Success Quote by J. Irwin Miller

A businessman praising the humanities is already a small act of rebellion against the spreadsheet gospel. J. Irwin Miller frames the humanities not as ornament or leisure, but as a form of practical ethics: a discipline charged with improving how people behave at work and at home. The line quietly flips the usual corporate hierarchy. Instead of treating “humanities” as a cost center and “professional activities” as the real arena, he suggests the opposite: our jobs are where character gets stress-tested, and the humanities are one of the few toolkits designed to prepare us for that pressure.

His diction is telling. “Most of us sense” invokes a kind of moral common sense, as if the claim shouldn’t be controversial - only politically inconvenient. “Responsibility” makes it heavier than “purpose”: he’s assigning an obligation to educators, institutions, and arguably employers who fund them. The phrase “conduct of human beings” sounds almost clinical, which is part of the point. In a business context, “conduct” covers everything from honesty to power to how decisions ripple through communities. “Manifold professional activities” widens the target beyond executives or “leaders” to everyone doing consequential work inside systems.

Miller’s era matters. Mid-century American capitalism sold itself as modern and efficient, while also generating bureaucracies capable of extraordinary harm at scale. His subtext is a warning: technical competence without interpretive and moral training becomes a dangerous kind of excellence. The humanities, in his view, are not anti-business; they’re the missing governance layer for human behavior when incentives get sharp.