Business education is being re-examined and reformulated to help students learn to grapple with business problems in new, multidisciplinary ways and to equip them with a deep cross-cultural understanding and a truly global perspective. Business students with highly verbal abilities, compared to those with high math abilities, thrive on complexity and uncertainty and tend to be open-minded, analytic, nonjudgmental, and integrative thinkers. This has resulted in an advocacy for bringing together the disciplines of economics and humanities. Conflicts arise when seemingly disparate disciplines are combined, and the resistance from some faculty to interdisciplinary studies often arises for reasons apart from the intrinsic merit of the courses. However, it behooves the disciplines, particularly the departments of foreign languages which find it difficult to make the transition into meeting student needs for a particular profession, to review their curricula and find ways to gain from each other while creating approaches to learning through course work more adaptable to the needs of the future. Six categories of business or economics novels are outlined, and seven teaching suggestions are offered for the use of fiction as authentic texts in business courses. (Contains 10 references.) (JDD)