Drew Faust on the importance of the humanities to a leader

"Such inquiry teaches us how to scrutinize the thing at hand, even in the thick dust of danger or drama or disorienting strangeness. It imparts skills that slow us down — the habit of deliberation, the critical eye, skills that give us capacity to interpret and judge human problems; the concentration that yields meaning in a world that is noisy with information, confusion, and change. The humanities teach us many things, not the least of which is empathy — how to see ourselves inside another person’s experience. How to picture a different possibility. As General Omar Bradley put it, 'A leader must possess imagination.'"

-Drew Faust in a speech at USMA, March 2016

http://www.harvard.edu/president/speech/2016/to-be-speaker-words-and-doer-deeds-literature-and-leadership