The Fuzzy and the Techie

Financial Times Business Book of the Month

Finalist for the 2016 Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize

A leading venture capitalist offers surprising revelations on who is going to be driving innovation in the years to come

Scott Hartley first heard the terms fuzzy and techie while studying political science at Stanford University. If you majored in the humanities or social sciences, you were a fuzzy. If you majored in the computer sciences, you were a techie. This informal division has quietly found its way into a default assumption that has misled the business world for decades: that it's the techies who drive innovation.

But in this brilliantly contrarian book, Hartley reveals the counterintuitive reality of business today: it's actually the fuzzies - not the techies - who are playing the key roles in developing the most creative and successful new business ideas. They are often the ones who understand the life issues that need solving and offer the best approaches for doing so. It is they who are bringing context to code, and ethics to algorithms.They also bring the management and communication skills, the soft skills that are so vital to spurring growth.

Hartley looks inside some of today's most dynamic new companies, reveals breakthrough fuzzy-techie collaborations, and explores how such collaborations are at the center of innovation in business, education, and government, and why liberal arts are still relevant in our techie world.