Prof. Evan Radcliffe's reception remarks:
In “How to Avoid a Bonfire of the Humanities” a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (25 October 2012; p. A17), Michael S. Malone tells what happened when he invited his friend Santosh Jayaram to talk to his students. Jayaram, Malone writes, “is the quintessential Silicon Valley high-tech entrepreneur: tech-savvy, empirical, ferociously competitive, and a veteran of Google, Twitter and a new start-up, Dabble.” So Malone was worried that Jayaram might discourage students in an English class. But, as Malone writes, “Santosh said, ‘Are you kidding? English majors are exactly the people I'm looking for.’”
Malone describes Jayaram’s reasoning: “Twenty years ago, if you wanted to start a company, you spent a month or so figuring out the product you wanted to build, then devoted the next 10 or 12 months to developing the prototype, tooling up and getting into full production.” But “Most products now are virtual, such as iPhone apps,” and lots of people anywhere in the world can construct them. The most important thing happens before you built the app, because you need to find investors and partners, explain to them and to coders what you want to build, and think about marketing your product—“and you have to do all of that without an actual product. ‘And how do you do that?’ Santosh said. ‘You tell stories.’ Stories, he said, about your product and how it will be used that are so vivid that your potential stakeholders imagine it already exists and is already part of their daily lives. Almost anything you can imagine you can now build, said Santosh, so the battleground in business has shifted from engineering, which everybody can do, to storytelling, for which many fewer people have real talent. ‘That's why I want to meet your English majors,’ he said.”
Malone concludes: “Asked once what made his company special, Steve Jobs replied: ‘It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.’”
