Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

A recent study found that cardiac patients were actually less likely to die if they were admitted during a national cardiology

But the drive to specialize goes beyond that. It infects not just individuals, but entire systems, as each specialized group sees a smaller and smaller part of a large puzzle.

I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience,

Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. Instead, as Herminia Ibarra suggested for the proactive pursuit of match quality, start plannin

So, about that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind.

You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.”

His description reminded me of Girl Scouts CEO Frances Hesselbein’s “circular management.” Instead of a ladder, the organizational structure was concentric circles, with Hesselbein in the middle. Information could flow in many directions, and anyone in one circle had numerous entry points to communicate with the next circle, rather than just a sing

A patient reports knee pain; an MRI shows a torn meniscus; naturally, a surgeon wants to fix it. When five orthopedic clinics in Finland compared the surgery with “sham surgery”—that is, surgeons took patients with knee pain and a torn meniscus to operating rooms, made incisions, faked surgeries, and sewed them back up and sent them to physical the

“Like all of you, nobody [at NASA or Thiokol] asked for the seventeen data points for which there had been no problems,” he explains. “Obviously that data existed, and they were having a discussion like we had. If I was in your situation I would probably say, ‘But in a classroom the teacher typically gives us material we’re supposed to have.’ But i