In his book, The Fuzzy and The Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World, Hartley also argued that the business world depends on human touch that soft skills bring despite the increasing role technology plays in running business organizations. His book has been translated into six languages and was listed among top ten business books in Spain, 2021. According to him, technology and the liberals arts cannot be studied in isolation from each other. He spoke about his book at the World Bank annual meeting, USGIF's GEOINT Symposium, Google, IBM, Stanford University with Marissa Mayer, University of Washington, University of Arizona and Arkansas State University. The book was also selected as a book of the month by the Financial Times and was a finalist for the FT and McKinsey & Company's Bracken Bower Prize. His book has been mentioned by Fareed Zakaria during commencement speech at Bucknell University. He maintained that liberal arts degrees are crucial in applying emerging technologies to the creation of breakthrough innovations. Hartley also criticized fellow venture capitalists such as Marc Andreessen, who previously declared that the average graduate with a degree in English ends up "working in a shoe store”. He pushed back against Andreesen's position that a liberal arts education limits the dimensionality of one's thinking since it makes students less familiar with mathematical models and statistics. Hartley said that those with backgrounds in these fields "will develop ethics in artificial intelligence, question bias in algorithms and data and will bring contextual understanding to code.”
