What type of education is most valuable today? We need tech, tech and nothing but tech, say venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Kentucky governor Matt Bevin. These angry crusaders are making headlines -- but they're missing something crucial about tech's own growth engine. A lot of today's engineers wouldn't even be in business if it weren't for non-technical people. A prime case in point: the contributions of Harvard classics major Tim O'Reilly.
If you've ever tried to sharpen up your programming skills, you know about O'Reilly Media's vast shelf of books on everything from Windows 10 to Python for Data Analysis. Each book is well-organized; each tends to be about as lucid as such works can be, and they're all priced in line with the cost of a decent lunch, instead of an overseas vacation. Add in O'Reilly Media's webinars and conferences -- and the Sebastopol, Calif., company has played a important role in training countless thousands of software engineers.
So why did it take a classics major, instead of an engineer, to build this formidable training institution? The answer is: knowing how to code is only one piece of the puzzle. Tim O'Reilly writes well -- and he knows how to build up a team of capable writers and editors so that his business can scale. He did some technical writing on his own after college, and it didn't take long for him to see the chance to build a business, instead of just paying the rent.
Most important, O'Reilly has a deep understanding of how knowledge should disseminate in a society, and how best to make that happen. O'Reilly Media doesn't just truck its books into bookstores and wait for customers; it develops a deep engagement with the engineering community through all sorts of low-cost, ingenious ways. Building a knowledge community is an art, and O'Reilly got the right training during his 1970s stint at Harvard. As he told a Harvard interviewer a while ago: "The classics are part of my mental tool set; the context I think with."
One of O'Reilly's credos is "Create more value than you capture." Where does that come from? O'Reilly says he drew inspiration from a famous exchange between Diogenes and Alexander the Great. The connection is too intricate to summarize here, but the key insight is that successful publishing requires a blend of altruism and business savvy.
It isn't easy to get that right. If O'Reilly's classical education helped him strike the right balance, that's turned out to be an advantage worth many millions of dollars.
More broadly, all it takes is a quick scan through the job ads to see how useful a liberal-arts education can be -- even in our tech-hungry society. Facebook's top hiring need these days, as I've written before, doesn't involve software engineers. Instead, the giant social network keeps needing to build out its sales and business development team. That's a natural haven for people who studied English, psychology and the like in college. They know how to read people, how to build a compelling narrative, and how to navigate their way through conflicting priorities.
Think about everything too literally, and it's easy to mock what's taught on liberal arts campuses. Khosla decries people who memorize the Gettysburg Address, and Gov. Bevin doesn't like French-literature majors. But I've been spending the past few months talking to a lot of liberal-arts majors who have been in the workplace for five to 15 years. They tell me that they routinely extrapolate business-relevant lessons from long-ago classes.
Just ask Jason Langheier, a Williams College graduate who now runs Zipongo, a digital nutrition platform in San Francisco. His alma mater, founded in 1793, is the epitome of an old-line liberal arts college. That provided the ideal launching pad, Langheier says, because "Williams teaches you entrepreneurship without even knowing it."
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I'll be writing a lot more about the value of non-technical skills in a high-tech world, both for Forbes and in a forthcoming book. For updates, follow me on Twitter at @GeorgeAnders
