I really like what Juliet Goodfriend has to say about a liberal education in her presentations. In this article, reporter Jeff Ignatius summarizes what she tells business leaders around the country: that many people with business undergraduate degrees won’t have the critical-thinking and communication skills necessary to succeed in business. “You’ll never again have a chance to learn from the humanities what they have to offer,” Goodfriend said in an interview last week, “and you’ll have every chance in the world to learn such subjects as marketing.”
Ignatius quotes Goodfriend later in his story: “Writing good narrative prose that has an understanding of plot and of the narrative arc is essential to presenting a business plan to a board of directors, or even to your boss.”
Goodfriend has a wonderful understanding of the importance of storytelling in business, and of how important that message is both inside and outside a company. Investors won’t have an understanding of what you stand for if all you have are a good understanding of the numbers, she says. They won’t understand you or where you want to go. Writes Ignatius: “Her message sounds like an offshoot of the “creative class” concept promoted by Richard Florida. Florida argues that an emergent group of creative people will increasingly drive the economy, and many communities are trying to capitalize by marketing themselves to this creative class.”
