Rita: Believe it or not, I studied 19th-century French poetry.
Phil: [laughs] What a waste of time!
-Groundhog Day, 1993
Let me get this off my chest: I was never a history lover. You know those people who get excited about news archives and tours of the Colosseum? My favorite part of a history trip to Washington D.C. as an eighth grader was the Hard Rock Cafe. Now, I never disliked history — it was full of libel and guns and pillaging. Plus, of all the potential disciplines in college, I thought history would best hone my ability to write. So I became a history major. But I wasn’t what you’d call a cheerleader.
I wouldn’t even say I was singing history’s praises when I graduated. I loved my classes and professors, I did reasonably well, and I enjoyed what I studied. But if history were a person, I wouldn’t exactly have taken a bullet for him.
I think differently now.
After graduation, I went to journalism school and then became a writer for a financial firm in New York. In the years that followed, I was tasked with writing about the Federal Reserve, companies in the energy sector, real estate in China, grantor-retained annuity trusts, yield curves, and tax legislation. Nothing liberal arts-y there. But the strangest thing happened in the midst of this: Over and over, as I became immersed in the work, I looked up and found myself gravitating back to the same disciplines my old professors had instilled. I started loving the liberal arts by accident. And it was because of those principles the professors had drilled day in and day out…
Go back to the source. Humanities professors hammer home that primary sources are where the gold is. You can read 17 biographies of Lincoln, but nothing will put you in his shoes like reading his letters to his wife. In the same way, you can read four articles that tell you what the Fed’s recent meeting minutes mean…or you can read the minutes yourself. I’ve found that my strongest thinking comes when I take the time to read, watch, or inspect the primary sources and come to my own conclusions. There’s always a temptation to simply regurgitate information; liberal arts majors learn to fight it.
It applies across professions. The best brand consultants demand to look, see, and feel all of a company’s marketing materials as if they were first-century parchment. The best investment analysts don’t just read about soybean markets; they visit farms in Brazil. And the best CEOs don’t just form their opinions based on what the executive team says; they walk the halls themselves. In every profession, the best performers are those with the keenest sense of what’s really going on — on the team, in the company, throughout the industry. And if you want to know what’s going on, go back to the source.
Gathering all the facts is easy; it’s making an argument that’s tough. When you’re in middle school, social studies and literature and philosophy are about collecting and memorizing the facts: what the Magna Carta was, what the difference between a simile and metaphor is, and how Descartes’ views differed from Hume’s. But as you get dig deeper, you recognize that downloading facts is the easy part — the real challenge is making sense of them. A bad historian can tell you five theories of what started the Sino-Japanese War. A good historian knows the facts well enough to tell you which one is best. Facts are not the answers; they are the clues. It’s up to you to figure out where those clues point. As a liberal arts major I learned that, paradoxically, studying history can be a frighteningly creative process.
The same is true in business. Today, our economic and social problems rarely stem from not having enough information, but too much. In an instant, people can access sales data across 100 countries, a million survey responses, or 94 pages on operating expenses. The real value is taking that data…and then using it to make a compelling argument. Find out what it means. Weigh the evidence carefully…and then be decisive. Defend your thesis: “There are four ways we can reduce expenses by 10%…but given the evidence, this is my recommendation, and here’s why.”
Find the story. From our earliest days, we are hard-wired to love stories. We like to be pulled by a narrative, to uncover the surprising, the fascinating, the infuriating, and the human. And perhaps no discipline is more replete with stories of the human condition than the liberal arts. Think of Anne Frank’s diary, or Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, or Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. Studying the liberal arts conditions you to keep asking the same questions: Where is the conflict? Who are the people, and what are their qualities, quirks, and flaws? Where is the story?
Business is about finding the story, about taking a boatload of information and seeing what it represents: the people, the conflict, the breakthroughs. Investors, employees, and clients are likely to perk up their ears a little when they hear, “I learned a lot about our company’s trajectory when I overheard this conversation at the airport last week…” Stories stick. You can present quarterly numbers about revenue and headcount, but the only way you’ll hold people’s attention is by tying it to a broader story. Studying the humanities conditions us to sense what is human in every set of information — whether a client conversation, annual report, or product — and to discover the story within.
* * * * *
It’s no secret that the liberal arts are on trial today. When you talk to parents of high school and college students, you hear more and more that their children need to major in something that will get them a job for God’s sake. Tomorrow’s leaders, the thinking goes, are the engineers, statisticians, computer scientists, and medical researchers.
Maybe so. Certainly we need to train those who can create the software and jets and medicine of an increasingly technological, data-driven world. But just as important, I think, is to equip people with the discipline to tie that data to what’s human, people who know how to analyze evidence and make a sound argument, who know how to take a step back and see the broader narrative, who know how to tell the story, who recognize that analyzing anything isn’t always an objective, algorithmic process, but something that requires insight, interpretation, and creativity.
In other words, the business world will always be hungry for people who know how to really think. That’s the essence of studying the liberal arts, really. Even if you learn it by accident.
Ricky McRoskey 
Leave a comment