Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World

During spring break of my freshman year in college, I called my mom from the airport, as I had found an immediate flight to Belgium that week. And this while I was still a teenager. I learned the importance of being confident, but never cocky, in making smart decisions. Toward the end of my sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania, I went to a student conference at Princeton and ended up sleeping on a random student’s floor. I asked him what he was doing after he graduated and he told me he was going to become a consultant. He told me it was the perfect job for someone who didn’t know anything but had the confidence to pretend like he knew everything. This was prior to the internet, too, so I asked him to fax me the golden list he’d cobbled together of the one hundred largest consulting firms in the United States. I sent each firm my resume, which might as well have been a blank piece of paper, and eagerly awaited the rush of job offers. Instead, I received one hundred rejections, but at least they responded! Then I received a phone call from Mercer Management Consulting. While their New York office had rejected me, they’d sent my letter to their Philadelphia office. I got the job without an interview and spent the summer soliciting pharmaceutical companies to participate in their annual human resources survey. I enjoyed making a salary and decided to work there again during the school year.

Make Me Smile

Failure and rejection from nearly every consulting firm taught me the importance of taking initiative and not following the standard path. I also learned the law of large numbers, which boils down to the larger the volume of opportunities you pursue, the greater the number of opportunities you will have. People look for perfection and thereby create fewer potential opportunities for themselves. Instead, embrace imperfection and you’ll have more and better future options. I also saw the rewards if I resolved to be confident. The confidence I developed rippled forward from there and enabled me in all things to be bold. I have never gotten a job that I was an ideal candidate for. I genuinely believed that the company was lucky to have me leading the team, and I would find a way to succeed. It would ultimately allow me to believe that I could engineer the acquisition of Meetup out of WeWork no matter the odds. I never wavered in my confidence, not only that we would succeed but that there was no better leader for the company. Perhaps it’s because as a white man, I have a great deal of privilege that empowers me to challenge rules, expectations, and norms. I recognize that this makes it much easier for me to ignore do not enter signs and flout convention in a way that isn’t available to others.

Just For Now

If you succeed, great. If you fail, and over time you likely will, even better. If you fail, you’ll learn more. The same could be said of maximizing opportunities. Students are often taught the importance of building a specialty and taking a focused approach in their career choices. But this focus results in fewer and sometimes no choices, which then limits the likelihood a student will find a role that is the best fit for their specific needs. Besides, how many students even know what they want and what they’ll need when they get to college? I had taken classes in twenty different fields by the time I was a junior, and I still had no idea what I wanted to do. I couldn’t even imagine specifically focusing on any one topic and not trying to maximize my interest in building broad experiences. I would become the specialist in nothing but have basic skills across broad disciplines, and most important, I’d be able to understand the relationship between disciplines, which is often the best approach to tackling problems. I am an expert in very little. Each one of my direct reports knows more than I about their area of functional expertise. My priority is understanding the interdisciplinary reason for a challenge.

Coming Round Again

If we have a sales challenge, it isn’t solely a sales challenge. It is also likely a product, marketing, or incentive challenge. If our product isn’t meeting the needs of our users, it isn’t just a product issue but likely related to our approach to editorial, research, design, or engineering. As I learned from my earlier years, understanding others’ perspectives allows a leader to understand the myriad bases for company challenges and to make decisions across an organization rather than focusing on one function. Instead of trying one thing at a time, try a lot of things at the same time. Keep what works and ditch the rest. Expand your options. You’ll see yourself finding more success. Convention has always dictated the importance of specialization. Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World has dispelled the convention of specialization. Seriously playing a diversity of sports at a young age has been demonstrated to accelerate an athlete’s elite performance, and the same holds true for the value of diverse experiences for business leaders. The serendipity that comes from the optionality of diverse work experiences will drive more success than a persistent and potentially myopic focus of specialization. The risk of having many opportunities is, of course, being unable to choose among them and thereby losing all of them. Decision paralysis can impact every aspect of your personal and professional life. A decision isn’t just about the challenge at hand. For instance, I wasn’t sure whether I’d enjoy consulting after college, so I decided to get as many job offers as I could. And because I’d worked for a human resources consulting firm, the best way to do that would be to apply to other human resources consulting firms. I ended up with four offers. Three were from large, prestigious brand names with established career paths. I accepted quickly because my goal wasn’t a job.