Hi there and welcome to Fashionable CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content material officer of Mansueto Ventures. Every week this article explores inclusive approaches to management drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Quick Firm. Should you obtained this article from a pal, you possibly can sign up to get it yourself each Monday morning.
As school college students settle into their fall courses, I assumed I’d use this week’s Fashionable CEO to counsel that aspiring enterprise leaders think about majoring in English or literature.
You learn that proper. I was an English main, and I recurrently draw on my humanities schooling in my function as CEO, albeit of a small media firm. My professors helped me admire nuance and originality (traits I search for when recruiting expertise). Throughout my school years, group discussions about literature taught me {that a} dozen individuals may learn the identical passage and have wildly totally different interpretations of the fabric—good preparation for navigating divergent opinions on a management crew.
The artwork of enterprise
I’m not the one English major-turned-CEO to commend my research. Nikhil Deogun, CEO of the Americas at advisory agency Brunswick Group, majored in English and economics. (“Economics was principally to maintain my dad completely satisfied,” he says.) “A liberal arts schooling teaches you find out how to suppose—find out how to make an argument, query an assumption, get to the center of a difficulty, and clarify why it issues,” he tells Fashionable CEO. “As a CEO, that’s an enormous a part of the job. You must make sense of sophisticated issues, resolve what issues and produce individuals together with you,” he says.
David Risher, chief govt officer and a director of Lyft, has a level in comparative literature, which he says, “is all about asking and discovering what makes nice literature work: How the writer tapped into common pursuits and desires for journey, for love, for relevance—to create one thing really novel. Any profitable enterprise does precisely the identical.”
Alas, college students have been turning away from humanities levels lately. A 2023 New Yorker characteristic titled “The End of the English Major” chronicled the decline of “schooling within the human previous,” noting that within the decade previous to the article’s publication, college-level examine of English and historical past fell by a 3rd whereas enrollment in career-oriented fields akin to well being sciences and engineering soared.
Irrelevance immunity
The rise of AI, nonetheless, could breathe new life into cultural research as employers begin to notice that crucial pondering and creativity can’t be simply changed by expertise. “A liberal arts diploma vaccinates you in opposition to irrelevance,” Risher says. “AI will know all of the solutions. However you’ll be taught to ask the precise questions, to suppose for your self, and to come back to some extent of view—expertise that may by no means exit of favor.”
So, in case you are a school scholar questioning whether or not an English diploma could enable you to get you a job, the reply is sure. It would even land you the highest job.
Reader mailbag
Our August 17 newsletter in search of recommendation on find out how to inspire groups at fast-growth corporations drew this response from Carlos Fausto Miranda, founder and principal, Fausto Industrial Actual Property Companies (No. 4,277 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 checklist of America’s fastest-growing personal corporations):
“Persons are pushed by function and which means. It’s crucial that everybody in your crew, from the bottom to the very best ranges, understands how critically essential they’re to attaining your trigger, and the way deeply essential the trigger is.”
Greatest in enterprise
My colleagues at Inc. are as soon as once more soliciting nominations for the annual Greatest in Enterprise awards, which acknowledge excellence throughout quite a few classes together with marketing, buyer impression, social good, and innovation. The successful individuals, initiatives, and corporations might be featured within the Winter concern, which I’ve come to worth as a compendium of the highlights of the yr. (The 2025 edition is chock-full of inspiration.)
Firms see many advantages to being named Greatest in Enterprise. Right here’s what Atmosphere Healthcare, a 2025 honoree throughout a number of classes, together with greatest AI Implementation, needed to say: The “Inc. Greatest in Enterprise Awards offered significant exterior validation. Extra importantly, it celebrated what our crew and our companions on the nation’s main well being techniques had achieved collectively.”
Learn and watch extra: CEOs and the humanities
- Steve Jobs on why expertise plus the humanities is in Apple’s DNA
- Why this CEO keeps hiring humanities majors
- A CEO who studied liberal arts as an undergrad says his MBA was a waste of time
