Many engineering majors hate humanity classes with a passion. Like most other engineers, I growned and moaned at the ones that actually made you read, or even write (gasp). However, I have changed a bit since those freshman days; classes that used to seem useless are now more appealing. In fact, I believe that the creativity required in humanity classes will help engineers be better entrepreneurs.

Humanity classes focus around methods that are mainly analytical, critical and speculative. It’s not just about how, it’s why. It’s about those red pens bleeding all over my papers, screaming “so what? convince me!” It’s about getting a B- for hackneyed ideas. Each thought has to be original and different. You have to be creative. You have take complicated aspects of humankind and explain it in an understandable way. An entrepreneur must be capable of all these things. You don’t get specifications given to you by the lead designer. Like a paper, you just think of thesis and go.

Recently, I came across a New York Times article, revealing the libraries of CEO’s. What’s surprising is the emphasis of fiction over non-fiction. Sure, those “Top 10 Ways to Networking” books are useful, but it’s the novels and poetry contain raw substance:

Poetry speaks to many C.E.O.’s. “I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers,” says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports. Mr. Harman maintains a library in each of his three homes, in Washington, Los Angeles and Aspen, Colo. “Poets are our original systems thinkers,” he said. “They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”

What I found in some of the technical courses (not all) were more “how-to”’s rather than “how-come”’s. Engineers are good at building things. They are good making sure all the small details of a system function correctly. And that’s how big companies work; each engineer is given a modulized task, which are then pieced together. This works great at large organizations, but startup’s are much more messy.

Like a writer, poet, or poet, an entrepreneur has to have an original take on a messy problem. For example, let’s look at the iPhone. It’s probably too early to call it a success, but many things on it just work elegantly. Internet is a huge problem on mobile devices, but Apple has improved it a bit by analyzing and showing that the problem is the UI. There’s no way you could browse around webpages with only buttons. Surprisingly, no one got that. No one was creative enough to get of the common button world and venture into the finger pointing world. Everyone else got a B- while Apple got an A. Human problems are chaotic; those who can analyze and create clear and original solutions win.

In a previous post, I mentioned how we need better entrepreneurship programs in college. I will definitely be giving this some more thought as I organize my fall semester class schedule. To those who found this post boring, considering dropping out of school I welcome all comments.

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