In a gala dinner with beautiful arrangements, great food, and entertainment from around the world, professor Cary Wasden was honored by the BYU Management Society-Hawaii Chapter with the Global Leadership Award “I am genuinely humbled… because I really love teaching, and I enjoy it when my peers appreciate what I do, and I enjoy it even more when my students appreciate what I do.”
The BYU Management Society’s vision is to “[Grow] moral and ethical leadership around the world”. They do this by establishing a network of professionals, giving opportunities to develop careers and serve in the community wherever the society’s members are found. The Society also honors achievement and excellence in a variety of areas. Wasden has a long history in the world of finance, even being rated as the #1 financial analyst in the world. He came to BYU–Hawaii in 2009 and teaches economics and finance.
The Global Leadership Award is given in recognition of integrity and commitment to excellence. Integrity has long been a part of Wasden’s life. He recounted how he moved with his family to Washington and started a financial investment firm, with the aim to do “exhaustive research on financial investments from around the world”. One of their first projects was the company ENRON. They published their research about the company, and it portrayed the company in a very negative light because, based on their research, the company was bound for bankruptcy. Immediately, they began to receive a very heavy backlash to the report from a variety of sources telling them to retract what they had said. They decided to stick to “the principles they had established from the beginning”. As history shows, they were right, and ENRON proved to be laced with fraud and went bankrupt. “I have found that that principle, as simple as it may sound, is always in your favor,” said Wasden of integrity. “It will always lead you to act ethically, and to bring honor to yourself, your school, and your church.”
Professor Wasden went on to relate the story of Jesus feeding the 5000 as told in all four gospels in the New Testament. He told how the apostles were concerned with how to feed all the people, but the Lord miraculously provided for all of them with a few loaves and fishes that a boy had brought with him. His point in telling the story was that we often “gloss over one of the more important points: the boy with the five loaves and two fishes, and he came and brought everything he had to the Lord, and the Lord magnified it,” he continued by saying “if I can give any advice from all my years of experience and failure, it is that if you give all you have to the Lord, he will take care of the rest.”
“You are not in charge, the Lord is in charge,” concluded Wasden. “If you bring everything you have to the Lord, and let him break the bread, he will bless you more than you can possibly imagine.”