the traits of wise leaders across professions, how their traits aligned with the dimensions of wisdom leadership, and how wisdom leadership manifests differently in various professional contexts.

This sentiment analysis provides a foundation to answer RQ2, which sought to understand how these traits align with the dimensions of wisdom leadership. Similarly, by uncovering principal themes and their association with sentiments across speeches, we are one step closer to answering RQ3 and RQ4. It also further extends our understanding of RQ5, by offering a more nuanced comprehension of differences in the themes and elements of speeches delivered by leaders from different professions and the implications of these differences for wisdom leadership in various professional contexts.

5.1.3 LDA Findings

In our research, we employed topic modeling to identify the main themes that emerged from a set of commencement speeches across various professions, including Academia, Arts and Literature, Business, Entertainment, and Law and Politics. Through Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a probabilistic model for collections of text corpora, we identified five main topics that featured these speeches.

Our analysis indicated that every profession covered each topic to some extent, but usually, one or two topics dominated each group. Topic 5, which we labeled as “Personal Development and Awareness”, was universal and appeared in all professions except business. This theme promoted personal growth, attention to the world, and encouraging one’s “light” to shine, reflecting a broader focus on self-development and perception.

We found that the business profession was mainly influenced by Topic 1, “Inspiration and Purpose”, which encompassed terms such as “think_good”, “one_day”, “sense_purpose”, and “can_get”. This focus indicated the profession’s inclination towards positive thinking, a clear sense of purpose, and future vision.

Law and Politics, on the other hand, closely correlated with Topics 2, “Political Considerations”, and topic 3, “Civil Rights and Global Issues”. This reflected the profession’s inherent emphasis on political and social contexts, civil rights discussions, and pressing global issues.

Arts and Literature speeches predominantly reflected Topic 4, “Art and Truth”, indicating the profession’s focus on truth-telling, making good art, and the value of liberal arts. The academic profession presented a diverse topic range, but there was a stronger emphasis on Topic 5, followed by Topics 1 and 3.

These findings suggest that each profession has its unique thematic emphasis while sharing some common themes across the board. It underscores the importance of context in discourse and highlights how various professions address their specific audience’s needs and expectations.

5.1.4 STM Findings

Our STM analysis revealed a diverse range of wisdom dimensions and traits embedded in these speeches (RQ2). For instance, we noticed themes of self-regulation and moral maturity, empathy and altruism, self-reflection and ethical understanding, and societal transformation. Interestingly, we observed that these wisdom dimensions align well with the definitions provided by various scholars in the field of wisdom studies, such as Grossmann, Karami, Nonaka, Sternberg, McKenna, and others. This alignment underlines the utility of our text-mining technique in extracting meaningful insights about wisdom leadership from textual data.

Moreover, by examining the distribution of topics across different professions, we connected the themes and common elements identified through our STM analysis with wisdom leadership aspects relevant to each profession (RQ4). For example, the entertainment sector showed a prevalent theme of learning from failure and the altruistic use of power. On the other hand, law and politics were associated with wisdom dimensions such as the integration of heart and mind, self-reflection, and ethical understanding. These findings highlight each field’s unique characteristics and dominant themes.

Furthermore, our results revealed noticeable differences in topic distributions among speeches delivered by leaders from various professions (RQ5). Specific topics, such as Topic 6 on institutional responsibility and historical awareness, resonated strongly in the business sector, while other topics, such as Topic 3 on resilience and empathy, were more dominant in law and politics. These variations suggest that different wisdom dimensions may be more or less relevant depending on the professional context, reflecting the multifaceted nature of wisdom leadership.

5.1.5 Top2Vec and Word2Vec Findings

In response to RQ1 and RQ4, the word2vec results highlighted the complexity and multifaceted nature of wisdom through key interconnected terms such as “wisdom,” “moral,” “conscience,” “action,” and “judge.” These terms and their interrelations were linked to the components of Sternberg’s Balance Theory of Wisdom, the Berlin School’s idea of wisdom, McKenna’s and Grossmann’s definitions of wisdom, and Karami’s assertion about wisdom. Thus, the analysis not only surfaced the most frequent ngrams in the speeches but also illuminated how they provide insights into the concept of wisdom leadership.

For RQ2, these results demonstrated how text-mining techniques could be used to reveal the traits of wise leaders. For instance, the interconnected terms “judge,” “humanity,” “moral,” and “action” highlighted the importance of ethical values, balancing various interests for a common good, and pragmatic intelligence. These traits align with the dimensions of wisdom leadership as they suggest a wise leader would need to be analytical, morally grounded, and practically intelligent.

Addressing RQ3, the Top2Vec analysis recognized principal themes across the speeches, ranging from ‘Development and Improvement’ to ‘Communal Responsibility and Global Challenges.’ These topics revealed wisdom’s reflective, cognitive, and affective dimensions. This is crucial, as it shows that wisdom is not only a personal attribute but also a social one that extends to community interactions and global concerns.

Finally, for RQ5, a heatmap of topics across various professions revealed variations in the emphasis on different themes in different professional contexts. For instance, ‘Communal Responsibility and Global Challenges’ was prominent in speeches from law and politics professionals, indicating their societal and global focus. These variations can reveal unique characteristics of wisdom leadership in different professional contexts, showing how wisdom may manifest differently depending on the context and profession.

In the process of our analysis, the themes of pursuit of passion or achievement emerged across various professional speeches. The following section serves as an interpretive space where we critically engage with these prominent themes and explore their relationship with wisdom leadership.

5.2 Wisdom Leadership Reinterpreted: The Pursuit of Passion and Achievement

In our analysis of commencement addresses, a recurring theme emerged centered around the pursuit of passion and the drive for achievement. At first glance, this appears to be a clear directive: follow your passions, strive for success, achieve great things, or Jobs’ “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Yet, when considering this theme in the context of wisdom, the interpretation deepens and evolves.

Traditionally, wisdom is not solely defined by the pursuit of personal passions or achievements. It encompasses a broader spectrum of life experiences, ethical considerations, and a balance between personal fulfillment and collective well-being. Wisdom extends beyond goal-oriented thinking to include the process of understanding why we choose specific goals, how we aim to achieve them, and the possible implications of these decisions.

Pursuing passions and achievements can indeed be seen as a facet of a wise life, but they do not associate with wisdom in themselves. They are potential components of a life enriched by wisdom, but not definitive markers of it. The reason lies in the distinction between the goal (the what) and the journey (the why and the how).

Wisdom comes into play in determining whether these passions and goals align with broader ethical considerations and contribute positively to both personal growth and societal well-being. Wisdom guides us in how we strive to fulfill these ambitions, considering not just the intended result, but also the means, the impacts, and the adjustments required along the way.

Passion is beneficial when it fuels engagements that lead to personal fulfillment and positive societal impacts. Achievements are commendable when they result from ethical actions, wise decision-making, and when they contribute to individual and societal development. Therefore, wisdom is not about achieving the goal at any cost, but rather achieving it in a way that is considerate of the broader context and implications.

In essence, the true wisdom lies in the ability to balance passion with responsibility, achievement with ethics, and personal success with collective well-being. It involves recognizing and acknowledging the interconnectedness of our actions and aspirations with the world around us. It requires the humility to continue learning, the courage to adapt and change, and the generosity to consider the greater good.

Therefore, the repeated emphasis on pursuing passion and striving for achievement in the commencement addresses, when viewed through the lens of wisdom, can be seen as a call for a balanced, thoughtful, and responsible approach to one’s life journey. It encourages graduates not only to aspire and strive but also to do so with wisdom, understanding, and consideration of the broader impacts of their pursuits.

5.3 Acknowledging Limitations and Potential Biases

While the present study provides valuable insights into the concept of wisdom in commencement speeches, it also has a number of limitations and potential biases that should be taken into account when interpreting the findings.

Firstly, the commencement speeches represent a specific context, marked by institutional traditions and expectations. As such, they might not fully capture the breadth and depth of wisdom leadership across different professional fields. Speakers may adjust their message to fit the occasion and the expectations of their audience, which could affect the themes and wisdom-related concepts that are highlighted in their speeches.

Secondly, our findings are tied to the cultural and institutional settings in which the speeches were given. They may not necessarily generalize to other settings or countries, and additional research would be needed to explore potential cultural differences in wisdom and leadership concepts.

Thirdly, the study focused on a specific conceptualization of wisdom, as captured by the Balance Theory and other theoretical frameworks mentioned in the study. Wisdom is a complex construct, and different theoretical perspectives might highlight other aspects of wisdom that were not covered in this study.

The interpretation of the topics generated by different algorithms also involves a certain level of subjectivity. While we tried to provide clear and consistent interpretations, other researchers might interpret the same topics differently. Additionally, topic modeling is an exploratory technique, and its findings should be seen as hypotheses that need to be confirmed through additional research.

Regarding the profession-specific insights, our sample might have been biased towards certain professions, and our findings might not necessarily generalize to all individuals within these professions. The results related to profession-specific topics should therefore be interpreted with caution and confirmed through further studies.

While we used advanced text mining techniques to analyze the speeches, these techniques have their own limitations. They are not able to fully capture the nuanced meanings of the speeches, and they might miss some wisdom-related concepts that are expressed implicitly rather than explicitly. Validation of our findings through other methods or data sources would provide stronger evidence for the identified patterns.

Lastly, the interpretation and application of wisdom is also indeed subjective and can vary greatly among individuals based on numerous factors such as personal values, cultural background, life experiences, and cognitive abilities. Moreover, not everyone can readily adopt a long-term perspective, often due to immediate pressures, limited resources, or a lack of foresight and experience. The challenge, then, is not only to develop wisdom but also to recognize and respect its diverse expressions. Wisdom does not demand grand sacrifices or historical achievements from everyone. Instead, it invites us all to grow in self-awareness, nurture empathy, develop our understanding of the world, and strive for balance in our decisions and actions. It invites us to see beyond our immediate circumstances and to consider the broader implications of our actions—something that requires practice, patience, and, indeed, wisdom itself. Future research could address these limitations by using more diverse data sources, exploring other theoretical perspectives on wisdom, employing complementary analysis methods, and conducting more detailed profession-specific analyses. Despite these limitations, we believe that our study provides a valuable starting point for exploring the concept of wisdom in leadership discourse and highlights the potential of text-mining techniques for analyzing large text corpora.

5.4 Final Thoughts and Future Research

It appears that wisdom leadership can be largely considered as a universal construct, as it manifests across different professions. The common elements identified, such as embracing complexity, ethical decision-making, and acting for and valuing the common good, reflect broad principles that transcend specific professional boundaries.

However, while the core principles of wisdom leadership are universal, the application of these principles may vary according to the profession. Certain themes or topics might be more pertinent in one profession than another, reflecting the unique contexts and challenges of different fields. For example, speeches from the field of Law and Politics might emphasize civil rights, while those from Arts and Literature might focus more on creativity and challenging conventional norms.

Therefore, it can be concluded that wisdom leadership is a combination of both universal and profession-specific elements. The universal aspects form the principles that are applicable across all fields, while the profession-specific elements allow these principles to be applied effectively in different contexts.

Looking ahead, there are several avenues for future research. A deeper exploration of how universal principles of wisdom leadership are interpreted and applied within each profession could be undertaken. This could involve conducting interviews with leaders from different fields or more detailed case studies, providing a richer, more nuanced understanding of wisdom leadership in context.

An expansion of the dataset is another promising direction for future research. While commencement speeches offer valuable insights, including other forms of public discourse such as professional talks, interviews, or written works by leaders could provide a more comprehensive perspective on wisdom leadership. Furthermore, incorporating more commencement addresses from different cultures could illuminate potential cultural variations in wisdom leadership.

A crucial component of this research is the detailed results and interactive visualizations of the Structural Topic Modeling analysis, accessible at the following link: https://khadjehali.com/javad/vis/stm/. This tool provides an in-depth exploration of topic distribution, semantic polarity, and document classifications across various professions, speakers, and locations. While it has been instrumental in our exploration of wisdom leadership, the potential applications of this tool extend well beyond this specific subject. The adaptable nature of this tool enables researchers to delve into a broad spectrum of subjects. For instance, sociologists could use it to analyze societal norms as expressed in commencement speeches, or political scientists could study the articulation of ideologies or construction of political identities. It has the potential to provide subtle insights into a wide range of study fields, from psychological studies of motivation and emotional appeals to historical analyses of social values across time.

In summary, this research represents a step in extending our understanding of wisdom leadership, highlighting both its universality and profession-specific variations. It also demonstrates the power of mixed-methods research in extracting deep, nuanced insights from text data. It affirms the potential of combining quantitative and qualitative techniques to enrich our understanding of various complex phenomena, thus making a noteworthy contribution to the broader field of text analysis research. The insights gathered here, in conjunction with potential future research directions, stand to make contribution to the ongoing discourse on wisdom leadership.