Today's post is guest-written by my Gen-Y protege, Liam O'Dea. A graduate of the highly esteemed University of Virginia , Liam services retirement products at an internationally-known financial services company and is planning on an MBA in the near future.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I entered business as a temp in June 2006 because I did not want to work nights waiting tables while I pursued my writing ambitions. I sought predictability in both schedule and income. After a few months I was hired on as a permanent employee for a well-respected financial institution. As an English major, I assumed this would NOT be the environment in which I would thrive. While completing my degree I was often asked, as many liberal arts majors are, “What are you going to do with that?” Minnesotans know Garrison Keillor never jokes about the inevitable success of English majors. Perhaps he should. In spite of its popularity within the business community, it is a mistake to view a liberal arts undergraduate degree as irrelevant and useless. The level of complexity and interconnectedness inherent in business now and in the future requires professionals who know how to think and deal with nuance and ambiguity.
While I walked away from college happily ignorant of corporate operations, business strategy, and almost anything else business-related, I unknowingly spent four years acquiring skills that would prove useful in that world. As an English major, there were never right or wrong answers. The focus was on how well you supported your arguments. Why did the writer say this? What about that relates to other sections of the work? How does one event propel the work forward? What is the work aiming to accomplish? In addressing these questions wholly, one must also look at the context from which the writer is coming, both personal and cultural. Yeats would not have been Yeats if he had grown up in the Rockies.
Thinking in this way is highly valuable in business. As an organization, why do we handle one process this way and another that way? How does this impact the customer? Me? My team? The bottom-line? The work culture? How does this relate to our overall business strategy? The ability to ask such questions carries much more value in business than being able to merely perform certain tasks on automation. How can a professional, and thus a company, seize opportunities without analyzing and questioning the current context? As Columbia Business School Dean R. Glen Hubbard stated in a speech in Las Vegas in 2007, “The goal is not to have a data dump of functional skills, but to create a process that teaches people how to recognize opportunity—and capture it.”
Going forward, “capturing opportunities” will most likely include the consideration of the impact upon the larger community. A liberal arts undergraduate will most likely be more capable in accounting for those considerations than an individual who simply learned how to organize data and follow the status quo. Given the current outrage over large Wall Street salaries, it seems the world is ready to embrace such business people. And believe me, there are already plenty out there.
