For many years I struggled to become an expert because I thought that was where the real value was - I was a photographer, an IBM MVS Systems Programmer for a while, a telecommunications guru (questionable but it makes a point), a creativity expert and probably a few others. Each of these I approached with vigor, curiosity and enthusiasm - each brought new skills, new insights and plenty of problems. However although my salary levels and seniority rose it wasn't until I stepped back from being a specialist to becoming a generalist that I found my true vocation in life and where I can add real value to business, people and companies.
I was reading Stephen Dennings book over the weekend on Leadership and Storytelling and was interested to read that he too found that when he bridged the gap between a number of different disciplines was where he found his niche. This bridging role is one I got into almost by accident way back in the mid 199o's when I was heading up a telecommunication group and got seconded onto a working party to look at the future of the company - from a technical perspective. I wrote the technical bit but found I had a 'need' to write little the general bit as well - I found that the experience I had had becoming specialist was suddenly paying off as I could bridge the gap between business and technology.
My career over the next few years was a little chaotic and opportunistic but I carried on finding people and projects that needed this bridging, this generalist role. This I called innovation and being able to stitch stories together about what might happen in the future became my version of foresight. I assumed everyone else could do this 'stuff' but after a few years I realized that this was not the case and in fact there were few people who could take on this role - particularly the looking forward bit.
So back to the generalist concept. I was lucky enough to meet Micheal Rodgers a couple of years ago who had been the Futurist in residence at the New York Times. We had engaged him to speak at a conference at Pitney Bowes on how the world would change. Over dinner the evening prior to the conference we chatted at some length about this strange role we had both found ourselves in - that of the practical futurist.
We concluded that being a generalist who could talk about - technology, society, business, economics and many other topics and making this relevant to the audience was what futurism was really all about. So many people know a lot about a little - a futurist tends to know a about a lot and has the ability to make it relevant, timely and most of all interesting!
Going back to the bridge concept then - this ability to bridge the worlds of different people and disciplines seems to be something that few people can do effectively but I believe is something that we need to value as a society and we should find out how we can develop this further. In the future, particularly with the vast amounts of specialist knowledge and experience available on the Internet the ability to stitch this all together and make sense of it will be a valuable capability as we come out of the current recession and back into growth. One of the problems we saw last year was that companies were not taking the time to look holistically at their environment and landscape and for many they either missed the signs altogether or at best misread them.
What are your thoughts on the generalist vs. specialist argument?
