Wednesday, July 3, 2013

The eternal generalist vs. specialist debate revisited

A good piece I dug out from the Harvard Business Review which is about generalists and specialists - it becomes all the more relevant in the context of experts and expert opinion about which I have blogged often.
"The declining returns to expertise have implications at the national, company, and even individual level. A collection of specialists creates a less flexible labor force, one that requires "retraining" with technological developments creating constantly shifting human resource needs. In this regard, the recent emphasis in American education on "job-specific" skills is disturbing. Within a company, employees skilled in numerous functions are more valuable as management can dynamically adjust their roles. Many forward-looking companies are specifically mandating multi-functional experience as a requirement for career progress. Finally, individuals should manage their careers around obtaining a diversity of geographic and functional experiences. Professionals armed with the analytical capabilities (e.g. basic statistical skills, critical reasoning, etc.) developed via these experiences will fare particularly well when competing against others more focused on domain-specific skill development. 

The time has come to acknowledge expertise as overvalued. There is no question that expertise and hedgehog logic are appropriate in certain domains (i.e. hard sciences), but they certainly appear less fitting for domains plagued with uncertainty, ambiguity, and poorly-defined dynamics (i.e. social sciences, business, etc.). The time has come for leaders to embrace the power of foxy thinking."
Any "expert" opinion on this?

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