Lisa Su's MIT Speech: In the Future, People with This Kind of Mindset Will Be the Most Valuable

In May 2026, Lisa Su, CEO of the $900 billion market cap chip giant AMD, returned to her alma mater the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and delivered a thought-provoking speech at the commencement ceremony.

In her speech, Lisa Su mentioned a highly important universal competency called the "engineer's instinct".

Today's content will break down Lisa Su's speech, and we will work together to find the answers.

I. The Transformation of Lisa Su

In the autumn of 1986, 17-year-old Lisa Su was admitted to MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hereafter referred to as MIT).

She originally thought she was very good at math, but less than two weeks later, she discovered that there were so many people at MIT with exceptional mathematical skills. The initial problem sets felt extremely difficult to her, and she, who had never stayed up late before, began pulling all-nighters to study alongside her classmates.

MIT has a way of pushing its students to their limits. Lisa Su said: "You grapple with the problem, you might burn out a circuit or two, and then suddenly, something works."

It was in that exact moment that she began to see herself as an engineer.

The UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program) changed Lisa Su's life. In Professor Hank Smith's lab in Building 39, she put on her first cleanroom suit, stepped into the dust-free space, and fabricated devices on tiny 2-inch wafers.

She conducted a series of experiments, most of which did not go as expected, so she kept making adjustments and trying again. This was the first time she no longer only learned technology in the classroom, but became a member of a team to discover new things.

Lisa Su said: "We can make things so small that they fit on a chip the size of a coin, yet powerful enough to change the world."

From that moment on, she fell in love with semiconductors.

During her doctoral studies, her advisor guided her through deeper training, transforming her from a new graduate student just starting out into someone capable of conducting original research and making new contributions to the field.

In this process, she began to believe in herself. Not the kind of confidence that assumes you will always know the answer, but the kind that even when you do not know the answer, you can find a way to solve the problem.

What Lisa Su gained at MIT, besides a wealth of knowledge, was the ability to take action in the face of the unknown. The former makes someone a "person who knows how to learn", while the latter makes someone a "person who knows how to solve problems".

The gap between these two capabilities is exactly the leap on the journey to excellence.

II. What Exactly is the "Engineer's Instinct"?

Lisa Su condensed all the skills MIT taught her into one concept: the engineer's instinct, which means facing a seemingly unsolvable problem, breaking it down into smaller parts, and then systematically conquering them step by step.

There are several key terms in this definition that we need to look at separately.

First, "seemingly unsolvable". Real-world problems often look impossible to solve at the very beginning. They are completely different from the well-designed exercises in textbooks, which have given conditions, definite answers, and clear evaluation criteria. Real problems may have incomplete information, many variables, slow progress, and unstable results.

Second, "break down". When facing a big problem, instead of asking "can I do it", you should ask: How many steps can it be broken into? What is the first step? Where is the most likely point of failure? What resources are needed? This way of thinking is not innate; it is developed through training.

Third, "systematically". Stay calm amid anxiety and uncertainty, move forward logically, and do not get carried away by emotions.

Fourth, "conquer step by step". This means embracing the process of repeated trial and error. Lisa Su carried out a large number of failed experiments in the cleanroom, and she also made long-term bets at AMD before seeing the returns.

This set of capabilities does not belong exclusively to engineers or technical teams. A marketing leader, when facing a complex user growth challenge, needs to judge the direction, collect information, break down tasks, and adjust through trial and error — that is also the engineer's instinct.

An entrepreneur, dealing with market uncertainty, needs to organize resources, withstand failures, and repeatedly verify assumptions — that is the same thing.

In fact, it is more like a universal growth capability: not shrinking from difficult problems, not panicking in the face of the unknown, reflecting on failures, and breaking down complex problems.

III. In the AI Era, We Need the Engineer's Instinct More Than Ever

Lisa Su spent a large part of her speech talking about AI, placing it alongside the major technological transformations of the past few decades: the Internet changed how we communicate, mobile computing changed our lifestyles, and cloud computing changed how we work.

She emphasized: AI is not just a tool that helps us do things faster; it is far more profound than that. It has the potential to accelerate discoveries in every field, helping us solve problems that we could never tackle before.

The field that excites her the most is medicine and healthcare, where AI can help doctors and researchers bring the world's best professional expertise to every patient.

Lisa Su said: "In the next 10 years, we may make more discoveries than we did in the past 30 years." But immediately after that, she issued a reminder: "Technology alone does not determine what the future will look like; the best people do."

She continued: "The world does not just need people who know how to use powerful tools; it needs people who know what to do with these tools: people with a sense of mission, judgment, and courage, people who can look at a difficult problem and say 'I know this is incredibly important, and we will find a way'."

IV. The Engineer's Instinct

How to Reshape Organizational Management in the AI Era

In enterprises, there are many operations with clear definitions, judgment criteria, standardized processes, and stable, replicable workflows. The problems are pre-designed, conditions are given, answers exist, and evaluation standards are definite. This system runs daily operations efficiently, but it has a side effect: it makes organizations accustomed to a world where "there must be a standard answer".

In today's world full of uncertainty, that is not the case. There are often no standard answers, and even the problem itself may not be clear at the start. It requires people to first judge the direction, then collect information, break down tasks, conduct trial and error, make adjustments, and finally move forward amid uncertainty.

This is where the value of the engineer's instinct lies: not knowing the answer immediately, but trusting that you can break down the problem, push it forward, and solve it even when you do not have the answer.

The first thing Lisa Su did when she took over AMD was not to issue directives, but to figure out what the company wanted to become in the future. Instead of asking how to boost revenue, she asked "is high-performance computing the most important technology for the future".

In this way, she placed a long-term bet and gave the team the space to think boldly.

Command-style management asks "has this been done yet", while engineer-style management asks "how many steps can this problem be broken into? What is the first step? Where is the most likely point of failure? What resources are needed?"

The former drives execution, while the latter drives thinking. In the AI era, the core value of managers needs to shift from driving execution to driving thinking.

Lisa Su emphasized that when the engineer's instinct is shared across the team, it becomes far more powerful.

The ability to break down problems cannot be exclusive to the CEO. Every team leader, every project manager, and even every frontline employee should have the ability to break down, advance, and solve unknown problems.

This requires organizations to recruit and nurture more people who "can find solutions when facing uncertain problems".

In the AI era, the competitiveness of an organization does not depend on how many AI tools it has, but on how many such people it employs.

Conclusion

At the end of her speech, Lisa Su said these words: "In the years ahead, you will always walk into another room where you have no idea what you are doing. You have been in this situation before; just find a way to work it out."

The uncertainty of the future will not diminish. Many industries will be reshaped, many business models will become obsolete, many paths will be reopened, and then closed again.

What can truly sustain an entrepreneur is the ability to face the unknown.

The engineering capabilities of an organization need to be more solid, enabling the organization to step into the real world and confront real problems.

True heroism is to actively move toward difficult problems and create certainty amid uncertainty.

This article is from the WeChat official account "NoteMan" (ID: Notesman), written by Lao Jia, and republished by 36Kr with authorization.