Rejecting Specialization

• The Industry/Reality Gap

Looking at successful examples of 20% beef we see that there’s a common theme of analyzing the gap between theory and industry. The unique vantage point that the consultant has is the vantage point across multiple clients - sometimes across multiple industries too.

In every industry there’s typically some kind of received wisdom that sounds like good rational advice but simply doesn’t hold up when faced with reality. The trick is to look for advice that is “not even wrong” - advice that is correct in a certain sense but fundamentally unhelpful when applied to reality.

Building vibes is a different kind of work from specializing. You’re not just demonstrating expertise and competence but compatibility.

How strong opinions create the kind of trust and visibility required for senior, ambiguous work.

Great positioning, if you can pull it off, can lead to ambiguous work.

It’s hard to see which parts of your experience and opinions are distinctive and resonate without sharing them. In my experience, it’s rarely the big grand vision that people are attracted to but rather something more mundane and grounded - something that has a clarity and weight about it that is distinctive.

Developing a point of view is a long journey, and it’s not easy. But it’s a more forgiving path than specializing.

You can separate most work into two buckets: well-defined and ambiguous .

• Well defined work is the kind of recognizable work where the client has clarity around both the problem and solution.


• Ambiguous work on the other hand is where either the problem or solution are not fully formed. 

The problem is that good specialization is exceptionally hard. And mediocre specialization has two core problems:

1. It attracts less senior, more tightly defined work that traps you in a mode of repeatable execution work


2. It puts you in a well defined box that grinds against your identity