When Generalists Are Better Than Specialists, and Vice Versa

As a company nears maturity, it needs competent managers to oversee and fine tune existing process. Some of the early specialists start to leave — they’re innovators and implementers, not operators of existing systems. New specialists take their place — those good at maintaining existing processes and keeping them running over long periods of time.

Ideas follow inspiration, which comes freely at a friendly intersection of diverse multidisciplinary, multi-industry, multicultural thinking – exactly the kind of thinking that our focused lives tend not to have enough of.

When you know how generalists and specialists fit into the stage of a company’s growth, you can better plan for whether you want to develop a generalist or a specialist skill set. What stage is the company you’re at right now? If you want to stay there, do you need to focus on going deep with a specialist skill set or go broader by picking up more ... See more

Part 1: Strong Opinions

The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization. While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as com

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