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From the issue dated 2/28/2003
From Books to Business: the Value of a Liberal Education
By PETER FELLOWES
As a high-school student in the late 1950s, I was advised
to take a college degree in the liberal arts as the surest
path to a meaningful life and fulfilling career. During my
freshman year at a liberal-arts college, I read widely, took
every English course I could, wrote poetry, and kept a diary.
I wasn't worried about getting a job. All I wanted to do was
come to grips with the truth of life as expressed by great
authors.
When it came time for graduation, I decided to continue my
literary education by getting a master's degree in creative
writing. A year later, I had a degree and a teaching position
at a liberal-arts college. For the next 20 years, having
earned my Ph.D., I spent most of my working life as an English
professor, instructing students in the value of literature and
the importance of language.
Then, everything changed for me in 1989, when I accepted my
brother's invitation to join him in the management of our
family manufacturing business. What qualified me to enter this
world? Apart from my last name and the gleanings of family
conversations over the years, not much.
But I had been telling students for years that the best
preparation for a career was study in the liberal arts --
particularly English literature. I had cited the fact that
most people change their jobs at least five times during their
lives and that, for this reason, a general education was
better than a specific or technical education. I had told
students that most employers preferred to train their
employees on the job; they wanted to recruit individuals who
could think clearly, organize tasks, and communicate
effectively. I had told students that the study of novels and
lyric poetry, short stories and drama, was a proven path
toward a clear mind and an orderly spirit -- that they could
do no better than to take these skills into the real world of
work. But was I right?
As soon as I found myself sitting behind a large mahogany desk
in a tufted leather executive's chair, I quickly came face to
face with an unsettling realization: I truly did not know
where I was, what I was hearing, or what I was seeing. This
was particularly unnerving because of the prominence of my
position: I was an officer of a major office-products company
with a presumed role in shaping its future. I possessed the
respect of peers without having earned it.
I turned to an old lesson from academe. When you don't
understand, start asking questions. I began reading our
company the way I had been trained to read literature -- not
just for the story, but rather for the underlying structure
where I knew the real meaning lay. If I lacked firsthand
knowledge, I found I could work with inferences. I tried to
assess the motivations of the people with whom I was working
as if they were characters in a novel. I tried to understand
their strengths and limitations, to learn when to listen and
when to discount what I heard.
This was not an intellectual pastime but a practical
necessity. Every time I found myself involved with a problem,
I immediately received conflicting, authoritatively delivered
accounts of what was happening and why from individuals in a
better position than I to understand the problem. Knowing on
whose opinion I could depend, and how far, was an early
survival skill in the corporate organization.
At the same time, I made an arresting discovery about life in
organizations. For most of my academic career I had been an
independent contractor. Entering the business world, I began
to appreciate that most of the world's work is not done by
individuals, but rather by organizations, with individuals
complexly interacting and fractionally contributing to the
completion of shared tasks.
This modus operandi of organizations poses a disturbing
challenge to everyone from the chief executive officer to the
employee hired yesterday. To be blunt, no one really knows
what's going on. No one can see wide enough or deep enough
into the organization to understand the whole. Everyone has
just a piece of the picture in his or her hands. Business
opportunities require rapid decision making, often more
intuitive than reasoned and almost always based on lofty
summaries, undigested opinions, and dramatically related
anecdotes. Of course, professors also work with incomplete
information, but in most cases, they enjoy the privilege of
the resident expert and may forget -- at least I did -- how
uncertain a basis their reasoned arguments may have. Entering
the business world, I was shocked by the spontaneity of
decision making.
Gradually, I noticed a peculiar thing. The organization was
consuming an enormous amount of time and energy in
communicating with itself. It wasn't just me; everybody was
spending better than half of their time relating what they had
seen or heard in various parts of the company or in the
marketplace. We were continuously talking to ourselves, 24
hours a day from 10 locations around the world.
In global organizations, no one has the privilege of a global
location: Everyone is local. In such an environment, everyone
needs to be talking to everyone all the time to share
observations, to try to grasp a fleeting picture of the whole
before making decisions.
In entering this global conversation, I found myself falling
back on my education in English. I needed words, carefully
chosen and arranged, in order to help others understand what I
had observed and the conclusions I was drawing. I also needed
the rhetorical skills I had absorbed in studying literature.
To overcome the skeptical and to mobilize the indifferent, I
required language in which emotional appeals were embedded. If
it is nothing else, the world of business is a world of
action, and human nature being what it is, people must be
stirred in order to act. A vision of the future must be
summoned, the thrill of victory must be evoked, the corporate
will must be aroused if a business is to prevail against
competition. Strangely, I found myself writing far more than I
had ever done as a professor of English.
The study of the liberal arts, however, offers more than
training in the skills of critical thinking and effective
communication. Study of the liberal arts can lead to moral
understandings that are invaluable to success in whatever one
attempts in life.
When morality and business are brought up today in the same
sentence, one hears about recent corporate scandals or about
the policies of business toward the environment, the rights of
consumers, employees, shareholders, or other groups from the
surrounding community. But in holding corporations to account,
we sometimes forget to talk about individuals. We become
absorbed in the ethical crises besetting institutions and
overlook the sad and humble truth that most of us, as Tolstoy
observed, are in a better position to improve ourselves than
to reform society.
Business continually tests the character of individuals. Does
one have the self-discipline to control the human
predisposition toward selfishness? Indeed, does one recognize
that selfishness is a moral problem that we are presented with
as human beings, or does one look upon selfishness as a
powerful spur to business success and an attribute of the
successful? Does one have the courage to tell the truth, or
does one put greater confidence in the ability to manage the
truth? Has one taken possession of the mysterious gift of
empathy, such that one has some notion of what it might mean
to be fair -- such that one resists the pleasures of
caricaturing others and indulging personal biases, of
persecuting the weak and championing the strong, of
disparaging what is foreign, and, in countless other ways, of
disadvantaging others in order to try to feel better about
oneself?
To its apologists, capitalism is a system based on individuals
and companies of individuals pursuing self-interest and, in so
doing, unintentionally serving the common good. The exceptions
to this generalization loom large today. Examples of the
system rewarding enterprising self-centeredness to the
disadvantage of society are, in fact, commonplace. Still,
capitalism has not succeeded in overruling the moral laws of
life. Unless there is mutuality of opportunity, business
success falters, and most successful business people, in my
experience, instinctively understand this.
Coming from the academic world with certain prejudices about
profit-making organizations, I was surprised and genuinely
intrigued to discover this. I had not expected self-interest
to be so consciously enlightened. But mutuality is a moral
prerequisite for business activity. Unless shared interest can
be discovered and regularly honored between customer and
supplier, employer and employee, manufacturer and consumer,
management and shareholders, the business goes sour. The
economic circuit is broken.
In the recent scandals, the law is moving to punish those who
have acted unlawfully, but the marketplace is exacting its own
punishment -- imposing, arguably, a higher standard. For law
breaking, executives can be jailed, but it only takes the
taint of unethical behavior for whole corporations to be
devoured, their economic and social value cut in half or
reduced to zero.
What does a liberal education have to say about character and
the ethical testing that life presents at every turn? For me
the answer lies in the epic accounts of Homer and Spenser, in
the comedies of Shakespeare and Austen, in the narratives of
Tolstoy and James. The great aim of the liberal arts, as I was
told as a college freshman, is knowledge of oneself. There is
no higher wisdom to which we can aspire, nor more useful
knowledge that we can possess.
Peter Fellowes is president of Fellowes, a manufacturer of
consumer-electronics accessories and related office products.
He taught English at North Park University.
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Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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