Sometimes a simple story is all it takes to capture complex issues, or so it seems. Take this one. A few years ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost a game of Scrabble to a friend’s teenage daughter. “Before they played a second game, he wrote a simple computer program that would look up his letters in the dictionary so that he could choose from all possible words,” wrote New Yorker reporter Evan Osnos. As the girl told it to Osnos, “During the game in which I was playing the program, everyone around us was taking sides: Team Human and Team Machine.”
Business Does Not Need the Humanities — But Humans Do
Calls to humanize business are not new. From Elton Mayo to Charles Handy, leading thinkers have called for a role for the humanities in mitigating technology’s relentlessness and the efficiency’s ruthlessness. But therein lies the problem: relegating the humanities to a proscribed “role” reduces them to a useful instrument, which strips them of what makes them special. Poetry is not a productivity hack, and a novel is not a means to an end of increased EQ. Embracing humanity means asking more fundamental questions: what if inconvenience and discomfort, boredom and distractions, are features and not bugs of a good life? What if social fragmentation and dearth of meaning in the workplace are not symptoms of what is not working, but side effects of what works? That is, unintended outcomes of our obsession with solving problems and cutting a profit? These are the questions that only the humanities can help us answer. Sometimes it is useful to move fast and break things. Other times it is wise to move slow and heal people.