The Fuzzy and the Techie

<p><b>A <i>Financial Times</i> Business Book of the Month from a leading venture capitalist offers a host of revelations on who will be driving innovation in the years to come. </b><br/><br/>Finalist for the 2016 Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize <br/><br/>“Scott Hartley artfully explains why it is time for us to get over the false division between the human and the technical.” --Tim Brown CEO of IDEO and author of <i>Change by Design </i><br/><br/>Scott Hartley first heard the terms fuzzy and techie while studying political science at Stanford University. If you majored in humanities or social sciences you were a fuzzy. If you majored in computer or hard sciences you were a techie. While Silicon Valley is generally considered a techie stronghold the founders of companies like Airbnb Pinterest Slack LinkedIn PayPal Stitch Fix Reddit and others are all fuzzies--in other words people with backgrounds in the liberal arts. <br/><br/>In this brilliantly counterintuitive book Hartley shatters assumptions about business and education today: learning to code is not enough. The soft skills--curiosity communication and collaboration along with an understanding of psychology and societal ills--are central to why technology has value. Fuzzies are the instrumental stewards of robots artificial intelligence and machine learning. They offer a human touch that is of equal if not greater importance in our technology-led world than what most techies can provide. <br/><br/>For anyone doubting whether a well-rounded liberal arts education is practical in today's world Hartley's work will come as an inspiring revelation.</p>