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“The art of prophecy," Mark Twain declared, “is very difficult, especially with respect to the future.”
He was right. More often than not, prognosticators get it wrong – especially those who try to forecast business trends. For example, in 1929, just before the stock market crash, Irving Fisher, a prominent economics professor at Yale, announced that “stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Oops.
To be sure, predicting the future is a slippery enterprise. But the editors of “Business Week” make an admirable attempt in a recent cover story titled “The 21st Century Corporation.” Drawing upon the insights of dozens of chief executives, venture capitalists, academics, consultants and futurists, “Business Week” paints an intriguing picture of the post-industrial, information-driven, service-oriented economy.
The cover story predicts that the most effective leaders of this new perpetual-motion economy will not be technical experts but bold generalists comfortable in the face of uncertainty. They must be able to distill new ideas and make new connections from torrents of information – and do so quickly.
Such chief executives will be nimble learners and facile adapters who embrace change and harness its energies. All of these qualities, “Business Week” says, are attributes of a broadly based liberal arts education. “Although disciplines such as marketing and finances will remain key,” the magazine predicts, “there will be more value placed on a liberal arts education that encourages lateral thinking.”
In other words, the new economy needs leaders who have developed a capacity for thinking across disciplines and beyond specialties. In a knowledge-based society characterized by rapidly changing markets, technologies, careers, and relationships, a narrowly focused education will not provide the breadth or agility needed by entrepreneurs and corporate leaders.
A modern liberal arts education encompasses a wide array of subjects. Such breadth of exposure acquaints students with all of the major fields and helps them learn to think critically and creatively. While specialized training may better prepare a person for a specific job, a liberal arts education helps students hone the qualities necessary for leadership and innovation: curiosity, flexibility, experimentation, poise, and communication. It forces young people to look beyond traditional boundaries for answers, to challenge embedded assumptions, and embrace new ideas and technologies. Most important, a liberal arts education fosters a thirst for lifelong learning that is the most important attribute of tomorrow’s chief executives.
The greatest challenge for leaders in this new century, according to Roger E. Herman, a strategic business futurist and author of “How to Become an Employer of Choice,” will be to keep up, to constantly learn. In an ever-changing environment, the riches will go to those who have learned how to learn.”
Regardless of their size, the businesses that thrive in the future will be those that can best negotiate new alliances and partnerships. The leaders of these companies will need to be versed in diplomacy and adaptability; they cannot rely on traditional methods of directing and controlling.
“In the years ahead we’ll need more and more workers who can think, collaborate, create, solve problems, communicate and lead,” says Herman. “People who specialized ... during their college days are discovering that there was something missing in their education. They didn’t acquire the knowledge skills, background and insight that a liberal arts education offers.”
Indeed, from the point of view of corporate executives, the importance of specialization in higher education is diminishing. The post-industrial economy requires leaders who possess a wide range of higher-order thinking skills – analysis, synthesis, evaluation and critical judgment – that have long been the emphasis of a liberal arts education.
The most successful corporations are looking for young executives who can think, write and speak clearly, people with the poise and self-confidence to lead groups, digest data, appreciate ambiguity and grasp the big picture. As Anne Lee Verville, a senior executive at IBM recently observed, “the shelf life of a technical degree is less than five years.” To know “how to keep learning new things has become essential to economic survival.”
The message from futurists is clear: Young people should pursue diverse interests and nurture their creativity. They should learn how to play a musical instrument, how to speak a foreign language, how to relate to another culture, how to nurture a sense of play and humor and how to manipulate computers. In short, they should expand their horizons and unleash their curiosity. Above all, they should keep learning. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, sums it up: “If we can inject the liberal arts spirit into the very serious realm of business, I think it will be a worthwhile contribution.” |
