Why We Need Liberal Arts in the Business World

Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

It’s become dogmatic in certain circles to insist that only STEM subjects matter; disciplines like English, Sociology, and Music have become passé. Danish-American strategy consultant Christian Madsbjerg disagrees. Traditional humanities disciplines are not backward or vestigial; in his experience, business professionals and forward-planning capitalists need these fields to function. We’re not all plugged into an algorithm, Madsbjerg writes. Humane arts are necessary in a wealthy society.

We’ve all grown bored with the repetitive claims. America needs more welders and fewer philosophers, Marco Rubio said. Madsbjerg quotes Jeb Bush that psychology majors are headed for jobs at Chik-fil-A. Today’s data-driven world gives us all important answers, and we can accurately predict outcomes if we simply have sufficient information. Businesses run on data, and we need more number crunchers, more code writers. The numbers speak for themselves.

Not so, Madsbjerg writes. Numbers almost never speak for themselves; they need humans to interpret them. In his early chapters, Madsbjerg details several high-profile incidents where numbers, adrift from human context, proved the exact opposite of reality. Software failed to predict movements in population, economy, even disease epidemiology. Only a well-informed human could restore the context these numbers lacked, giving them power to mean anything in the real world.

From this foundation, Madsbjerg builds five formal bromides about how humanities make American business possible. I could list them: statements like “Culture—Not Individuals,” or “The North Star—Not GPS.” But unlike too many business writers, who dispense fortune cookie platitudes with casual disregard, the real joy in reading Madsbjerg comes from his explanations. A schooled philosopher himself, Madsbjerg coaches readers through a thought process, not memorized “skillz drillz.”

Why, for instance, does the Ford Motor Company struggle to sell cars in India to people who are, demographically, almost identical to their core business in America? The answer, which Madsbjerg teases out across several chapters, has roots in cultural circumstances unrelated to cars. Running the bare statistics, middle-class Indian urbanites seemingly resemble their American peers. Understanding the difference requires pausing big data and unpacking respective cultural contexts.

Christian Madsbjerg

This doesn’t mean abandoning technical skills. In my favorite illustration, Madsbjerg describes a Danish architect scouting a location for a prospective Swiss bid. Important aspects of architecture, like engineering properties of glass, steel, and masonry, apply everywhere. But aspects of designing this building, to fit into this business and regional culture, involve understandings not taught in design classrooms. These require understanding language and industry and art—in short, understanding humans.

Madsbjerg, to his credit, does not produce another crinkum-crankum encomium to why liberal arts education makes us better people. I could’ve written that; I probably have. As a business consultant, Madsbjerg maintains focus on economic implications. Liberally educated professionals make better business executives, he insists, because their diverse education allows them to face difficult situations, sift conflicting evidence, and make decisions that improve everyone’s condition.

This requires a complex relationship with information. Business executives who turn data into outcomes don’t simply receive their information; they run it through filters that, for lack of better terminology, resemble anthropology, literature, and art. Business history, and Madsbjerg’s prose, is replete with examples of people, well-trained to do one thing (spreadsheets, double-entry bookkeeping), who stumbled altogether when confronted with the larger picture. Liberally educated professionals can simply adapt better.

And Madsbjerg himself is actually a good example of this. I’ve had several books cross my desk recently, offering to make readers into billionaire business icons; most either bury the audience in source notes and statistics, or tell long, rambling anecdotes that seem largely irrelevant. Madsbjerg, by contrast, creates the kind of balance that makes his advice practical: numbers where they’re necessary, stories where they’re relevant, always couched in comprehensible context.

Humans are sensemaking creatures, Madsbjerg writes, thus his title. Increases in data collection and statistical analysis have made sensemaking more powerful, nuanced, and worthwhile. But data never simply exists as-is; it always comes from somewhere, and requires human intelligence to make it applicable. Without that human intelligence, which comes from understanding literature, social science, and other humanities disciplines, numbers mean nothing, or even create more confusion than they solve.

I’ve read and reviewed several business books recently, and hated more than I care to recount. The worst are often mere billboards for the authors’ consultancies, comprehensible only if a Harvard MBA or the author is present. Madsbjerg has instead created a manifesto. Businesses, money, and data all serve people, he writes, not vice versa. Understanding this makes the difference between success and failure.

Poor-Shaming in the Self-Help Industry

Earlier this week, New York-based MSW Melody Wilding published a column declaring people prone to poor decision-making could improve their choices, and their lives, using the HALT method. This approach requires people making any particular choice to first take care that they aren’t choosing while Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. I reached the end and wondered: does this author realize she just described the experience of being poor?

I don’t mean the experience of being destitute. Of course people living in illegal squats or sleeping on sidewalks make poor choices. Living day by day, hour by hour, they lack freedom and security enough to even make long-term decisions; they’re more focused on ensuring the few possessions they still have don’t get pilfered while they’re chasing the next meal. We expect the truly indigent to make bad decisions.

Rather, I mean ordinary working poor. People like me, living paycheck to paycheck, spend much of our time Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. I’ve sometimes punted meals onto the next pay cycle, banking on the reality well-known to survivalists, that the sensation of hunger dissipates after two to three days. I’ve postponed sleep to dedicate time and energy looking for other jobs, hoping to improve my material situation to rise above a constant HALT state.

And the job conditions absolutely require a tolerance for both loneliness and fatigue. I know, writing this, that by the time you read it, I’ll probably be at my job, working under solitary or near-solitary conditions. The equipment I use is too loud to permit me plugging earbuds into my phone, much less conversing with whatever co-workers might wander past. Even in a crowd, work conditions are intensely isolating.

Just last week, my boss assigned me a side task, “when you need a break.” So I assumed the task was low-priority, and continued my main assignment. The next morning, I found the parts I’d been assigned to locate and collect, when I needed a break, jammed atop my regular tools so precariously that, if I moved one piece, the others would collapse, possibly breaking my tools. My boss admitted pulling this passive-aggressive move out of pure petty spite.

So yeah, I’m Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired most of the time. Nor is this unique to any particular job. My blue-collar career has consisted of both construction and assembly line work, jobs that pay poorly because they’re considered low-skill and unimportant, and leave workers constantly surrounded by people but unable to talk. Before that, I was a university adjunct, a job that left me socially stimulated, but chronically broke and overextended.

These conditions are complicated by issues that seem incidental, but prove very important. For instance, the poorer you are in America, the further you live from work, statistically speaking. And probably, the further you live from access to public transportation, too. So you’re economically dependent upon your car, in which you probably spend a significant portion of your non-work hours. That’s time not spent with family, friends, or doing anything constructive or ennobling.

Also, a growing body of evidence indicates that most addictive behaviors, including substance abuse and certain other addictions, like gambling or risky sex, originate from some form of pain. This may include physical pain, or the psychological pain induced by loneliness. As the 1990s song indicates, Common People “dance and drink and screw, because there’s nothing else to do.” Put concisely, despite the common wisdom addictions don’t cause poverty; poverty causes addictions.

America’s elected officials prefer to invest resources in expanding what’s already Earth’s biggest military, offsetting costs by cutting half-invisible programs like Meals on Wheels. Why, these officials ask, can’t the elderly get their children to provide food and other protections against economic freefall? But these same officials do nothing to prevent the concentration of wealth in a few major cities, forcing young adults to move to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco in pursuit of work.

So yeah, America’s poor are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired most of the time. This forces us into cycles of lousy decision-making that prevent us improving our own lot. We recognize our own situation; we don’t need Gothamite experts reminding us. Yet self-help writers, from Jack Canfield to Suze Orton, constantly invent new ways to imply the poor are poor only because they lack Wall Street’s well-worn methods of saving, investing, and other good decisions.

I believe Melody Wilding means well. I certainly attempt to improve myself and my decision-making constantly. But when my job sometimes requires me to work thirteen days on, one day off, telling me that I’m making bad decisions because I’m tired isn’t just insulting. It’s a sign of deep-rooted ignorance in today’s economic atmosphere.

Who Is This Jon Ronson Person Anyway?

Jon Ronson, The Elephant in the Room: A Journey into the Trump Campaign and the “Alt-Right” and The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones: And the Less Amazing Adventures of Some Other Real-Life Superheroes

Welsh journalist Jon Ronson probably came closest to hitting the big time when Ewan McGregor played him in the 2009 film The Men Who Stare At Goats. He lacks Hunter S. Thompson’s name recognition, despite being visibly influenced by Thompson’s gonzo style, but continues producing prolifically. Having recently discovered Ronson’s work, I decided to investigate him further by reading some of his standalone digital essays. Sadly, I emerged more confused than when I went in.

I cannot dispassionately consider Ronson’s essay about the Alt-right, in largest part because he published it before the 2016 general election. Like me, he considered Clinton's victory a foregone conclusion, and treats Donald Trump as a nine-days wonder, bound to blow over quickly. Interactions with actual conservatives present as low comedy. Thus he doesn't so much unpack Trump, as mock Trump's various hangers-on, especially Alex Jones, to whom Ronson has a personal and professional connection.

More important, for an essay whose title promises to go "Into the Trump Campaign and the Alt-Right," it offers precious few inside views. Ronson wanders into Alex Jones' studio a few times, where he's greeted with polite distrust. But he never meets Trump, Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, or Kellyanne Conway. His Trump campaign reports originate in the press gallery way above the Republican National Convention. He’s one among the crowd; there's no insidership on display.

Completing this essay, I feel no better informed about the Alt-Right than going in. Who are they? What is their unifying position? When did they uncouple from the mainstream right? Are they more than PR jargon? For a term that's gotten ballyhooed widely in the last six months, I realize I know little about them. I undertook this essay, partly, hoping it would clarify my confusion. Instead I feel as flummoxed and adrift as ever.

This essay doesn't know what it wants to be about, probably because its author doesn't know what he wants to accomplish. We're I grading this whirlwind in my classroom, I'd say it lacks a thesis statement. Without that, the author lacks focus, and the reader lacks grounding. Ronson apparently expected a message to emerge from this stream of consciousness. But it's just a mélànge of liberal journalist buzzwords opportunistically grabbing a waiting, but confused, audience.

Ronson’s essay about the Real-Life Superhero Movement has the opposite problem: where he analyzes the Alt-Right he never meets, he meets the Superheroes he barely analyzes. Fluke Internet publicity made Phoenix Jones a viral sensation in the late 2000s, despite being hardly the only unarmed, costumed crimefighter in America, or even Seattle. Equipped with a press agent and a theatrical flair, Jones made civilian street patrols, formerly a fringe area, suddenly visible, if still unpopular.

Jon Ronson

Late-night patrols with Jones’s Rain City Superhero Movement reveal a strikingly banal truth: they don’t do much. Though Jones claims he’s been shot on patrol, his principal activity apparently involves making people stare, turning public gaze on unsavory people doing unsavory things, until they back down. They’re less crime-fighters, more public spectacle. In many ways, mostly unspoken but once briefly acknowledged, these “superheroes” channel the existential malaise inherent in Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel Watchmen.

Though the Rain City Superheroes have garnered media attention, they’re hardly America’s only self-proclaimed superheroes. Ronson visits other cities, only to find himself deeply disappointed. New York’s organized “superheroes” are effective at dispersing criminals, but have little flair; Ronson calls them bullies. San Diego’s superheroes make good PR, but patrol safe, gentrified downtown streets. Only the Rain City Superheroes combine theatre with (sadly paltry) results.  Despite many fine-sounding promises, this ain’t the Justice League, folks.

Unfortunately, Ronson only makes these “heroes” into punch lines. He observes them only one or two nights, which, combined with cursory interviews, denies them any reliable long view. He makes no attempt to get viewpoints from police, policy experts, psychologists, or basically anyone outside the movement. He simply contrasts the superheroes’ high-minded rhetoric with their banal results and rolls his eyes. Fans of pop psychology will see avenues for deeper investigation, which Ronson basically ignores.

These essays don’t instill confidence in Ronson’s journalism. The one trait they share is Ronson himself. Like P.J. O’Rourke and other Rolling Stone alumni, his “journalism” involves reporting what happened to him, and assuming it’s representative. If a student presented such content to me, I’d explain the Fallacy of Composition and suggest avenues for rewrite. But maybe that’s why I’m still slaving in the salt mines, while Ronson gets movie resales and TED Talk invites.

The “Gig Economy” and the American Work Ethic

Wages, insurance, guaranteed work? Screw you, who needs 'em?

Here’s a riddle for you: how can we call somebody “manager” of a facility if we never see him? I wondered that when the titular factory floor manager visited our shift one night. And when I say “one night,” I mean for forty-five minutes at the beginning of the shift. In over three years working third shift, I never saw our supposed factory manager before or after that all-crew meeting. Third shift was organizationally disconnected from the rest of the company.

Halfway through that meeting, a virtual monologue of bromides reheated from Stephen Covey and Kenneth Blanchard, the “manager” asked the assembled workers: “How many of you have second jobs outside this company?” About a quarter of workers raised a hand. “See there? That’s what I call initiative. When my son asks for a bigger allowance, I tell him to be more like the workers at [Company Name] and get a job. Take responsibility for yourself.”

Let’s be clear. In a room entirely comprised of adults working full time, with frequent mandatory overtime shifts, this manager considered it an indicator of high ethical character that roughly one in four workers cannot make ends meet. These workers, the majority of whom have spouses, partners, and/or minor children at home, spend half their waking hours inside this man’s facility, then decamp to another entire job to cover their bills.

Earlier this week, New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino published a short article, “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death.” Tolentino quotes PR from inside “sharing economy” companies like Lyft, which praises a pregnant contract driver who picked up another fare after labor began, and Fiverr, which encourages freelancers to forego sleep. The images are pretty terrifying, especially if you amortize actual pay across work done.

But frankly, it isn’t surprising to anybody who’s worked jobs with little growth potential recently. Readers may recall the notorious McDonald's Employee Budget, which assumed workers had two jobs, while including no money for groceries or childcare. The jobs available to people lacking skills or connections, or who simply cannot reconcile their skillset with local economic demands, literally assume you can’t make ends meet on full-time employment.

Companies like Fiverr, which charges five bucks for skilled actions, are merely the culmination of economic trends, since the 1970s, that have progressively separated work from reward. They literally invite workers to charge five dollars for services like graphic design, a field that often charges in the hundreds, if not tens of thousands, of dollars for services rendered. These costs aren’t unreasonable, because buyers often reap rewards disproportionate to the value of actual performed labor.

Political cartoonist Ted Rall. Click to see source.

If you pay five dollars for, say, the cover design on your next self-published book, you’re either getting a substandard product done hastily in Microsoft Paint, or you’re profiting off somebody else’s desperation. The latter option, to the current economy, isn’t so bad. Thing is, when Tolentino associates this trend exclusively with the “gig economy,” she’s arguably missing the larger point. This isn’t a niche flaw; it has become characteristic of our entire working economy.

White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney last week defended President Trump’s proposed budget, which controversially cuts block grants to school lunch programs and Meals on Wheels to near-zero, by calling it “compassionate.” This is common reasoning in conservative circles: refusing to protect the poor gives them incentives to work. If there isn’t a floor through which people are prevented from falling, the logic goes, people will work even harder to prevent their own total economic collapse.

Yet at that same factory where I worked, where the absentee manager praised employees who needed second jobs to feed their children, I watched one young woman forced to quit a job she actually loved. She received a merit-based pay raise, which gave her just enough money to no longer qualify for protected childcare subsidies. Forced to choose between paying more out-of-pocket or leave her kids home alone unsupervised, she had only one choice: find another job that paid either more or less.

The gig economy makes visible something that’s been real but concealed for two generations now: Americans no longer value work. We give lip service to the American work ethic, to myths of self-reliance and bootstrapping. But our structural refusal to pay for the things we buy reveals our actual core values. My manager, and the PR flack who praised a Lyft driver working through birth pains, couldn’t have been clearer: If you’re poor, go fuck yourself. That’s all you deserve.

In Praise of Fanfiction

Margery Kempe, history's first
fanfiction writer

As an undergraduate, I once had a creative writing class with a guy who wrote science fiction. I have no complaints about genre writing; of the three manuscripts I workshopped that semester, two of mine were also science fiction. But this guy’s stories were based on video games. This was easy to tell with one story, where the entire plot turned on monsters jumping out from behind furniture and yelling “Boo.” He admitted the second manuscript was the backstory for his online role-playing game character.

Ordinarily, I’d pay such people no mind, besides warning then to recognize the difference between differing media while writing. First-person shooter games reward simple, repetitive action, while RPGs favor exploration and exposition over action and dialog. Pick your medium, and stick with it. But I spoke with our teacher later, who informed me that, because this one student had serious problems with what she called “fanfiction,” she forbid any genre writing in future semesters.

That’s where I have a problem. Because fundamentally, I understand what this guy wanted to do. He had joined what USC professor Henry Jenkins calls “participatory culture,” a niche that includes not only fan fiction, but fan conventions, cosplaying, RPGs based on popular franchises, and other reciprocal creation. Audiences have never been entirely satisfied simply, passively receiving their favorite stories from the dream factories that create them. They’ve always wanted to join the creation.

In my pre-internet youth, I usually had no idea such participatory culture existed. Sure, I played with action figures, and schoolyard games involved adding to the canon of TV shows. We kids loved recreating Voltron episodes, and sometimes came near blows over who played the Black Lion. Looking back, it’s funny how the kids wearing football jerseys and recreating Monday night’s scrimmage lines were considered school heroes, but students trading hand-drawn Star Wars comics were “losers.”

But dedicated fan culture went much further. Mimeographed fan magazines, including fiction based around popular franchises like Star Trek, were frequently hand-distributed at conventions and circulated among friends. Burgeoning digital technologies made distribution of fan-made works more practical, and formerly narrow fan networks began trading stories globally. Continuing stories like James Cawley’s Star Trek: New Voyages, or Nicholas Briggs’ Doctor Who spinoff Auton received international distribution.

It’s easy for cultural snobs and university professors to dismiss fan creations as “mere” juvenilia. Better writers would naturally create original works, duh. But this hasn’t always been so. Well-respected writers have long attached their creations to existing works. Some have called English Christian mystic Margery Kempe a writer of fanfiction for inserting herself into New Testament narratives. Surely the tradition is older, as many scholars consider certain New Testament epistles later imitations of Saint Paul.

Promo poster from James Cawley's
Star Trek: New Voyages

Only with the rise of affordable print technology and widespread literacy did originality become something desirable in literature. When only limited resources existed for distribution of written material, originality was regarded as theft from the common store. Why bother creating something new, when you could better spend your time hand-copying the important works of bygone masters? Until the Industrial Revolution, works like “innovation” and “newfangledness” were deployed as insults.

Fanfiction writers don’t merely derive from existing works. They attempt to join an ongoing discussion, adding to the experience. And certainly, James Cawley’s episodes will never have the arching influence the original Star Trek had, particularly as his distribution license with Paramount forbids him showing a profit. But for an intimate circle of fans, such new content deepens the experience, particularly because in creating, they more wholly immerse themselves in the act of sharing.

In graduate school, I read research indicating that teachers could broaden students’ subject understanding by having them write new material within the subject. In sciences, this could mean creative writing about a discipline: deepening students’ grasp of sociology, for instance, by having them write from the perspective of someone from another race, sex, and nationality. In literature, writing “continuations” brings students into the process. I didn’t understand A Raisin in the Sun until writing a scene where Beneatha packs her belongings.

I remember telling a Freshman Comp student that art becomes art, not because we appreciate it, but because we have a relationship with it. And when we have a relationship with something, we want to return our feelings. We want that give-and-take with friends, spouses, children. Art is no different. If we passively receive it, and create new work only at right angles, we have missed the opportunity for true reciprocation with what we love.