Humanities and Business and Life

The Burden of the Humanities

A technique we use in efforts to find sustainable business models is conversation groups. We bring together sensible people from differing trades and industries and buy them lunch. They know, or respect from a distance, the folks they will be conversing with. We give them broad strokes to get them started and let them go. It's amazing how useful their responses and surprise feelings and realizations really are in deciding how to spend millions of dollars.

Invariably, the balance sheet cowboys find common cause with humanities majors, and we begin to discuss WHY people keep coming back for more, the fundamental basis for a business.

Most of us have a WHAT - a thing we want to foist on the world to make a few bucks. We think our product knowledge and its result, our creation, is enough. Yet the HOW and WHY underlaying that particular things' right to live in a social and cultural and financial market never gets discussed well.

The stuff we strive for, and will to live with our dollars, energy or votes, has something to do with utility, yes. But in an age of easy me-too commodification, the senisbility of how we motivate our selves to part with money or time, or love and admiration, are far too unstudied. For my money, yes, a humanities approach can't stand alone. But it would be a marvelous parallel to an MBA, one too focused on how to extract money rather than uplift people in their search for meaning and value.