Success through being a generalist

Everyone knows what it means to specialize in a particular field but it might not be as common to think about what it means to be a generalist.

Forbes magazine uses an excellent analogy from the animal kingdom in which they examine koalas and mice.  Koalas must have a specific diet, climate, and access to trees in order to survive and thrive.  Mice, on the other hand, can survive just about anywhere that there is access to edible food.  Although koalas do well when the situation is ideal, disruption can lead to disaster while the mice will simply move on to somewhere else.

Much like the animals, people often fill these same roles during their lives in the way they approach their careers and personal lives. As the Harvard Business Review explains, the past several decades have seen a marked increase in the amount of specialists flooding the job market because, for years, “expert” status has assured more money and better career chances.  They argue that this era may be drawing to a close, however, as it will take a generalist familiar in a variety of fields to be able to connect individual pieces into a big picture of the modern world economy.

For a given business, having a team of people highly trained in one specific area will be extremely inflexible if it comes time to head in a new direction or otherwise respond to trends in the market.  These individuals would have to be retrained which takes time and effort.  On the other hand, generalists can not only react more nimbly, but also tend to predict those trends better than the experts.  According to a study of professional forecasters, non-experts in a field were more likely to predict the future than the experts; which shows how a narrow viewpoint can be blinding.

While it will probably always be useful for a person’s surgeon to be highly trained in their area of expertise during an operation, it might take a generalist to understand why the surgery is needed in the first place.