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English Major and Other Oddities
by John RhoadesI have a confession to make: I was an English major in college. Not only did I complete a B.A. in English Literature, but also an M.A. and half of a Ph.D. (definitely a story for another posting). There are two prompts for this sudden bout of self-transparency.
David Brooks had a thought provoking column in the New York Times describing how, in a tough economy, the more scientific college disciplines experience a surge in majors, while the Humanities department suffers. As Brooks puts it, “When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major.” Indulge? Oh sure, that is exactly what my eight years in university felt like.
But while I was declaring my solidarity with those who have had to read Plato, Machiavelli, and Voltaire to receive their sheepskin, this column made me think about stereotypes and the role they play in organizational culture. How do the quick judgments we make about governing cultures influence the way we operate in our professional lives? How do stereotypes diminish our understanding of organizational culture, frustrating our efforts to be even more successful?
These questions lead me to the second prompt. I have the privilege of delivering Access Sciences’ first Compass Forum address on June 29th at the Hotel Zaza (register here). In this session, I will discuss how stereotypes, governing culture, and subcultures directly impact business performance.
As a test, think about your first reaction when I said I was an English major. What was your immediate reference? Now imagine I said I had a Finance background with an M.B.A. How would that perception have changed?
Stereotypes and cultural assumptions allow us to impose order and discipline on the chaos of all the information stimuli we receive everyday. They are our modern version of Greek myths, serving as shorthand for value judgments. The question, though, is how do we identify, subvert, and transform these assumptions to achieve higher business performance?
Join me on June 29th for a lively debate as we examine these questions. Meanwhile, I am going to brush up my Shakespeare just in case someone wants to discuss Henry V's leadership values.
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When I was a consultant for
When I was a consultant for Meta Group, my boss and I were driving another consultant to a business meeting in Kuwait City. I asked Brian about his credentials, and he told us he had an English degree from Columbia University. The boss and I laughed. Don had graduated in English from a small Arkansas college, planning to be a high school teacher, but instead had become a tech writer. Myself, I have a Ph.D. in English and was an English professor at the college and university levels before going into tech writing, then business/IT consulting.
I would not trade my education for anything. I think of Louis Nizer, the famous lawyer, who said he took every English course that Harvard offered. And every day I apply the intellectual discipline and the writing skill that I learned as a grad student in English.
As business and IT move closer together, as enterprise architecture comes to maturity, I find that business managers and, especially, IT managers need reeducation. Most IT managers, I would say, started as Java developers during the '90s. What they learned then is what they take as eternal reality, and I've been treated with contempt by some managers who think that anyone over 50 is a worn-out COBOL programmer.
Truth is, the ability to synthesize information across boundaries and the ability to communicate concepts effectively to different audiences are qualities essential to the consulting I do, and they are qualities that an education in English and the humanities can foster. Of course, not everyone develops those abilities through formal education, and not everyone who graduates in English can see beyond literature and classroom teaching. But these abilities are real, they are by no means inferior to those that are developed through education in science or technology, and they are increasingly valuable assets as business and information technology align behind strategy.