The Future of Generalist Work

Britt Gage

“The beginner chases the right answers.

The master chases the right questions.”

James Clear • 3-2-1: On hard conversations, how to ruin a good strategy, and asking for what you want

Generalists are masters in asking the right questions.

Here are eight imperatives—all of them drawing strength and sustenance from the humanities:

We need a way of defining and pursuing progress that doesn’t reduce that concept to something that only comes from a digital device.

We desperately need access to values and wisdom that aren’t corrupted by the relentless financial metrics and imposed

Ted Gioia • The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn't Happening at College

I believe “what effect do you want to have on people” is one of the most important questions we should ask when we are making something. Life isn't just a series of problems to be solved but experiences to be had.

Things I'm thinking about

Top tier executive assistants are great at many things but have critical core operational tasks and simply don’t have the wide strategic business context required for CoS-style work.

Michael Houck • Understanding Cost Of Sales | Blog - Houck's Newsletter

How to clarify a concept you can’t articulate:

1. Change mediums. Draw it. Photograph it. Sing it.

2. Change levels. Explain what is one level up (bigger picture) or one level down (finer details).

3. Change fields. What would this concept look like in different fields?

James Clear • 3-2-1: On hard conversations, how to ruin a good strategy, and asking for what you want

How great generalists think

Job titles are just the most visible ladder of them all. It’s interesting that pompous executive job titles were invented during the Victorian era. This is when we started the trend of calling a cleaner a hygiene technician. A bin man became a waste management and disposal technician. Later on, a call-center worker became a communications... See more

Anne-Laure Le Cunff • The tyranny of job titles: from vanity growth to personal growth

Generalists have shirked the the notion of a true job title to fit their work and have followed the thread of providing value and making an impact. No wonder there’s a group of talented professionals hiding in plain sight given how constricting the traditional job titles have become in affirming our professional worth.

I don’t think that means we don’t need specialists. But as eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson said, we need both frogs and birds. The frogs are down in the mud looking at the granular details of everything. The birds are up above and don’t see those details, but they can see multiple frogs and can integrate work. What he said is, our... See more

Don’t Underestimate Generalists: They Bring Value to Your Team

The tools that are available to each of us are so powerful, so varied and so complex that even the free ones are ignored or misunderstood. We’re too busy doing work to get much done.

And so we end up with the convenient and sexy tools (like the smartphone you might be reading this on) and fail to do the few hours or days of training we might need to... See more

PW 4: Productivity and tools

So many of the problems that teams have — communication, organization, strategy — are unrelated to the function.

23 Tactical Company Building Lessons, Learned From Scaling Stripe & Notion

Generalists can unlock solves to org problems specialists have trouble fixing.