A wealth of knowledge in the humanities

Apr 21, 2011

By Tony Golsby-Smith

HOW many people in your organisation are innovative thinkers who can help with your thorniest strategy problems? How many have a keen understanding of customer needs? How many understand what it takes to be assured employees are engaged at work?

If the answer is 'not many', welcome to the club. Business leaders around the world have told me that they despair of finding people who can help them solve wicked problems - or even get their heads around them. It's not that firms don't have smart people working with them. There are plenty of MBAs and even PhDs in economics, chemistry or computer science in the corporate ranks. Intellectual wattage is not lacking. It's the right intellectual wattage that's hard to find. They simply don't have enough people with the right backgrounds.

This is because our educational systems focus on teaching science and business students to control, predict, verify, guarantee and test data. They do not teach them how to navigate 'what if' questions or unknown futures.

As Mr Amos Shapira, chief executive officer (CEO) of Cellcom, the leading cellphone provider in Israel, put it: 'The knowledge I use as CEO can be acquired in two weeks... The main thing a student needs to be taught is how to study and analyse things (including) history and philosophy.'

People trained in the humanities who study Shakespeare's works or Cezanne's paintings, say, have learnt to play with big concepts, and to apply new ways of thinking to difficult problems that can't be analysed in conventional ways. Here are just a few things that the liberal arts crowd can help you with:

Complexity and ambiguity: Too many companies lack the scope of understanding to stop problems before they start, because their people are too focused on immediate tasks or buried under so much data they can't see warning signs. The BP oil disaster, the manufacturing problems at Johnson&Johnson and Genzyme and many others might have been avoided if they had learnt to identify ambiguous threats.

Any great work of art - whether literary, philosophical, psychological or visual - challenges a humanist to be curious, to ask open-ended questions, to see the big picture. This kind of thinking is just what you need if you are facing a murky future or dealing with tricky, incipient problems.

Innovation: If you want out-of-the-box thinking, you need to free up people's inherent creativity. Humanists are trained to be creative and are uniquely adapted to leading creative teams.

A case in point: Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who openly acknowledges how studying the beautiful art of calligraphy led him to design the interface of the Macintosh computer.

Communication and presentation: Liberal arts graduates are well-trained in writing and presenting, making them natural fits for marketing, training and research. A focus on writing - which you need for degrees in history, literature, philosophy and rhetoric - helps people develop persuasive arguments; and a background in performance - such as theatre or music - gives people great presentation skills. And an understanding of history is indispensable to understand the broader competitive arena and global markets.

Customer and employee satisfaction: The ability to 'get under the skin' of customers and employees to discover their real needs and concerns demands something other than surveys, which yield superficial information. Instead, you need keen powers of observation and psychology - the stuff of poets and novelists.

What else? A person who has studied a foreign language or literature can run your overseas offices, or help with your global strategy by providing local insight or business analysis. Philosophers can help you with ethics. Historians can help you understand the past while giving you a picture of the future. (Just ask Procter & Gamble's A.G. Lafley, who once planned to be a professor in medieval and Renaissance history.)

If you want another good reason to hire from the humanities, consider this: Consulting firms such as McKinsey and Bain like to hire them for all the reasons I've described above. You can hire liberal arts graduates yourself, or you can pay through the nose for a big consulting firm to hire them to do the thinking for you.

The writer is the founder and CEO of Second Road, a business design and transformation firm headquartered in Sydney, Australia. This article appeared first in the March 31 issue of Harvard Business Review.

In case you're still not convinced why Humanities is important to you.