In 1984, when Georgia Berner's husband was killed in a plane crash, she found herself with four children and a manufacturing company that needed someone to run it. As CEO of Berner International in New Castle, she has grown the company sixfold and received numerous awards in recognition of her work. The following is excerpted from her address to December graduates at Slippery Rock University.

How could I be so successful at business when my degrees are in the humanities?

Well, what is business? In its simplest stripped-down form, business is selling a product for a profit. You might make the product or a service, or you might buy the product from someone else to sell the product; it's still about selling a product for a profit.

So how did my education translate to the needs of an engineered product manufacturing business? Fine arts training gave me an eye for drawings; political science and social psychology (which is about demographics and "normal" behavior) gave me an understanding of people and hence of marketing; English literature gave me communication and articulation skills, plus a sense of breadth of the world in which we operate; the humanities taught me to question, to question and to question, to gather many sources, to be creative; raising children and living in Japan gave me organizational skills; history and the great works of literature throughout the ages taught me the importance of ethics and integrity in doing business.

Did I need a business degree to be successful? No, I did not. And when someone recently asked me that question, it led me to think that perhaps we would not have so many Enrons or US Airways in our current world if more people read about Ulysses and King Lear; read Faulkner and Winston Churchill, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ayn Rand; saw plays like "Cat on A Hot Tin Roof" -- even "The Lion King" -- because greed, treachery and false pride are as old as mankind, a tale told many times. And whether the tale is fiction or whether the tale is Enron, the plot never changes.

What my university education gave me was the tools for my mind -- the ability to be resourceful, questioning, to express myself and to believe in myself.

So, I am a manufacturer with several liberal arts degrees. And I am also a woman. Doesn't that sound like a double whammy? Yes and no. I am deeply thankful to have been born in the United States, where women have choices. I also believe our choices are precarious, that women and the wonderful men who support us need to always be vigilant. It is not that long that women have been out of long skirts, allowed to vote, having athletic programs in our schools. Slippery Rock is known for -- among other excellent programs -- its physical education programs. We are graduating outstanding young phys ed teachers, and Title IX is under attack in this country.

Small businesses have been acknowledged to be the engine of this economy. A large proportion of those businesses are owned by women, and they still have difficulties getting financing solely because they are women. The Economist magazine has observed that countries where women are free and active partners in the economy have the successful economies. Countries where women are subjugated, shrouded, have no rights, have the unsuccessful economies of the world.

Think about it. Cut half your population out of the cultural, working and political world: A lot of energy has to be devoted to keeping that population down, energy that could be spent building, creating, progressing.

One more thing that I believe belongs in the world of business is respect for people. We do not have a top-down structure at Berner. Each one of us has a job to do, and we know our jobs. But we also know that our operation is fluid, that communication is more important than anything and that yelling at people does not increase their output nor the quality of their work.

It is my belief that you now have a responsibility, a responsibility to continue to learn and grow; to be curious and to be creative; to occasionally turn off the television and read a book, even if it is only a children's book; to question news; to take a long walk; to dance; to listen to a symphony; to reach out to different cultures and ideas; and to remember that under our different skins and shapes we are all just humans, trying to get along.

You are setting off on a journey. If you don't like the place where you are, either change it or leave it, because life is much too short to put up with it.