Liberal Arts Now More than Ever

Jello Jigglers, poetry, business innovation. Creativity is your moat in the AI era

I found my new career hero: Dana Gioia. Stanford MBA, MA from Harvard in Comparative Lit. Corporate champion. Non-profit leader. Walked away from a small fortune in corporate America to write, teach and “pursue beauty.”

But, he’s also a compelling example of the liberal arts as a super power for leadership.

Business nerds love stories like Gioia’s, a classic combination of insight and marketing. He was running the Jello business, a high margin cash machine that was coasting on its powerful brand. But, the business was in a slow decline and needed something bold to turn it around and get it growing again.

It’s really worth clicking through and hearing the story, but, spoiler alert, it's basically a new use case story. And the world was gifted Jello Jigglers as a result. And the business doubled almost overnight.

Liberal arts folks like me love the story, too, because it validates something we’ve always assumed: A solid foundation in the humanities and arts creates leads to a different approach to solution-finding and leadership.

He makes a persuasive argument that he, a poet, was the right guy in the right place at the right time. The culture at General Foods at the time had been built on a more rigid, militaristic mindset, designed to perpetuate optimization, marginal improvements, and predictability. What was needed, though, was a rethink, someone to redefine the problem and reimagine the potential solutions.

Gioia attributes his success to being a creative, a poet with a number-crunching super power. “I brought creativity that was completely in command of the numbers.” Like a good writer, he was patient enough to take the time to research, listen and understand in order to re-imagine and reconceptualizing something new for the business. And, while he doesn’t state it directly, I bet he was an incredibly persuasive communicator inside the org.

Gioia admits he wasn’t a “born” creative, but that part of his personality was developed over time through a youth where the humanities, the liberal arts, were not only supported but encouraged. Maybe he was a little precocious, but he was also surrounded by it in his early seventies, Los Angeles youth. It was all around him.

Now More Than Ever

We all know we’re entering a new era of creativity and innovation in business, society and culture. We’re seeing the signs all around us everyday, but it’s still the early days. Opportunities for new products and ideas will only expand as AI innovations accelerate and the vast oceans of Silicon Valley money fuels a race for the next trillion dollar business.

Algorithms won’t make it happen alone. And coders won’t do it on their own. We’ll need creatives. Folks who can spot a genuine need and then pull the tech together to make it happen, to craft the interfaces that make it all seem like magic.

Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams saw how valuable it was to get texts with short SMS updates from friends and thus was born Twitter. Seeing the tools on the table and making something useful from them? That’s creative work. Explaining why we need it? That’s creative work. Seeing someone struggle with a challenge and conceptualizing a unique solution? Creative work.

We need the liberal arts, now more than ever.

We’re already flooded with AI slop, trillions of machine generated words to meet SEO and power the algorithms. But, reading well for comprehension and insights, discerning what’s actually useful and what’s BS? That comes from liberal arts.

We’ve got too many visuals flooding into our eyes. TikTok. Youtube. Reels. Jumpy edits on Netflix. But, knowing what you’re seeing and being able to make sense of them? Being able to tell the difference between average and good and great design? That comes from art appreciation. Being able to articulate what’s “good” and why? That’s thinking and writing and persuasion. That comes from composition and writing practice.

Generating new ideas? You get a lot of practice when you draw, paint, or sculpt something. Facing a blank canvas and the confidence (or chutzpah) to turn it into something beautiful and provocative? That’s art class.

I think the real winners will be those that can do both. It’s not either or. We need people who are technically competent, who have high quantitative literacy AND we need people who aspire to come up with new things that are beautiful and useful.

Build Your Moat

All jobs are going to be threatened by AI soon enough.

How will you build your “moat”, your protection against AI?

Being able to read cut through the slop. Thinking rationally, in a structured way. Being able to communicate clearly, to persuade with words and ideas. Carefully listening with empathy. Understanding history and the lessons learned there so we can apply them and avoid the mistakes of the past. Being able to argue coherently and understand logic.

AI can’t really do that stuff. It’s your way to maintain an edge when you’re working alongside the most powerful AI-driven brain the world has ever seen.

It’s Not Too Late: Embracing The Humanities as a Middle Aged Worker

I found the Gioia interview really inspiring, and I bought his memoir (hey, podcasts work!) to get a little deeper into his mind. More importantly, it got me thinking about how middle/late career folks can do a little renewal work via the liberal arts.

And, ideally, we’d all be building a creative practice that puts us in a place where we can go deep, zone out, find flow, and build the skills - empathy, listening, lateral thinking, intuition, taste, an appreciation for design - that can lead us to new insights and ideas.

There are some pretty straightforward things that would be enjoyable to pursue, too:

• Take an art appreciation class at your local museum. They really help you learn how to see and notice in a different way. But, if you want to do it from home, there are some great resources online (like Steve Martin!) to jump start your curiosity.

• Go to a music appreciation class or the symphony or a concert outside your normal taste. I’m going deep into some hip hop right now, mainly as a way to appreciate stuff outside my zone. There are some great podcasts and YouTube series, too.

• Start drawing. You already know how to do it, but you probably don’t do it enough

• Read more. Not “self help” or business books. Fiction. Poetry. Adventure. Anything that absorbs you for more than 10 minutes

Meanwhile, support the liberal arts in your kids schools. Don’t be one of those a-holes that complains about English class, art appreciation, music or history classes. You know those people that say “how is that going to help them get a job!?” Don’t do that.

We want smart, curious, broadly skilled kids that generate new ideas and can communicate them well. They’re not learning that in math class (Probably).

But, we also need curious, well rounded leaders to guide the work that AI does for and with us.