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BR1704_SYN_VELLA

Alexei Vella

College students who major in the humanities e'er get asked a sure question. They're asked it so often—and by and so many people—that it should come up printed on their diplomas. That question, posed past friends, career counselors, and family, is "What are y'all planning to exercise with your caste?" But it might as well be "What are the humanities adept for?"

According to 3 new books, the answer is "Quite a lot." From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon, people are starting time to realize that to effectively tackle today'south biggest social and technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human context—something humanities graduates happen to be well trained to practice. Call information technology the revenge of the film, history, and philosophy nerds.

In The Fuzzy and the Techie, venture capitalist Scott Hartley takes aim at the "false dichotomy" between the humanities and informatics. Some tech manufacture leaders have proclaimed that studying anything as well the Stalk fields is a fault if you want a job in the digital economy. Here'southward a typical dictum, from Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla: "Piddling of the cloth taught in Liberal Arts programs today is relevant to the futurity."

Hartley believes that this STEM-just mindset is all wrong. The main problem is that information technology encourages students to approach their pedagogy vocationally—to think just in terms of the jobs they're preparing for. Merely the barriers to entry for technical roles are dropping. Many tasks that once required specialized preparation tin now be done with uncomplicated tools and the internet. For case, a novice programmer tin can get a project off the footing with chunks of code from GitHub and help from Stack Overflow.

If we want to prepare students to solve large-scale human problems, Hartley argues, nosotros must push them to widen, non narrow, their educational activity and interests. He ticks off a long list of successful tech leaders who hold degrees in the humanities. To mention merely a few CEOs: Stewart Butterfield, Slack, philosophy; Jack Ma, Alibaba, English language; Susan Wojcicki, YouTube, history and literature; Brian Chesky, Airbnb, fine arts. Of form, we need technical experts, Hartley says, but we likewise demand people who grasp the whys and hows of human behavior.

What matters at present is not the skills you have just how yous think. Can y'all ask the right questions? Exercise you know what problem you're trying to solve in the commencement identify? Hartley argues for a truthful "liberal arts" education—one that includes both hard sciences and "softer" subjects. A well-rounded learning feel, he says, opens people upwards to new opportunities and helps them develop products that reply to existent human needs.

The human being context is likewise the focus of Cents and Sensibility, by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, professors of the humanities and economics, respectively, at Northwestern University. They argue that when economic models autumn short, they exercise and so for want of human being understanding. Economic science tends to ignore 3 things: culture'southward consequence on decision making, the usefulness of stories in explaining people's actions, and upstanding considerations. People don't exist in a vacuum, and treating them as if they do is both reductive and potentially harmful.

Morson and Schapiro'south solution is literature. They suggest that economists could gain wisdom from reading great novelists, who have a deeper insight into people than social scientists do. Whereas economists tend to treat people as abstractions, novelists dig into the specifics. To illustrate the signal, Morson and Schapiro enquire, When has a scientist's model or case study drawn a person as vividly as Tolstoy drew Anna Karenina?

Novels tin also assist united states of america develop empathy. Stories, subsequently all, steep us in characters' lives, forcing united states of america to see the world as other people practice. (Morson and Schapiro add together that although many fields of study tell their practitioners to sympathize, only literature offers practice in doing it.)

Sensemaking, by strategy consultant Christian Madsbjerg, picks up the thread from Morson and Schapiro and carries it back to Hartley. Madsbjerg argues that unless companies take pains to understand the human beings represented in their data sets, they adventure losing touch with the markets they're serving. He says the deep cultural knowledge businesses need comes not from numbers-driven market research but from a humanities-driven study of texts, languages, and people.

Madsbjerg cites Lincoln, Ford's luxury brand, which just a few years ago lagged so far behind BMW and Mercedes that the company nearly killed it off. Executives knew that becoming competitive again would mean selling more cars outside the United States, especially in China, the next big luxury market. So they began to advisedly examine how customers around the world experience, not just drive, cars. Over the course of a year, Lincoln representatives talked to customers about their daily lives and what "luxury" meant to them. They discovered that in many countries transportation isn't drivers' acme priority: Cars are instead seen as social spaces or places to entertain concern clients. Though well engineered, Lincolns needed to exist reconceived to address the customers' human context. Subsequent design efforts have paid off: In 2016 sales in China tripled.

What these three books converge on is the idea that choosing a field of study is less important than finding means to expand our thinking, an idea echoed by yet another set of new releases: A Practical Education, past business professor Randall Stross, and Yous Can Do Annihilation, by journalist George Anders. Stem students can intendance about homo beings, just as English majors (including this one, who started college studying computer science) can investigate things scientifically. We should be careful not to let interdisciplinary jockeying make usa cling to what we know all-time. Everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer, equally the saying goes. Similarly, at how great a disadvantage might nosotros put ourselves—and the earth—if nosotros strength our minds to arroyo all problems the same way?

A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2017 issue (pp.144–145) of Harvard Business Review.