“Keep reading . . . read about any subject that interests you, and read about it until you fully understand it.”
The source of those words, and the audience for them, might be a surprise. The speaker is Jean-Pierre Garnier, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, second largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Garnier is leaving soon, and he spoke to young professionals at GSK at a luncheon about how to succeed in their work. Be a reader, he urged, affirming that wide reading well beyond your expertise and professional duties stretches the mind and increases knowledge.
His advice contradicts much of the tensions between the humanities worlds and business worlds, which seem to be growing as the undergraduate business major becomes more and more popular on campus. In fact, as this chart shows, bachelor’s degrees conferred in business far exceed those in any other discipline. In 2004, 307,000 out of 1.4 million total bachelor’s degrees went to business majors.
That’s more than English (54,000), foreign languages (17,700), liberal arts (42,000), philosophy and religion (11,000), and social sciences and history (150,000) combined.
Maybe Garnier’s counsel is a response to narrow professional outlooks he, perhaps, finds among young American professionals in business. Indeed, when CEOs are queried about what kind of workplace talents they’d like to see more of, they don’t talk about technical or computing or professional skills and knowledge. They talk about creativity, innovativeness, and imagination. Those traits come from long experience with literature, philosophy, history, and the arts.
So, as students flock to the undergraduate business major, they should keep in mind that the liberal-arts courses they so happily leave behind and judge as irrelevant to their careers may, in fact, form their only chance to acquire mental habits that will serve them well as they climb the corporate ladder.
