Sometimes Entrepreneurs Are Just Liberal Arts Majors Making Money

The room where it happened, my fate thus sealed

First, my credentials: I am the son of a mechanical engineer, spouse of an aeronautical engineer, and father of an environmental engineer. I not only support STEM, I adore STEM.

But I hail from a different tribe, that of the liberal arts majors.  I cast my lot long ago in a diner on the East Side of Providence, announcing to my college friends that I would major in history. “Oh, so you want to teach history,” one of my buddies asked, before adding, “could you pass the maple syrup?”

My fate thus sealed, I spent the rest of my undergraduate days having a particular set of skills drilled into my noggin: Sift through a mountain of information by reading quickly and critically, ask good questions, separate signal from noise, and use the results to craft a concise, compelling narrative. That is, take a feral world and tame it into a cracking good story.

After graduation, I took my history degree to Wall Street for a couple of years, returned home to earn my MBA (squeaking through Managerial Economics), and soon found myself working on the launch of a new company.

“We need a business plan,” my STEM boss said, looking at me. 

“What would you like me to do?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, dropping two binders and a box of material on my desk, “you need to quickly read through this mountain of information, ask good questions, and separate signal from noise. Then you need to draft a compelling narrative. After that,” he added, “we can go raise some money.”

Ginger could do anything Fred could--
backward and in heels.

Have you heard the old joke about Ginger Rogers, the great Fred Astaire’s dance partner?  Ginger, it was said, could do everything Fred could do—but backward and in heels.

For this lowly liberal arts major, it turned out that writing history was the same as writing a business plan, just backward and in heels. And unlike history, where my most important sources were dead, I could build a business plan by picking up the phone and speaking with a living person. 

Best of all, dancing forward into the future sometimes resulted in investors writing checks.

Liberal Arts Meets Entrepreneurship

As I researched my latest book, Innovation on Tap, I had in mind this crazy idea that both worlds could be combined, that history could be a useful tool for entrepreneurs designing business plans. Instead of a collection of dry facts, I thought, history was a laboratory where centuries of amazing experiments had been conducted. With a little diligence, these experiments would unfold as fascinating stories, some of which could have direct application to modern entrepreneurs.

A second underlying idea in Innovation on Tap is that entrepreneurship is just a bunch of liberal arts impulses directed at the market in ways that could be profitable.

Take, for example, the liberal arts tenet that says learning doesn’t have to have a direct payoff; knowledge enriches life and is good for its own sake. In the case of an entrepreneur, becoming a lifelong learner could pay unexpected dividends at any moment in his or her career.

Innovation on Tap

The classic case is Steve Jobs, who dropped out of Reed College but decided, in his free time, to attend a calligraphy course. He had no payoff in mind. He just loved the subject and thought calligraphy was beautiful. Years later while designing the Macintosh, Jobs’ knowledge of calligraphy paid off in the introduction of fonts that helped to connect user and machine.

Steve Jobs came to understand that innovation is just connecting stuff that isn’t naturally connected. Calligraphy and a keyboard come together nicely if you happen to be building a computer. Luggage and wheels combine for an easier trip through the airport. The Founding Fathers and rap intersect, if you can score a ticket on Broadway. 

A person gifted at seeing these unusual connections is lucky. If you are like me, however, then having lots and lots of things to connect is an advantage. In other words, constantly vacuuming up knowledge about anything and everything that interests you--a liberal arts perspective--can be the fuel for all kinds of innovation.

Liberal arts recognizes that the world is messy. There are few equations that add up, fewer elegant proofs. Eli Whitney built a machine that separated seed from cotton fifty-times faster than by hand—a STEM breakthrough for the ages—but failed to deliver on his promise with a misread of the Southern planter. Henry Ford engineered an orderly assembly process that moved the world, only to miss the emergence of a disorderly consumer culture. Facebook--well, imagine if Facebook had a liberal arts perspective equal to its STEM brilliance?

Liberal arts is perfect training for an entrepreneur destined to operate in a world of unreasonable customers, illogical competitors, and uncertain markets.

Finally, from history to English to philosophy, liberal arts is about storytelling. Economist Dan Kahneman reminds us that “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” Innovation may involve a ton of serious STEM work, but inevitably arises from the need for a cracking good story, one that people will embrace.

To paraphrase educator Henry Wriston, liberal arts prepares you to answer the next question, the one that you have never been asked. And entrepreneurship? Well, that’s about preparing to solve the next problem, the one that you have never seen.

Happily, the solution to that unexpected problem might just make you a little money.