What Good is My English Degree?

November 25, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

What kind of job are you going to get with an English degree (or a degree in History, Classics, Religion, Music, Art History, Anthropology, Philosophy or French)? You’re wondering. Maybe your parents are too.

Or then again: you studied the humanities and now you’re 10 or 15 or 25 years out of school. But every workday, you feel like you need a crash course in technology, social media, marketing, engineering and accounting? Why does what you studied seem to have so little value? Why do all these other things seem so important?

What you learned by studying the humanities does have value—tremendous value. But there are many reasons you might not think so, and a brief look at some of them might be helpful before discussing how the humanities can bring the greatest value to your job today.

The Industrial Revolution kicked off an explosion of technological advancement that has only accelerated in our lifetimes. (It’s x amount of memory on that chip today, twice as much tomorrow, and so on.) At the same time, advances in science created an experiment-based way of explaining the world that clashed with—and has now largely overtaken—a faith- or story-based worldview, at least in so-called “advanced societies.” (It’s less church attendance and more individualized spirituality, when faith remains a part of our lives at all.)

In their upward trajectory, technology and science were also vastly improving our standard of living. At the same time that questions of meaning and purpose became more personalized, many of us were also feeling that we no longer needed the humanities to improve the quality of our lives. Technology and science were attending to our material comfort along with our wellbeing.

Or so we thought.

Several writers have lamented the sidelining of the humanities. For example, Anthony Kronman has argued that as the arts have lost their prominence in our schools, we have almost lost the ability to develop an important dimension in our lives.

Where education used to mean exposure to a canon of Western thought to help students determine “how I should live my life,” that canon has increasingly come under attack. Some viewed it as propaganda from a group of white, Eurocentric oppressors, while others challenged these texts for presenting “subjective” interpretations of reality instead of the “objective” (and therefore more reliable) view that science and technology provides.

So in the face of this powerful onslaught, where is the value in your English degree?

Its value is to give you something that science and technology never can: a personal story that gives your life as well as your work both meaning and purpose. Despite our human flaws and ultimate mortality, the story you’re writing recounts how you can make a difference for yourself and others in your community by what you chose to do everyday. Through the humanities, you have lifelong access to role models and ideas that help you to live a good and fulfilling life.

It is the insight gained from these stories that business needs the most today.

In his “How to Avoid a Bonfire of the Humanities,” Michael S. Malone notes that since the best products and services aim at meeting real human needs and making our lives better, the best way to bring them to market is with stories that resonate in people’s lives.

Given the dominance of science and technology and its associated impacts today, fewer people know how to find what’s meaningful on their own, and fewer still can deliver it to them. Asked what made his company special, Steve Jobs said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

Think about it. It’s not what the product is that makes you buy it, or how you use it, but why it makes your life better. (Simon Sinek’s much-viewed TED talk is about just this point.) Your humanities degree has economic value precisely because it enables you to understand “the why.”

Where the English major is needed is at the intersection between the company and its customers. Having studied “humanity,” you have the ability to focus your company on meeting basic human needs in ways that neither science nor technology ever can. It is a priceless perspective that is needed in marketing, sales, and customer service, but also at every stage of product development and design. Again: Apple ads, Apple stores, and Apple products satisfy Apple customers as much as they do because of Apple’s English majors.

Malone concludes his “Bonfires” article by noting that in the future the market advantage will go to companies like this:

that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling. And not just creative writing, but every discipline in the humanities, from the classics to rhetoric to philosophy. Twenty-first century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.

The humanities have been undervalued and shunted aside, but what they have given us is more essential in the best jobs than ever. Far from putting you at a disadvantage in the workforce, they give you a powerful advantage. And the places where you should want to be working know it.

When Experience is the Best Teacher

September 27, 2012 By David Griesing 3 Comments

You’re at work thinking: I’ve got to get out of here.

Maybe you’re feeling a persistent ache (I’m wasting away here), or the pain is impossible to ignore (this job is killing me!)

It’s that trigger moment when you’ve not only had enough, but also start thinking about what to do next.

But even before the plan emerges, you hesitate. I can’t do anything I want to do without going back to school. I need a degree, and it will take two, three or four years before maybe I start getting what I need to be getting out of my work. (That is, all those things that you’re not getting now.) Will investing more time and money in your education be worth it?

Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

Paying for school used to be the relatively reasonable cost of getting where you wanted to go. No more. Graduates are struggling to find jobs that pay them enough to cover both their loan payments and the most basic necessities. For this reason alone, it may be time to consider whether more education is truly worth it.

Some are also questioning whether the education system is the primary driver of American innovation and wealth creation. Gregory Ferenstein argues that America’s economic success is due to the huge numbers of high performing (that is, “smart”) people in the U.S., a continuous influx of the most talented immigrants, access to the world’s best research facilities, and the largely unfettered economic opportunity all of us enjoy in this country.

Research has consistently shown that on nearly every measure of education (instructional hours, class-size, enrollment, college preparation), what students learn in school does not translate into later life success.

Instead, “[d]etermination, raw intelligence, and creativity are the measures of a successful college student and employee [and] none of those factors are learned in school.”

At this point you may wonder: instead of spending more time and money preparing to do what I want to do, why don’t I just do it?

20 or so students recently did just that, dropping out of top schools to take their business plans directly to market as recipients of a Thiel Fellowship. This highly competitive program pays them $50,000 a year while they work at road-testing their innovative ideas. It also provides them with a network of valuable contacts to help their start-ups to succeed.

These men and women are not “the average person” choosing the lessons of the marketplace over more time in a classroom. With its annual payments, this two-year fellowship is not the classic School of Hard Knocks. But comments made after these young people abandoned their degrees at places like Princeton and M.I.T. speak to those times in all of our lives when experience may be the best teacher.

In recent interviews, the Fellows talked at length about “getting a shot at a better education” by “diving into the real world of science, technology and business.” They had pent-up energy, and couldn’t wait another day to pursue their dreams. “I was antsy to get out into the world and execute on my ideas,” said Eden Full, whose aim was to market a low-cost solar panel. In her real world classroom, she had to learn to count on strangers for help and to become more flexible by finding daily workarounds for unexpected obstacles to get her business off the ground.

Laura Demming was looking to develop medical therapies that target damage from the aging process. She learned that persistence and belief in her ideas were essential to overcoming a string of early failures. The mother of one of the fellows was initially terrified when her son dropped out of school, but ultimately found herself amazed by his trajectory. “This is stuff you don’t learn in a classroom,” she said. “He’s blogging, he’s teaching, he’s writing software.” The father of another student said: “I can’t think of a worse environment than school if you want your kids to learn how to make decisions, manage risk and take responsibility for their choices.”

Wherever you are in your career, there are times when more skills and more knowledge will be essential for what you want to do in your next job. But there are other times when you have enough skills and knowledge already, times when more education is simply a way to postpone what the real world is waiting to teach you.

When you’re sitting at work, hating your job, and thinking about those things that you always wanted to accomplish, consider taking a chance on yourself and your ideas by completing your education in the real world. Your reward could be the empowerment that comes from facing risk, overcoming failure, and gaining practical experience in ways you never imagined.

Work That Produces Continuous Reward

September 11, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

You spend time everyday getting yourself ready for work because you want your sweat equity to provide you with more than just a paycheck. It takes regular priming, recharging and calibrating of your engine (see the last post) to obtain regular returns like empowerment from your work.

We all spend a sizable chunk of our lives working. As a result, you want to benefit as much as you can from the huge investment of time and energy you’re making. When your workday’s over, you want the satisfaction that comes from learning new things, stretching yourself, and becoming more capable. You also want your work to make a positive difference in ways that are consistent with your values because tremendous personal satisfaction comes from that too.

Becoming the best version of yourself. Helping to make the world the kind of better place you want it to be. These are the essential ingredients of fulfilling work.

But work that provides a return like this demands something from you as well. While it helps to get ready for it everyday, you also need to be “in the game for the long haul,” so that your work produces continuous reward for you and for others. That means you’ll also need a plan to disrupt the tendency we all have to fall off our best game and settle into complacency.

You generally know when you’re coasting and what it feels when you’re in a rut. Before long it becomes boring, predictable, pretty lifeless and ultimately pretty unsatisfying, right? So what can you do about it?

To continuously breathe new life into your work, one solution is to introduce new skills and perspectives into your job before you start slipping into your “comfort zone.” In their terrific article “Throw Your Life a Curve,” Juan Carlos Méndez-García and Whitney Johnson literally show us what this would look like.

The authors use a familiar graph that illustrates how innovative products rapidly penetrate markets to show us how bringing new knowledge or innovation into our jobs can change our individual work experiences just as dramatically. The graph they re-purpose to make their argument is called the S-curve.

When an innovative product like the iPhone is introduced, it takes off gradually (from lower left). However, when it hits a tipping point of awareness in the marketplace, the product enjoys a near vertical upturn in sales, until it approaches market penetration, when sales taper off at the peak of the curve.

Méndez-García and Whitney argue that something similar happens when you shake things up at work by bringing new ideas and skills into your job.

As we. . . mov[e] up a personal learning curve, initially progress is slow. But through deliberate practice, we gain traction, entering into a virtuous [upward] cycle that propels us into a sweet spot of accelerating competence and confidence. Then, as we approach mastery, the vicious [downward] cycle commences: the more habitual what we are doing becomes, the less we enjoy the “feel good” effects of learning: these two cycles constitute the S-curve.

What you need to do when the “feel good” effects start tapering off is the most interesting part.

As a worker, you essentially do what Apple has done so successfully as a company. While you are still enjoying the empowering effects of mastery in your current S-curve (or for Apple, while its current iPhone is still selling), you make the “jump” to the next curve by, once again, bringing new skills and knowledge into your job. Jumping from one curve to another in this manner can allow you to continue “the virtuous cycle” in your work in the same way that it allows Apple to enjoy continuous profits when it introduces its next generation iPhone.

As a worker, you risk loosing your competitive edge if you don’t continuously shake things up with new information. But as importantly, you risk loosing the empowering rush that comes when you’re in the “sweet spot of accelerating competence and confidence”—a phrase that perfectly captures what’s best about personal growth on the job. As the authors conclude:

[T]hose who can successfully navigate, even harness, the successive cycles of learning and maxing out that resemble the S-curve will thrive in this era of personal disruption. (italics added)

This is one roadmap for maintaining the flow of satisfaction, and even exhilaration on the job. Simply shake things up by introducing new (and wisely chosen) ways of thinking into your work whenever you find yourself approaching your comfort zone.

When you take active responsibility for the quality of your work like this, continuous reward for you, and for the company that’s lucky enough to have you, are sure to follow.

The School’s Values Are Not Enough

July 30, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Schools have their own values, but those values alone are not enough to guide our kids to fulfilling lives and work. Actively providing students with this kind of direction is something all of our schools should be doing.

When it comes to values, schools most commonly foster environments where I should respect you and you should respect me. Extraordinary schools extend this by encouraging you to care for me and for me to reciprocate in a caring way towards you. Tolerance for another’s viewpoints is another school value, as is encouraging active engagement as citizens in the community.

What schools are aiming for with these positive values is something that looks a lot like this—with the well-meaning community outreach going on in the distance.

peaceable kingdom — THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM by Edward Hicks

What our schools are not doing is actively helping students identify what is most important to each of them, in terms of their values?

That many of our schools are providing a righteous and nurturing environment is certainly a good thing, but positive environmental factors alone don’t help students connect with their most basic operating principles. Because most schools aren’t helping students “to make sense” of their education at this level, more and more rudderless young people are leaving our classrooms and stumbling their way into work and into life.

Most school values, like respect and tolerance, don’t leap into the hearts of students, providing clarity around questions of life and work. Instead, they essentially provide a warm bath where a student can feel safe and supported enough to potentially identify what he or she believes in. While the kind of active, mutual caring championed by education scholar Nel Noddings could lead to purposeful living and working, few schools today can help to ensure that if you care for me I will care for you back. As a transmittable value to students, mutual caring seems unrealistic in all but the most intimate school environments.

Encouraging civic engagement in the ways that Thomas Sergiovanni has talked about it also would not work as a vehicle for transmitting values from school to student in most of our schools. For Sergiovanni, students become “virtuous” by actively practicing virtues (like hope, trust, civility and piety) while working with “moral teachers.” As with “mutual caring,” a student’s own value choices are more actively encouraged in “the virtuous school,” but this model also seems unworkable in all but the smallest and most elite institutions.

In most schools, student engagement in civic affairs is limited to activities that leave everyone “feeling good” about themselves at the end of the day, but encourage neither commitment nor personal growth from the participants. It’s planting the community garden, reading to the elderly in a rest home: low impact activism that requires minimal effort for minimal impact. Schools, students and parents can pretend that some kind of value training is going on here, but everyone knows that it’s not.

So while schools often provide students with a warm Petri dish of tolerance and respect in the hope they’ll flourish, most fail to add the critical ingredient—which is actively teaching our kids how to cultivate their values so they can integrate what they’ve learned in school with what’s most important to them as individuals.

Earlier this month, I talked about some of the things schools can do in terms of building value awareness and helping students plan for their lives and their work. Exercises like this give students a roadmap that can help them to seize their futures instead of wandering aimlessly into them. We’re doing a very poor job providing our kids with this kind of preparation. It’s a problem for students leaving school at all education levels, and as I’ve written about before, even for the best and the brightest among them.

This is a tragedy that can be avoided.

It has profound implications for families, employers, communities, and most importantly the students who are graduating into life unprepared for its most basic challenges and opportunities.

Why are we so passive about this as parents?

Why aren’t we more concerned about this as teachers?

Policymakers and business correctly provide financial support and expertise for our non-performing schools. Why aren’t they also concerned about the purposeless students coming out of our performing schools, and the associated opportunity costs for our nation and our economy?

These aren’t just rhetorical questions.

I’d really like to hear your thoughts.

Inaugural post

October 30, 2011 By David Griesing 4 Comments

The most important thing that I have in this world is my life.

One reason my life is important has to do with what I can do with it—the wonderful things I can accomplish when I make the most of it—both for myself and for others. We all have an opportunity to make something truly extraordinary out of our lives. But at the same time, this opportunity is constrained by the limited time that we have been given to realize it.

We spend a lot of our limited time working. We work because we have to, to make money, to give ourselves and those who need us a place to live and a measure of material comfort. But there are more life-changing opportunities to be realized through our work than what it can buy for us.

Work can be an opportunity to learn how to use our talents to become more productive. It can be an opportunity to test our capabilities and, by doing so, gain an increasing sense of personal power: to discover the difference we can make when we’re firing on all cylinders. It can be an opportunity to fill the shoes we were born with.

Work is also an opportunity to join our productivity with that of our co-workers to make something of value. What our work produces can have value in the marketplace, namely, the goods and services we have come to either need or want in our consumer-driven society. But our work can also produce value at a deeper level. Our work can help to make the world the kind of better place that we want it to be.

Many of us expect little more from our work than a paycheck, some pleasant interaction with our co-workers, and a vague sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. We don’t expect our work to give us a higher sense of self-regard because of how capable we are becoming by doing it. We don’t expect our work to further objectives we care about or to help change things for the better.

Given the limited time we are given to realize the opportunity in our lives—and the huge amount of our time that we spend working—we should all be expecting more from our work. And when our work isn’t meeting our expectations, we should start thinking about creating the right kind of work for ourselves.

This blog is committed to thinking about what we should expect from our work, what we need to do to clarify those expectations in our lives, and how to create for ourselves the kind of work that meets those expectations when we can’t find it elsewhere.

Work Today
On September 22, the U.S. Census Bureau released figures showing that one in three young people, ages 20 to 29, were unemployed. With a national unemployment rate hovering around 9%, the actual number of Americans who want to work but can’t find jobs may be closer to 20% of the workforce (or roughly 60 million Americans!). The lost opportunity is simply staggering.

I am writing this from Philadelphia, which now enjoys the unfortunate distinction of being the Poorest Big City in the United States. According to the same Census figures, 27 percent of Philadelphia’s residents, and more than one third of its children, are living below the federal poverty level. In some of our neighborhoods, the unemployment rate approaches 50 percent. Philadelphia also has the lowest percentage of college graduates. With only one in ten of those students who entered our public high schools in 1999 completing college, there are far too few low level jobs available for the rest. It is like waters building behind a dam.

A discussion I had a few years back made these statistics more personal. I wanted to write to City gas utility customers about a plan I had for lowering their gas costs for things like cooking and heating. As the discussion went on, my thinking changed rapidly from what to say to how.

While I knew that a third of Philadelphia’s residents cannot read at all, I learned that even more have such minimal skills that they can read little more than the labels on products in the grocery or drug store: Heinz ketchup, Tide detergent. In other words, as many as two thirds of our residents may be unable to comprehend two straightforward paragraphs. So much for sending the utility’s 500,000+ customers my carefully reasoned attempt at communication.

At this point, my mind wandered to political campaigns in India, where the principal communication with millions of its poor and illiterate voters involves little more than the display of recognizable symbols, like a clock (the National Congress Party), a hand (the Indian National Party), or a lotus flower (the Baharatiya Janata Party). I realized that if India’s economy is “emerging” from this primitive state, our’s may be “slipping back.” In what would have been a first for Philadelphia’s natural gas utility, it occurred to me that I could have used a stove with dollar bills jumping out of it to get our customers’ attention, but where I would have gone from there with them remains a mystery.

Shockingly widespread poverty and low literacy disable Americans from becoming productive. For a nation preoccupied with worker productivity and gross national “product,” the lost opportunity this represents (and its associated costs) are unacceptable to me and likely to many others who are reading this. But poverty and illiteracy, that is, particular social problems, are not the aim of this conversation. The aim here is to care about, and then do something about whatever realities you find unacceptable in the world today as an integral part of your work.

Many seeking jobs here in Philadelphia (and elsewhere) are not in the pool of permanent unemployment occupied by people who are unlikely to find or keep a job in America’s economy today. These are unemployed Americans who read and hold high school diplomas and college degrees, and already have valuable skills and job experience.

This waste of our working potential is a further crime, but unfortunately we are far from being out of the woods. Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard, recently said: “The labor market has shown absolutely no recovery. There’s no scenario in which the labor market doesn’t continue to need help three to four years from now.”
Beyond what I have already said about the priority of realizing the promise in our lives through our work, today’s employment market may provide an additional argument for those of you who still need convincing. Its harsh realities may provide the final catalyst for you to start thinking about the nature and quality of your work in a whole new way.

If you cannot find any work with established employers—let alone fulfilling work—then it may be time to start thinking seriously about creating the right kind of job for yourself. (Necessity is the mother of invention. And we are, after all, a nation of entrepreneurs.)

Once you start looking to yourself for a job, why not give yourself a job that is both productive and fulfilling. There is lots of work that needs to be done to improve the world as you see it, and much of it will make you a happier and more fully realized person while doing it.

From this vantage point, the current employment challenges will involve some different mechanics than the usual job search: how to bring your energy, talent and imagination to the work that you create for yourself, and how to “make a living” while doing it.

Work That Makes You Feel Good About Doing It
Philosophers since Aristotle have committed a lot of words to describing the kinds of experiences that make us feel fulfilled in our lives and in our engagement with the world around us. They have generally concluded that we gain a sense of wellbeing when the way we live has both meaning and purpose.

Recent data is confirming their traditional wisdom. Industrial psychologists have begun to prove empirically that workers need to feel that their work has purpose and meaning for them to also find it satisfying. At the same time, professionals in a range of health-related fields are demonstrating the measurable benefits to both body and mind that result when the way that we work and live has these two components, making us feel productive and fulfilled. (We’ll be looking at several of these studies in a later post.) The first element that must be present for us to gain a sense of well-being from our work is dynamic in nature.

As suggested earlier, work has meaning and purpose when it involves your becoming someone who is smarter, more efficient or more energized, and as a result, more capable than you were before you started doing it. This kind of work likely produces something of value for the business you are in (and you get paid either a little or a lot for doing it), but it also adds to your self-confidence and skill. Accordingly, this kind of work tends to increase productivity in two directions: yielding not only higher returns for your workplace but also for you in terms of personal empowerment.

Work that has purpose and meaning also brings you closer to meeting important personal goals. While this includes financial independence and being able to provide for those who depend on you, it also involves accomplishing broader objectives that you care about. They can be internal to the workplace, like collaboration. Or they can extend beyond it, to external objectives: Protecting the environment. Maintaining a level playing field for all when it comes to opportunity. Providing access to safe housing, to adequate healthcare or nutrition. Mandating transparency in the political process or in the financial markets. Believing that everyone deserves a basic quality of life. These are the kinds of commitments that reflect your values: the principles that influence important decisions in your own life and in your engagement with the wider world.

Your work can vindicate your values, and make the world into what you believe will be a better place, in several ways. The nature of the work itself is one. What you’re making, or the service you’re providing, can have this sort of upside. In other words, those who buy your products or use your services may become smarter, healthier, able to communicate faster or travel more comfortably, have warmer houses or produce less pollution than they did before because of your product or service—and you may feel good about that.

Another way your work can further your values is how it’s being done. Does the place where you work improve the community where it’s based? Does it treat its employees, customers and suppliers fairly? Does it play a socially responsible role in its industry?

The value-charged goals we have as individuals are either met or disappointed in our workplaces today. We are either becoming more capable and more powerful as individuals when we do our jobs or we’re not. When you come to the realization that your work is making you feel neither productive nor fulfilled, it is time to think about creating the kind of work that will brings you returns in terms of job satisfaction and personal wellbeing. This kind of work is an opportunity that each of us has to make a living while living a life that is worth living.

Taking Everything Too Seriously (or Not)
Because our discussion here will often be about serious things like work and values, becoming happier and more productive, and even finding the so-called “meaning of life,” there will always be a risk that I will start taking myself too seriously (or one of you might find yourself unintentionally doing the same) while we’re in the middle of this conversation. After all, the stakes are high and time’s a-wasting.

While these are all things that matter and need to be talked about, I would also like for us to have this conversation without breast-beating, pontificating, I’m right/you’re wrong, I’m smarter than you are (or all of those people are over there)—that is, without the edge in the voice that tends to creep in whenever we leave the realm of small consequences for the realm of big ones.

How exactly can we do this?
There are several possible ways. You could leave this conversation to get a dose of balance, sanity and humor by taking your search engine to another page entirely. (I’ll recommend some interesting destinations from time to time.) You could also just close your screen and find some domestic source to restore both balance and perspective. But I’d rather that you take a moment to get a grip right here and quickly rejoin our conversation. For this purpose, I will always try to provide at least one place on this page (and eventually more) where you can go to get “Back in the Moment” and balance the seriousness and passion of our quest with a smile.

The animated Introduction “Connecting Your Values to Your Work” provides a slightly different angle for looking at what we’ll be discussing in these posts—as well as some basic information about why I wanted to have this conversation in the first place. It’s the same water, I think, but with some bubbles added to give it a lighter finish when it’s needed.

The words of Francois VI, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld and Prince de Marcillac—or just “La Rochefoucauld” as we have come to know him today—are also helpful in this regard. Among his Collected Maxims and Other Reflections (1678), La Rochefoucauld included the following:

Virtue would not go far if vanity did not keep her company.

When we are in touch with them, our principles do require some arrogance, along with more-than-a-little vain posturing and righteous indignation if they are to help us prevail and make a difference in the world. It is a way that you speak truth to power. But at least for purposes of our strategizing together in this discussion, there is a more productive balance to be struck. Thanks in advance for helping with that.