We live in the age of specialization and highly trained experts. It’s the end result of a lasting trend that began with the division of labor in the industrialization period, which spawned all sorts of management practices in manufacturing (think Toyota’s car plants and conveyor belts) and ultimately took over the service sector. That’s great news for experts but has brought the rare species of generalists to the brink of extinction. It’s been a dramatic, if gradual fall from grace. The original renaissance men (da Vinci, Leibniz, Goethe) had interests and capabilities that stretched across incredibly diverse and somewhat random disciplines. Goethe, for example, dabbled in iron ore mining for a while, not necessarily what you’d expect from the prince of poets. I bet these gentlemen were not equally competent in all the different things they touched, but being a polymath used to garner a lot of admiration. “Universal genius” is the flattering label that the German-speaking world coined for it.
Not anymore. It’s all about narrow skills, niche knowledge and highly specific capabilities. And that applies to disciplines across the board: finance, law, IT, engineering, medicine, linguistics, journalism and so forth. The specialist reigns supreme. And there are good reasons for it. As our understanding of any subject progresses, as we push the boundaries of research and create ever more sophisticated institutions and systems that are interconnected, complexity increases. In order to manage this complexity, you need specialists. They either know a particular thing inside out (say, how to design 3D graphics of fluids) or take that thing and take it to a whole new level (quantum physicists looking for the Higgs-Boson). Either way, the knowledge landscape fractures into smaller and smaller patches of sub-knowledge as a result. As it happens, there is often only a handful of people in the world who focus on the exact same topic and can have a meaningful discussion about it.
That creates two problems. First of all, it breeds isolation. Specialists may navigate adroitly around their small island of expertise, but are prone to lose sight of what lies beyond. I guess you can call that unworldliness without insulting anyone. Second, isolation is rather boring – for the isolated as well as the outsiders. Talking to a specialist doesn’t make for great conversation unless you’re a specialist yourself. Still, human capital is heavily geared towards specialists. Education favors early specialization, at least in continental Europe. The spirit of the liberal arts, a well-rounded education that promotes critical thinking, is hanging by a very thin thread. Job profiles are often so specific that only two or three candidates fit the profile and the rest is weeded out without any consideration. Call it efficient, I call it adverse selection.
The need to compartmentalize is a very human reflex. It tidies up a complex and often chaotic reality. But specialization has gone too far. It blinkers us and that’s never helpful. Generalists are important in a world full of experts and deserve much more credit than they’re currently getting. There are celebrity examples like Malcolm Gladwell, Niall Ferguson, Peter Sloterdijk or Nassim Taleb of course but they get their fair share of criticism. If you’re fed up with them because you think they’re jacks of all trades, that’s totally fine. If you think they’re arrogant and annoying like the kid in school who raises his hand all the time, that’s fine too. Because that’s their job and that’s what they’re here for. Call them experts in getting the big picture and connecting the dots. They may be weisenheimers but they’re never boring. Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs put it best when he spoke to summer interns a few months ago: “You have to be interesting, you have to have interests away from the narrow thing of what you do. You have to be somebody who somebody else wants to talk to”. This coming from his mouth, a representative of a notoriously specialized industry, is pretty encouraging. Let’s hope it catches on and we are at the beginning of a new generalist super-cycle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hnusNyxu5Q