Technical writing BCOR 220
Salma Kammoun
G10
Research Paper
Humanities and Business Complementarity Studying business includes accounting, finance, marketing, decision making and many other subjects. Students are only majoring in one of them due to the system that ignores the cultural part of education: Humanities. Dealing with languages, literature, History and Philosophy can have a great impact on the future employees business schools are forming which also helps on creating a better business environment. The classical curriculum should change to combine business and humanities in order to get multifunctional employees that have the ability to communicate and work in different environments, the capacity of acting properly in multiple situations and the ability to deal with the complex world we are living in. Learning foreign languages, literature and making cultural studies open one’s mind not only on others’ lifestyles, but also on their traditions and daily behavior. When working in multinational companies, an employee should be ready to deal with colleagues with different cultures and others that do not speak the same language as he does. So, being able to adapt oneself to those situations requires a certain knowledge that can be retained by studying humanities in business schools. Besides the oral part, writing is a necessity in communication. “Writing well is a fundamental principle of the communications business, deeply appreciated by clients and all others we work with.” Ken Makovsky, the top business-to-business counselor in the public relations industry, wrote in Forbes. He also insists on the influence of writing skills on the employee’s self-confidence saying that “everyone who possesses the grace and energy that the humanities develops in us, can only be secure in appreciating the rich heritage they have been given.” In addition to the communication, Humanities change the way employees face problematic situations at work and contribute in making the change. Even though we are living in technologically developed world that made students choose to major in sciences and business, the need of humanities in employees’ education is approved by many CEOs like Steve Jobs who insisted, in 2010, on the fundamental merge between technology and artistry. "It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough," he said. "It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing." Moreover, studying humanities makes an employee able to better solve a problem. It helps him see the different possible solutions to a unique one which is not an available skill for an employee taking only theoretical business courses. Steve Yi, CEO of web advertising platform MediaAlpha, who took a degree in East Asian Studies at Harvard, approved that he learnt from his educational path to see “every issue from multiple perspectives”. “It’s awfully similar to viewing our organization and our marketplace from different points of view, quickly shifting gears from sales to technology to marketing,” he says. “I need to synthesize these perspectives to decide where we need to go as a company.” Those different perspectives are the cause of a compounded world that we have to deal with. Despite the fact that our world is getting more and more variegated, college students are encouraged to be majoring in one domain such as business. Georgia Nugent, the former president of Kenyon College, warned that this is a paradoxical situation that we have to get our youth out of it by advising them to take liberal arts courses because of the flexibility they can get from. "It’s a horrible irony that at the very moment the world has become more complex, we’re encouraging our young people to be highly specialized in one task," she explains. "We are doing a disservice to young people by telling them that life is a straight path. The liberal arts are still relevant because they prepare students to be flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances." As a conclusion, business students should be instructed in humanities because of the benefits they can get from, like being aware of the diversity that an employee can face in his job at a multinational, learning to treat every situation differently believing that there is no absolute truth, and fronting the multiplicity of our environment.

References Ken Makovsky. (2013, July 3). The Difference Humanities Makes in Business. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com . Elizabeth Segran. (2014, August 28). Why Top Tech CEOs Want Employees with Liberal Arts Degrees. FastCompany. Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany.com .