3 CEOs on Why Their Unlikely Majors Were the Best Choice for Careers in Business
Lyft’s CEO says choosing a major in these areas “vaccinates you against irrelevance.”
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
As college students settle into their fall classes, I thought I’d use this week’s Modern CEO to suggest that aspiring business leaders consider majoring in English or literature.
You read that right. I was an English major, and I regularly draw on my humanities education in my role as CEO, albeit of a small media company. My professors helped me appreciate nuance and originality (traits I look for when recruiting talent). During my college years, group discussions about literature taught me that a dozen people could read the same passage and have wildly different interpretations of the material—good preparation for navigating divergent opinions on a leadership team.
The art of business
I’m not the only English major-turned-CEO to commend my studies. Nikhil Deogun, CEO of the Americas at advisory firm Brunswick Group, majored in English and economics. (“Economics was mostly to keep my dad happy,” he says.) “A liberal arts education teaches you how to think—how to make an argument, question an assumption, get to the heart of an issue, and explain why it matters,” he tells Modern CEO. “As a CEO, that’s a big part of the job. You have to make sense of complicated things, decide what matters and bring people along with you,” he says.
Refreshed leadership advice from CEO Stephanie Mehta
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David Risher, chief executive officer and a director of Lyft, has a degree in comparative literature, which he says, “is all about asking and discovering what makes great literature work: How the author tapped into universal interests and needs for adventure, for love, for relevance–to create something truly novel. Any successful business does exactly the same.”
Alas, students have been turning away from humanities degrees in recent years. A 2023 New Yorker feature titled “The End of the English Major” chronicled the decline of “education in the human past,” noting that in the decade prior to the article’s publication, college-level study of English and history fell by a third while enrollment in career-oriented fields such as health sciences and engineering soared.
Irrelevance immunity
The rise of AI, however, may breathe new life into cultural studies as employers start to realize that critical thinking and creativity cannot be easily replaced by technology. “A liberal arts degree vaccinates you against irrelevance,” Risher says. “AI will know all the answers. But you’ll learn to ask the right questions, to think for yourself, and to come to a point of view–skills that will never go out of style.”
Source: www.inc.com
