Engineering or Liberal Arts?

This morning I came across an article in TechCrunch by Vivek Wadhwa on where investments in education should be focused – Engineering or the Liberal arts?

Wadhwa an entrepreneur turned academic, was initially inclined himself towards the engineering side of the debate. Bill Gates in a recent address, according to the article had argued that education investments should be diverted from the Liberal Arts since they do not contribute to innovation or job creation. Steve Jobs of Apple on the other hand had talked about his company’s work being a synthesis of Technology, Engineering and the Humanities. Wadhwa in his own research at Duke University, has found that successful entrepreneurs and innovators do not necessarily have a background in Engineering or Technology and often come from diverse non-technical fields. He does state though that graduates with liberal arts degrees have a harder time in the employment market. He however advises his own children and students to follow and excel in their own sources of passion – implying perhaps the importance of excellence and its role in employability and success.

I completely agree with Wadhwa’s position on this topic. Like Wadhwa my own background is in Engineering. I spent several early years of my career designing and building sophisticated industrial control systems. I enjoyed that experience significantly and was proud of the contributions we made to society and the economy. I learned a lot about the design and engineering of complex systems in the process, particularly from German, Swiss and American engineers with whom my company in India collaborated. (In particular I still treasure the rigor and discipline involved in building such systems, and worry that the same rigor is often not seen in the Information Systems building discipline – however, that is besides the point for this post).

When I made a career transition into the Information Services industry, I increasingly realized the role and importance of socio-technical systems. Success with information technology required a greater understanding of the people and social aspects of organizations. Over the years of work in the IT industry, I was involved in building information systems that touched nearly all aspects of creating Innovative, Smart and Collaborative enterprises. Delivering successful outcomes with Information Technology necessarily demanded a keen insight and knowledge of the people side of the equation.

We all know that enterprises exist for customers (Levitt). Businesses design Value Creating Systems to help their customers solve problems. What customers value and how they consume and experience value too requires sophisticated understanding of human psychology, motivation, desires etc, requiring us to understand various social and psychological aspects of the value interface.

It is only through the purposeful and meaningful synthesis of our understanding of these vectors – the human, organizational and technological, can we build socio-technical systems that deliver sustained value. It is through the understanding of the enterprise as a socio-technical system can we build an Agile enterprise that can participate in sustained value creation by being Smart, Innovative and Collaborative.

In my mind too, the debate of Engineering vs. the Liberal Arts therefore is misleading. We continue to move at an accelerated pace into a world where only holistic systems that incorporate and integrate humans will succeed. The humanists will have to work side-by-side with the engineers to create a better world. We need everyone involved in that process. There will be jobs for the liberal arts too, for their will bring critical skills to the value equation and companies that do leverage those competencies will be in business long.