The Fuzzy and the Techie

A Financial Times 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.

Finalist for the 2016 Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize

“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 Change by Design

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.

In this brilliantly counterintuitive book, Hartley shatters assumptions about business and education 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.

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.