Saying Yes and No a New Way

The seasons are changing, and the chill in the air represents a sense of urgency organizations have to meet their financial and project goals. I am one of those people who accomplishes these goals and helps organizations succeed. Over the years, I have discovered that the most challenging part of the job is not the engineering but the interpersonal and political skills necessary to get work finished at large bureaucratic businesses. This week I want to look at a skill I learned that had become an essential tool for my success in the weird business world of business.  

I feel strongly that a Liberal Arts education is valuable in business and technology. You can teach anyone to write software and perform basic development tasks, but the real skill is communicating with people via the written and spoken word. Putting yourself in another person's shoes and spotting spurious arguments are also valuable business skills. A liberal arts education helps teach these skills, and the business world is better because of people with liberal arts backgrounds. I am biased on this front because I am a liberal arts graduate, and exposure to philosophy, theater, literature, media, and writing traditions has given me a competitive advantage in my career.    

In high school and community college, I took theater courses. Each student learns how to improvise on stage. It was a great experience, and I had plenty of laughs, but I did not realize the presentation and speaking skills I developed in a theater would stay with me for the remainder of my life. As I began meeting facilitation, I remembered a technique I learned in improvisation. Performers know to be unselfish with other performers and internalize the maxim of "…yes and." During a strange situation or when you are stuck on what to say, you look deeply into the eyes of your fellow performers and say "yes and…." At that point, the other performer, if they are paying attention, will pick up the performance and move it in a different direction.  

As a coach, in meetings with people who are reluctant to talk, I often use the "yes and…" technique to elicit more feedback and information. It is a great way to break the tension, and it helps remove the responsibility from one person speaking to the group. It transforms meetings into a more participatory experience because, as the facilitator, you lead them to say what needs to be understood instead of dictating to the group.  

We often have deadlines and other challenges which involve conflict. That conflict can be acknowledged if we use language that is a little less violent. Lately, I have been using an additional phrase: "no, wait…."  For example, I had someone demand that I deliver a user story. I said, "No, wait, I understand this is important, but where does it fit in with the release schedule."  After some thought and waiting, the person making the demand backed down. Another example is saying, "No, wait, do I understand you correctly?" The approach makes the conversation more participatory and helps facilitate a more profound understanding.  

We all have to say yes or no at work. Using theater improvisation techniques makes the process easier and allows people to feel involved in creating value. Feel free to give it a try.  

Until next time. 

Failure is the Fertile Soil for Growth

Failure happens

A common theme in business writing is the mythologizing of success.  It is an easy narrative to promote.  People enjoy reading about the success of others, and wealth is always intoxicating.  The struggle, failure, and sacrifices necessary to achieve that wealth have a glossy sheen in popular culture.  For me, the most exciting part of the story is how others deal with failure and crushing disappointment.  It interests me because my career has numerous episodes of frustration.  A setback proceeded with each significant improvement in my career and life. Defeat is a teaching tool for me, and now I incorporate it into my coaching practice.  

I have made numerous references to how failure is an exceptional learning tool.  Instead of failure, I should barrow the mindset of Carol Dweck and her Ted Talk from 2014.  Instead of saying, I failed, I should say that I have not yet succeeded.  It is the classic growth mindset which motivates people to figure things out and improve.  It sounds noble, but it is difficult for people to do because it challenges an individual’s self-worth.  

Thus, I spend lots of time taking the sting out of the everyday failures and mix-ups which happen in an office.  It means being kind in moments where your lesser self would like to snicker.  It means saying, “not yet,” and “what could we have done differently.”  It is holding others accountable without being mean about it.  I struggle just like the next business leader, but I have noticed that people respond to this approach.  Instead of beating a drum, a leader needs to show the way and get a little dirty in the process.  

Failure is real, but how we react to it makes the difference between a fixed mindset and growth and continuous improvement.  I choose a growth mindset any day of the week.  

Until next time. 

Call out Trolls Before They Destroy Your Business

Spot trolls before they hurt your business

The biggest challenge in Servant leadership is working with the disinterested, dishonest, and disrespectful.  Each organization harbors these individuals like weeds in a field of grass.  People like this seem to revel in their bad faith efforts to undermine others, avoid work, and act as parasites to everyone around them.  Throughout my career, I have confronted these individuals, and it never gets easier.  We should be brave enough to call out poor behavior.  

I spend plenty of time on LinkedIn. It is an excellent service because I can catch up on colleagues, get the latest news from the business community, and many of my fellow travelers share information about what is new. I was surfing along and read the following post from a coach and scrum trainer. The emphasis is mine.  

“I am a project manager having 15 years of experience and 5 years exclusively in project management. I do hold a PMP certificate too. My company is adopting Scrum-based delivery and it seems there is no role for the project managers. There are 3 roles in Scrum but none of them is for me. 

I can’t be a Product Owner because it will get filled from the business/customer side. I am not hands-on so I can’t be a part of the Development Team.

Scrum Master seems to be a very junior role for me. Many Scrum Masters are just a part-timer or working previously as Team Lead/ Tech Lead etc. There was a point when these people were reporting to me on my projects.

I also have an issue with the Servant Leadership style. It is not that I am a command & control person and you can ask my colleagues. Everyone will say how good I am with empathy, situation leadership, and self-reflection. But servant leadership sounds to me either head of the Servant or becoming Gandhi and Mandela. 

What will you suggest? Should I look at some different roles if yes then which one? I have also heard a lot about Agile Coach though I don’t know much how is this different than Scrum Master.”

I had a lot to unpack in this message.  It is an excellent example of how NOT to do Servant leadership.  I have said in the past, that ego is the enemy of good leadership.  Additionally, Servant leadership is more about leading by example than attempting to behave like a saint.  Scrum mastery requires kindness, and it often requires going beyond the call of duty. 

Being a scrum master is not a junior role.  It is a managerial role with tremendous responsibility and little authority. You are the person in the Taupe blazer who must inspire others to get work done.  At times you are a therapist, and at others, you are doing code reviews.  Often you are a square peg in a round hole.  Scrum masters are not junior; instead, they are essential to the success of your organization. 

The arrogance associated with the post was very telling.  What made it shocking was that it came from an instructor from Scrum.org.  I could expose this individual, but that would make me no better a coach or scrum master.  I am sensitive to harassment and doxing concerns on the internet.  I want the satisfaction of calling out a troll and exposing them to shame and ridicule.  The reality is they do not care.  A troll does what they do for the attention and outrage.  Instead, I would rather point out the attitude of these people so that we can be on the lookout for this behavior.  People like this are going to hurt your organization, so it is best to make you aware of them and not give them a chance.  

I take a great deal of pride in what I do.  As I continue to advance my career, I do not want to forget where I came from and the lessons I gained along the way.  Being a scrum master and product owner is hard work.  Developers and people in the organization are under tremendous pressure to deliver value to their customers and organization.  In the global economy, we are all servants, whether we like it or not.  Insulting other professionals as junior or beneath you is not how you participate in the agile reformation.  It is a form of elitism that has sparked backlash around the developed world.  

Today, I wanted to call attention to an attitude that will hurt your organization.  It is elitist, and it comes from a position of arrogance.  Do yourself a favor, find these people, and make sure you never hire them.  

Until next time. 

Some thoughts on personal change

A typical day for a scrum master; doughnuts and coffee

I have called working in the business world bipolar, toxic and an excuse for mental illness.  I still feel this way, but along the way, I have encountered numerous pockets of decency and professionalism.  I have made plenty of friends along the way.  This week, I took a massive step in my professional career and resigned from my present organization.  I will be joining another firm on November 19th.

When I was growing up in the 1980’s, my parents and teachers spoke about how a career was a pathway or process.  You would join a company and throughout your career advance up the organization.  Your loyalty to the organization came with a measure of job security, and a means to support a family.  I was instructed people succeeded and failed based on individual merit.   The recession of the early 1990’s and over twenty years of being a technology professional have proven those ideas false.

I have spent plenty of time around the damaged, neurotic, and mean people who make up a significant minority of business professionals.  In my worst moments of vulnerability, I have choked back tremendous amounts of rage and bitterness.  In my better moments, I have forced myself to see the good in others.  I was disappointed from time to time, but often my optimism was rewarded.  I leaned on colleagues to muddle through the long days and lack of support, and I relied on my fellow agile coaches who saw something in me I did not.

It is easy to see the bad in the world and wallow in nihilism.  Creating a reformation is going to be hard work.  A modern shareholding company is the closest thing contemporary society has to medieval feudalism, and those in power will do anything to remain in charge.

Fortunately, there are others like me who are agitating for change and a serious business case for making those changes.  Developers, agile coaches, scrum masters, product owners, and random strangers want these changes.  Together, we will work to make the modern corporation more sustainable, sane, and satisfying place to work.  I have spent five years learning to be a great scrum master and coach.  It is now time to put that experience to use expanding the agile reformation. 

Until next time.

No secrets on an agile team.

No secrets on a crap game or agile team.

I went to San Diego this week to talk about “Healthy Ownership,” with other agile professionals.  The experience got me out of the office and listening to others and their challenges making their workplaces better.  During the discussion, I recalled an old saying I learned when I worked as a dealer and pit boss at Harrah’s casino, “There are no secrets on a crap game.”  It occurs to me that wisdom can be applied to any agile team.

Working a crap game in progress, for the uninitiated, is confusing.  Dice are flying in the air and depending on the number they land hundreds or thousands of dollars can be won or lost.  It is a loud, frantic, and intense game of chance.  Since it is so fast, the dealers need to have incredible arithmetic skills, manual dexterity to make payments, the customer service skills of a butler, and the grace under pressure of a bomb disposal expert.  It was the most difficult job I ever had.

The reason dealers and pit bosses say, “There are no secrets on a crap game,” is things move so quickly on a crap table that bets are often made while the dice are in mid-air.  Only by shouting out your bet and having it confirmed by a dealer does it “count.”  If the dice bounce off a player’s arm on a crap game the other players will get angry and will often leave the table.  The superstitious behavior of gamblers encourages craps dealers to vocalize everything they do.  A dealer repeats back bets to the players.  A dealer often recites the payouts they are making and where those bets are located on the felt in front of them.  All this happens because the game needs to keep moving and no one wants to lose out on a bet.

In a world where agile teams have healthy ownership, the teams should exhibit three qualities.

1. Open Dialog.
2. Increased Empathy.
3. Collective Ownership.

For a crap game to be successful, open dialog needs to exist on the crew.  It is why everything is vocalized.  At casinos, my experience was crews were scheduled together so they learn to work together.  Finally, everyone on the crew is accountable if someone cheats or something goes horribly wrong.  It seems the casino business was into healthy ownership before agile professionals.

What does this mean for software development teams?  To achieve open dialog, the development team, scrum master, and product owner need to be in constant communication.  Stand up meetings need to be frank and to the point.  Product owners should listen in and make sure they can answer questions.  Scrum masters should facilitate discussion using the product backlog as the central hub of information.  Finally, developers should follow up on acceptance criteria to make sure what they are building is what the product owner needs.  If anyone is in doubt the should speak out.

To increase empathy on the team, the scrum master and product owner should share a work space.  It allows the scrum master and product owner to understand each other’s routine.  Using video conference equipment also helps.  It lets individuals see each other as real people instead of disembodied voices on a conference call.  Teams should work together in open spaces with areas for mob programming and rooms for privacy; I find both are necessary for the success and sanity of developers.  The most important piece is to make sure each member of the team understands the challenges and responsibility of the others so they may have empathy.

The final outcome of collective ownership is necessary for Healthy Ownership to thrive. It means the scrum master, product owner, and development team share equally the success and failure of each sprint.  I find this to be the most difficult outcome to achieve.  It requires highly skilled people to give up a little of their ego and make sacrifices for others.  To borrow a phrase from Benjamin Franklin, the agile team needs to hang together or all of them will hang separately.

To have healthy ownership an agile team needs; open dialog, increased empathy, and collective ownership.  The development team should not have any secrets just like a casino craps crew.  Following this model will create the healthy ownership which will help every team a success.

Until next time.

A lack of skin in the game for employees

From the blog: ON ART AND AESTHETICS

Last week I talked about three types of cultural factors which can make an agile implementation challenging.  I also spent some time catching up with some of my contemporaries discussing the application of Agile at different firms.  It was a disappointing discussion.  This week I want to talk about agile and the lack of follow through in many organizations.

I started thinking about the inability for the organization to improve their agile maturity when fellow agilest David Koontz posted an article from the Harvard Business review about the failure of digital transformation at many firms. It opened my eyes.  I then noticed a new book published by the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb called “Skin in the Game,” about the uneven relationships we create in the labor market.  The most telling passage was the following.

“True, a contractor has a downside, a financial penalty that can be built into the contract, in addition to reputational costs. But consider that an employee will always have more risk. And conditional on someone being an employee, such a person will be risk-averse. By being employees they signal a certain type of domestication.”

In short, being an employee of a large company creates people afraid of risk and rocking the boat. The company through its leadership and culture incentivizes particular behavior.  The employee trades their skills and dependability in exchange for a paycheck.  It creates situations where conscientious people tolerate ignorance and inefficiency because they say, “…that is how we have always done it.” Thanks to this submissiveness large firms stagnate and die.

It also explains to me why agile coaches are contractors.  In the words of Ken Schwaber, agile holds a mirror up to an organization.  Many organizations are not equipped professionally or psychologically to look at that reflection because they would see the incentives they have created are perverse and the services they offer are not meeting customer needs.  It is like being in the Jean-Paul Sartre novel “Nausea.”  The world we know crumbles away, and we see the disorienting reality of how things are working. Confronted with this we have three choices:

1. Wallow in despair and impotence
2. Ignore the truth and pretend nothing has happened
3. Take action and try to make change

The modern corporation incentivizes employees to make the first two choices.  Those who choose the third option either quit or the company fires them.

So as a scrum master or agile coach we are stuck making a change at the margins and moving on when we cannot do anymore.  The global economy continues to spin, and nothing seems to change. It is easy to get discouraged, but the size and diversity of the agile reformation continue to grow.  According to Scrum.org, over 100,000 people are trained at Scrum.  Figures from the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance are harder to come by, but eighteen years ago the manifesto began with fifteen people in a ski lodge.   The growth of the movement has been increasing and today’s consultants and practitioners will become tomorrow’s managers, directors, and executives.  It is a matter of time, and the Agile reformation will be driving reform inside the business establishment.

So perverse incentives prevent businesses from being more innovative and agile. The good news is the agile reformation is growing and with this growth will come increasing acceptance.  It will not be easy, but it will be worth it.

Until next time.

Watching the changes roll by

Heraclitus would be pleased

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus has a special place in my heart.  He was one of the first thinkers to observe the importance of change, and he coined a slogan which business people use each day.  Heraclitus said, “The only constant in nature is change.” This maxim in philosophy and business got a bit of a work out this week as the Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org announced two new training programs.  This week, I would like to talk about these new programs.

Scrum.org announced a new class and certification called Professional Scrum with Kanban.  My initial reaction was skepticism.  Kanban is widely discussed among agile practitioners and understanding how to do it properly is part of learning Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise (SAFe).  I was confused.  With this wealth of information, why would anyone want or need a class on Kanban and scrum?  It occurred to me people learn in different ways.  Some individuals can handle self-directed learning on Kanban.  Other people, will benefit from classroom training and the guidance of an experienced trainer.  So, a course on Scrum and Kanban is not so strange or confusing. 

The next big news in the agile world is the scrum alliance announcing the Advanced Certified Scrum Master and the Advanced Certified Product Owner credential.  I was much less skeptical about this news.   I worked as an agile developer for four years before becoming a certified scrum master.  The credential gave me instant credibility with hiring professionals and with executive leadership.  What the training did not provide me were some of the soft skills I would need to be a more successful scrum master.  Abilities like active listening and creating a dialog with stakeholders were skills I would discover by trial and error.  The advanced program from the scrum alliance provides a solid background in the basics and the skills required to spread the use of agile to other parts of the business outside of technology.   As someone who has been a CSP for the last four years, I wish I had this training during the early portion of my career.  Now the scrum alliance is offering it, and it is a positive development for those who know the basics but wish to be more successful.

Any training and development from the agile community is a good thing for the people out in the field.  The sharing of knowledge and information between the different licensing bodies also creates a cross-pollination of ideas.  It prevents the practice of technology and project management from getting stagnant.  I use approaches from SAFe and scaling scrum with scrum side by side. I have to deal with waterfall budget processes and graft them to scrum teams.  Finally, I deal with business partners who think everything I do is magic.  I need all the training I can get to be successful and deal with those challenges.

Heraclitus was a teacher.  This founding father of change spent his time educating others about it.  If agile is to continue to grow and spread; its practitioners need more opportunities to improve their skills and gain knowledge.  It means these new courses are good news about the health of the Agile reformation.

Until next time.

Flying my Pirate Flag

I am letting my pirate flag fly.

Being a full-time scrum master or agile coach is a labor of love.  An agile coach needs devotion.  The successful scrum master needs to do more than manage the version control system.  At times, they need to act like Don Quixote jousting at windmills.  All the time, they are they misfits in the organization attempting to get it to improve when inertia governs the corporate culture.  It is very lonely, and it requires reservoirs of passion which many people do not possess.  This week, I talk about the passion for being a scrum master.

It takes a unique individual to get up before the sunrise and make a phone call with a group of developers half a world away.  Additionally, that person spends hours to coordinate product owners and executives so that those developers can work efficiently.  A scrum master handles this responsibility with no authority, everyone involved has the right to say no; It takes a particular kind of person to lead and facilitate this type of activity.  It requires passion.

Being human beings, we are creatures guided by emotions and reason. The modern business has toxic emotional situations and pressures to perform.  Over time, it leads to burn out and passive-aggressive behavior.  A person does not give it their all because it will not make a difference to our bosses or the organization.  Only the application of passion can get someone through the day.

Currently, I am reading a fantastic book by Dave Burgess entitled “Teach Like a Pirate.”  Using techniques he has developed over his career as a teacher, Burgess talks about how to be a better teacher using techniques to build a passion for the subject, build rapport with students, and create situations where enthusiasm can triumph.

What is refreshing is Burgess, knows the difficulty of teaching and how high school students can be the most terrible room for any professional.  What is interesting, is that one of the first things he talks about is the need for passion.  He is also brave enough to admit that he cannot be brimming with passion every day.  He calls people who do freaks.

So unless they are all freaks, how is it that outstanding teachers can maintain a passion for what they do?  Burgess gives a simple answer, and that is to ask questions about what inspires passion in a person. The first question is what subject areas in your field of expertise excite you?  For me, it is metrics and measurement of continuous improvement.  Nothing is more satisfying than putting an easy to understand chart on the wall explaining the team is improving.

The next question is what part of your job is the most satisfactory?  It is the reason you keep doing it.  I have written about this for years.  When software ships and the team feels like they have done a good job is what keeps me taking the call from India each day.  The final question is about personal passions.  For me, it is board games, family, friends, craft cocktails, and good food.  Those things provide me with inspiration and love for what I do.

So in the lonely world of a scrum master or agile coach, it helps to find your passion daily.  With Dave Burgess and “Teach Like a Pirate,” I might have seen a means to do that.

Until next time.

Humanities and Liberal Arts are Good for Technology

I want liberal arts in my business

Occasionally, the news of the week prompts me to yell expletives at my web browser or television.  This was a financial literacy course called, Teen Financial Education Day.  It seemed innocent enough teaching young people how to use credit responsibly, how to use the banking system, and make smart investments.  It was innocent until you saw the advertising materials which said things like “A ballerina yesterday.  An engineer today.”  As a successful scrum master and software developer this ticked me off.  This week on the blog I want to talk about why and emphasize that we need humanities, liberal arts, and the STEM in order to have a successful business community.

I graduated from Illinois State University with a major in Mass Communication’s and a minor in philosophy.  I pursued the minor because it was a subject which interested me.  I pursued the Mass Communications degree because I was going to work in radio.  I could not have picked a worse major as the radio business outside Chicago began to contract and the recession of 1990 evaporated any other jobs.  As a child of the Reagan 1980’s who said no to drugs, worked hard in school and strived to better himself; it was a very bitter pill to swallow.  I did everything expected of me by society and my elders and I was rewarded with underemployment and ridicule.

It would take me eight years from when I graduated from college to find a career in the technology field.  It was the giddy and stupid days of the dot com bubble and I went back to community college to learn visual basic.  At the ripe old age of 30, I was starting my career from scratch.  I was a self-taught technologist.  Funny thing was that my experience in newspaper, radio, and mass media made me a natural fit as a web developer.  I could discuss typography with print professionals in a language they understood.  I understood the shorthand of marketing professionals.  I knew things about color, shape and art which didn’t have to be explained.  As technology changed with the addition of CSS and XML, I was able to quickly adapt and retrain myself because I learned those concepts in school studying alien concepts like monads, existential nausea, and the payola scandals of the 1960’s.

As a liberal arts and humanity’s student, I had an advantage over my more technical colleagues because I had the “soft” skills and communications abilities to help software projects get done.  So when a bank like Wells Fargo says these skills are not necessary as part of financial literacy education it makes me want to become a hulking green rage monster.  Furthermore, when that bank is the second largest provider of private student loans in the United States, it looks like that a financial institution is trying to pick and choose which majors students should pursue.  It looks fishy at best and market manipulative at worst.

We need humanities and liberal arts in American culture.  We need humanities and liberal arts in American business because these graduates have the writing, speaking, learning and teaching skills that businesses need.  They understand different cultures.  Someone with a background in gender studies could help reduce sexual harassment in the workplace.  A worker with an understanding of Langston Hughes, Nina Simone or the Harlem Renaissance might be better explain diversity issues or #BlackLivesMatter to people who might not have that understanding.  Finally, an art history major would be a perfect choice for a UX designer or Web designer.

This is why we need liberal arts and humanities.  We need it because life is more than ones and zeros.  It is about people and inspiring them, understanding them, and helping them be better people.  It is about developing open minds and optimism about the future.  It is about understanding the past and the way our culture has evolved over the last 3000 years to become what it is today and what it might be tomorrow.  Liberal arts helps build better technology and better businesses and it is about time that others begin to see that.

Until next time.

Quite Heroes Holding Back the Apocalypse

The end of the world has not happened for a reason.

A common theme in literature is how our modern conveniences separate us from devolving into a barbarous culture which makes the middle ages look like a picnic.  Books like “The Canticle of Leibowitz”, “Lord of the Flies”, and “Ready Player One” are great examples of the genre.  This week I want to talk about something you may not understand.  The only reason technology works is because hard working professionals keep it working.

Technology today has an air of glamour and money associated with it.  It was not always the case.  Engineers who worked in the boiler rooms were covered in grease and coal dust.  The person who ran the data center had paper cuts over his hands from punch cards.  The grumpy guy who maintained the AS/400 couldn’t get clothes that fit because he never slept normal hours or ate right because he kept the business running.  These people were the unsung heroes of the industrial revolution and the first wave of computing.

Today, software rules everything we do from business transactions via EDI to the latest trading algorithms used by stock brokers.  This week I discovered just how deep the rabbit hole goes in my own firm.  Minor changes that seem insignificant can have major consequences, in my case consequences which can total seven figures.  It is a revelation and it is terrifying.

It is up to software engineers, scrum masters, and business people to work together to help keep the world civilized.  It is not easy.  It requires sacrifices from families as parents work late nights getting a release ready for production.  Spouses will have to put up with impotence and sleeplessness as scrum masters grapple with obstacles and how to circumvent them.  Finally, children will have to understand that a ball game will get missed or recital skipped because a server went down and needs to be patched.  Technology workers are well compensated but that compensation comes with accepting some painful trade-offs.

Today, technology people not only in the United States but around the world are struggling to keep the global economy working.  Developers in Northern Ireland are working with engineers in India for merchantmen in Hong Kong.  Project managers in Europe and the United States, are struggling to keep the trains running on time and the projects on track.  This is a very human activity to get machines to try and play nice with other machines.  It is a human struggle that goes on each day and not many people see it.

So the next time you are enjoying air conditioning, clean drinking water, wi-fi or the latest microbrew remember you enjoy these vestiges of civilization because someone sacrificed bringing them to you.  These silent professionals are the ones who make civilization possible.

Until next time.

Liberal Arts and Return on Investment

It was not a failure to launch
it was a rotten economy.
(Picture from Time.com)

Being an entrepreneur during times like this is very difficult.  Each day, I see myself confronted with frustration and failure.  It gets old and it sucks the enthusiasm out of you.  That is when I have had to rely on family and friends to pick me up and make sense of my crazy fate.  You see I have always traveled the more unfamiliar path my entire life and in spite of my choices I have managed to earn a living and develop the skills necessary to found my own business.  I reflected on that when this week when Payscale.com published its annual list of return on investment colleges and college majors.  Naturally, degrees from colleges near Silicon Valley and with big focus on science and technology had the highest rankings.  This kicked off another round of articles about how a humanities education was a handicap in today’s global economy.  As someone who comes from a humanities background, I can say that those articles are gross exaggerations.  This week on the blog, I will argue that a humanities background is an advantage in this mixed up global economy.

When I graduated from college in 1990, George Bush Sr. was president and we were in the middle of a recession which guaranteed that none of us graduating were going to find a job.  It was very discouraging for someone who wanted to work in radio.  I found an internship which paid minimum wage and worked nights as a disk jockey at a night club.  It was awful.  I was forced to live like a teen-ager with my parents and I had enough money for gas.  I could not afford to rent my own place or provide for myself.  Adding insult to injury was the cover of Time Magazine telling everyone that my failure to launch was due to laziness. As someone who said no to drugs, worked his nerdy butt off in high school and college, and sacrificed so much to become an academic and professional success; it was a bitter pill to swallow.

It was during this time that I felt the first rumbles of the internet.  I discovered the Prodigy data service and also learned about this funny thing called Microsoft windows and how it made life easier.  It did not know it yet but a path in my life was revealing itself to me.  It would be almost eight years from college graduation to my first technology job but I think my liberal arts background made it possible.  I had to learn strange languages.  A course in symbolic logic I took as part of my philosophy minor made it easier to understand decision trees and algorithms.  The years working in print media and radio helped me bridge the gap between old-media and the new-fangled media of the web.  Without a communications degree, I would not have the skills necessary to collaborate with customers and users.  Liberal Arts and humanities have served me well.

As I earned my MBA the study skills I learned as an undergraduate came in handy.  I was more prepared than my fellow students, understood the turn of a phrase and could take complicated things and make them easy to understand.  I doubt I would have learned those skills in a computer science course.  Now that I have an MBA and I have founded my own business, I see that I have been able to merge my experience with technology with my liberal arts background.

I also know that I want to hire a mix of liberal arts and technical professionals as my business grows.  I have terrible spelling so I have to rely on others to proof read my work.  That means that English majors are going to receive preferential hiring treatment from HR department.  For every developer who understands monads and SOLID programming, I am going to make sure I hire a few people to understand how to conjugate a verb and understand what Gottfried Leibniz meant by monads.  I feel this way because a diverse group of people can better solve the problems of customers.

So looking at the news that a liberal arts background may not provide the most return on investment for a professional, I politely ignore it.  I have been surviving and thriving as a professional because of my liberal arts background instead of in spite of it.  I have learned to ride the wave of the internet as it picked up steam and I have founded my own business hoping to help others take advantage of those trends.

If you would like to know more about my business and how we can help you improve your profits and bottom line please give us a call.

Being an entrepreneur is frustrating but I would rather follow this path rather than the well-traveled one.  I hope you get the chance to wander with me.

Until next time.