Westmont Magazine The Liberal Arts' Superpower

Teaching Graduates How to Tell Stories

Geoffrey Moore, a bestselling author, speaker and adviser, explored “Digital Transformation: The Liberal Arts in an Age of Disruption” at a sold-out Mosher Center for Moral and Ethical Leadership luncheon November 5 in Westmont’s Global Leadership Center.

His first book, “Crossing the Chasm,” describes challenges start-up companies face as they move from early adopters to mainstream customers. Now in its third edition, the volume has sold more than a million copies.

At the luncheon, Moore explained how we’ve moved into a new economic era, dubbed the Age of the Customer. Earlier business networks depended on energy and globalization of the supply chain to yield the lowest cost advantage. The advent of the internet has led to a huge shift from providing customer support to helping customers succeed. “Where is the trapped value in your world and how can we make sure our product helps you release that trapped value so you can get a return on your investment?” Moore says.

Workers focused on customer success constantly check to see which customers are adopting their products and what parts they’re using. “If we can apply that to the educational community, which of our students are ahead?” he says. “Which of our students are behind? Do you know? I taught for four years, I could intuit that. A good teacher kind of senses it, but you don’t know. But in a digitally enabled world, you would know.”

Sal Khan is founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. “He shows us a little flash of what this could look like,” Moore says. They know exactly how their students are doing in the class. They can see where they get stuck, and they can inter- vene. And when students are learning fast, they can get out of the way.

In the context of this model, Moore said a liberal arts degree can help graduates succeed in marketing new products because they can tell a story. “Venture capitalists don’t have all the facts, but they can apply literary criticism to entrepreneurial narratives,” he says. “You learn about the difference between telling a good story, a mediocre story and a bad story in an English class. You can bring that knowledge to a marketing story. You have to tell a story that’s credible and compelling. It’s a liberal arts discipline. It’s not a STEM discipline at all.”

Shifting your focus from yourself to the customer requires a whole new vocabulary so you can understand their industry and its worth. Moore says that learning all the nouns helps you master a discipline. For example, in statistics, you learn what regression and standard deviation mean. “If you take a new course here at Westmont, there’s a bunch of nouns you have to learn. But the verbs, adjectives, modifiers and conjunctions are always the same.”

He described this as a kind of language immersion. If your first job involves interacting with customers, you must quickly immerse yourself and learn all the nouns in their industry.

“The value of a liberal arts education, once you get past that first job, gets better and better because of creative imagination and incredible thinking,” he said. “We’re continually confronting new problems and new situations with new narratives that have new implications. You have to realize that narrative is the problem-solving tool for the future. Robots will not replace us because we’re story-telling beasts. We use stories to process the world, imagine other worlds and navigate the future under great uncertainty.”

The Mosher Foundation generously sponsors the Mosher Center for Moral and Ethical Lead- ership lecture series. Westmont has invited leading global thinkers, including Pulitzer Prize recipients and award-winning authors, to speak to the community. The series seeks to explore and encourage the important role moral and ethical leadership plays in the business, govern- ment and non-profit sectors.