Why Digital Companies Need More Liberal Arts Majors

As technology becomes more commoditized, consumers and those who sell to them will demand differentiation which can best be provided not through engineering, but creativity.

Diversity of talent for organizations is the same as it is for species: a matter of survival. JL

Tom Perrault reports in Harvard Business Review:

As consumers begin to lead a digital life, companies must meet them where they are, regardless of their tech savvy. Companies with easy-to-use interfaces and intuitive functionality will win every time.Computers will take over more and more tasks, including programming and data crunching. What can’t be replaced (are) skills such as creativity, empathy, listening, and vision.
In today’s digitally driven world, companies are competing ferociously for technological skills. They believe the ability to create the hard code that makes a product come to life is at the heart of their success. Without code, after all, you merely have ideas on a napkin or a dream in your head.
It’s the same with data analysts and business intelligence engineers. What’s more important than taking the massive amounts of data that a company receives every day and making sense of it? Decoding this data, everyone tells us, will help companies pinpoint exactly what each consumer wants and will inform a product’s creation in turn.
The current emphasis on these skills seems totally rational, as nothing happens without them and no company can ever hope to be successful in their absence. But what companies forget is that this won’t be true forever. In fact, it won’t be long before these very skills become commoditized. In the future, computers will take over more and more of these tasks, including programming and data crunching. The things that are foundational to a company’s success today will be replaced and automated by a machine tomorrow.
But there will be a limit to how far computers can replace human capabilities, at least in the near long term. What can’t be replaced in any organization imaginable in the future is precisely what seems overlooked today: liberal arts skills, such as creativity, empathy, listening, and vision. These skills, not digital or technological ones, will hold the keys to a company’s future success. And yet companies aren’t hiring for them. This is a problem for today’s digital companies, and it’s only going to get worse.
For example, launching a product with a mediocre user interface or unintuitive user experience is currently OK, if not encouraged as best practice. It’s part of the old Silicon Valley mantra: launch a product that barely works and iterate, iterate, iterate. But as more companies move to the digital space, they’re discovering that “launch and beg for patience” doesn’t hold true anymore. Ask Twitter how hard it is to gain new users, or ask anyone over 40 how to use Snapchat. You’ll see that neither service is designed for the mass consumer.But as consumers begin to lead a digital life, companies must meet them where they are, regardless of their tech savvy. Companies with easy-to-use interfaces and intuitive functionality will win every time over companies that create any roadblock to using a product.
That’s where liberal arts skills come in — and where liberal arts students will finally have their day in the sun. Soon, companies will rush to hire these skills in the same way that they compete for coders and engineers today. And, perhaps not unsurprisingly, certain skills will be even more in demand in the leaders of the future:
Creativity: One of the core skills is the creative thinking that will help a company attract and engage users. Every company will need to figure out how to get consumers to use its product. What does the consumer want? How does the consumer feel? How can we make this product intuitive for the consumer? Creative thinkers will help companies create an easy-to-use, non-intimidating product that everyone can access. Simplicity is hard. If it were easy, anyone could and would do it. But only people with specialized creative skills — honed from years of thinking, reading, writing, and creating — have the talent of making the complex simple and the difficult accessible.
Leaders will need to both hire for more creative talent and create the type of culture in which creatives thrive. Employees will value cultures that are supportive, understanding, fluid, open, and dynamic. It stands to reason that these are the very same traits that a leader will need to demonstrate in order to create and support such a culture. Culture creation, then, will be a prized competency of future business leaders.
Empathy: It’s the core of a creative’s passion. For companies to truly understand the needs of the customer, they must be able to think and feel like a customer would. And for a business to be successful, knowing how its customers think and feel is everything. You can’t outsource that to a computer. You need to hire for it.
Empathy is just as important, if not more so, for the business leader running a company. Once a company has outsourced any manual work or task work to computers, drones, or a 3D printer, knowledge workers and creatives will make up the bulk of any future digital company. And these same employees will have higher support requirements from their leaders than they do today.

Business leaders with heightened senses of empathy will be rewarded in this environment. Not only will they be able to understand their customer better, they will also be required to lead their workforces through a breakneck pace of innovation. And how better to do so than by truly understanding their people and what drives each of them (emphasis on “each”)? One-size-fits-all will be a thing of the past. Employees will expect a leader to understand and meet their particular needs and wants.
Listening: If empathy is at the core of creativity, then listening is at the heart of empathy. And that is exactly what liberal arts majors have been prepared to do. It’s through listening that you make sense of the world. Knowledge workers who are able to truly hear and understand what is being said — and, equally important, what is not being said — will have a powerful impact on their organizations. By listening deeply, employees build substantive relationships with each other, as well as with customers. In doing so, they can perpetuate a more powerful culture and even increase sales.
Equally, leaders will have to stop talking so much and instead listen more — much more. Their smart employees have a lot to say and expect the forum in which to say it, and they want to make sure that they are fully understood. Speaking down to or patronizing these workers won’t be acceptable. They will expect to be treated more as equals, with greater disclosure of information and fewer hidden agendas. Similarly, using stilted company jargon or being opaque in communications is a sure-fire way to lose the respect of your most valuable employees. A leader has to have the capability not only to listen hard, but to demonstrate by their actions that they can turn what they’ve heard into action.
Vision: Finally, companies in the future will need all their employees, not just their leaders, to be visionaries. Employees will need to be able to take in massive amounts of information in a world that’s changing ever faster and then make sense of it all in a way that a computer can’t. A computer can factor in objective data, but a worker must take that data and then overlay it with subjective understanding that can’t always be quantified. The ability to understand the world through different lenses and turn competing or disparate viewpoints into a compelling narrative is an art, not a science. It requires an intuitive understanding of the world that comes from a deep immersion in the liberal arts.
Companies today should begin preparing themselves to be the powerhouses of tomorrow by bringing in more employees with liberal arts skills. Rather than scorning philosophy or history majors who have spent years wrestling knotty theoretical issues and then explicating them in precise details, companies should understand that the skills these students possess will help them become the leaders and CEOs of tomorrow. Begin building a culture that tells your most critical future employees, “Your creativity, empathy, listening skills, and vision can thrive here. We’re open for business, and you’ll be the main driver of our success.”