Where Have All The Generalists Gone?

I was reading a BusinessWeek article today by Bill Buxton about what he calls I-shaped people.

It’s funny that I came across this article because just the other day, I was chatting about the possible extinction of technical generalists with my nephew (@noskillz).

He asked me if I’d noticed that generalists had pretty much disappeared over the last few years. I really hadn’t given the topic much thought since I consider myself a bit of a generalist (and I’m still here).

He made his point through a great example, from a developer’s point of view. He’d worked with a major software company sometime back and found it odd that no one on the development team knew a certain product stack from top to bottom; Everyone had a specific job and sub-product to take care of, but no one had a 35,000 foot view of the entire product line, from a code perspective.

I can see how the siloed approach would make sense for that company and I also understand where he’s coming from. There are pluses and minuses to being highly specific and taking a generalist approach.

But to really ride the fast moving wave my co-author Paul David Henry (@docteled) and I call the Crest of Change in our “Strategic Networking” book, you really need generalists on your cross-disciplinary teams.

As Buxton said in the article, generalists “…have their feet firmly planted in the mud of the practical world, and yet stretch far enough to stick their head in the clouds when they need to. Furthermore, they simultaneously span all of the space in between.”

Far from extinct, today’s generalists work from a big picture vantage point but can also jump into the trenches and get their hands dirty when necessary. They fill gaps that can be created by having more specialized team members consistently focused on their specialized tasks.

Using generalists is strategic and smart, especially when the selection, implementation, use, and management of today’s rapidly changing technologies requires us to be constantly learning just to stay current, let alone trying to move out in front of the wave.

So forget fossil hunting. Find yourself a few good generalists with mud on their feet and enough smarts to reach up into the clouds…then hire them, before someone else does.

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