The phrase “jack of all trades,” was quite a compliment years ago for someone good at a lot of all things. However, our world has been increasingly, until just recently I would say, shifting towards specialization.
When someone asks what another does, the response tends to be a very narrow label.
The “jack of all trades” phrase has been appended with “master of none” and lately it’s being recirculated around the internet with another addendum, “but more often than not more oftentimes better than a master of one.”
Specialists have been greatly prized in our society over generalists and often mentors, bloggers, and self-help gurus often lead people to believe that niching down is the best route one can go.
My belief is that being especially strong in an area and then combining things from a variety of fields through upskilling in diverse areas is the better way to be an asset these days. Especially in an era where one is increasingly moving in the direction of self-employment and working from home and doing remote collaboration. So, let’s talk about the idea of cross-pollination.
Cross-Pollination
The idea of putting diverse groups of people, overseen by generalists is not new. Walt Disney was famous for it. Also, he would see people with skills originally in camera engineering go into jobs of vehicle design for Disneyland and with so many people learning skills from each other and putting those skills to work in different ways, WED Imagineering, and their employees, famously known as Imagineers became the creative lifeblood of the physical presence of the company in its theme parks the world over.
That same can be said of the famously secret aircraft research and development division of Lockheed Martin, affectionately known as “The Skunk Works.” Ben Rich, the former division vice president writes that…
“Inside the Skunk Works, we were a small, intensely cohesive group consisting of about fifty veteran engineers and designers and a hundred or so expert machinists and shop workers. Our forte was building a small number of very technologically advanced airplanes for highly secret missions.”
[…]
“To save time and money and maintain high quality standards, we did our own milling and forging and at one time approached the ability of our vendor’s plants to roll parts to precise dimensions. We even developed our own cutting fluid that would not corrode titanium. To prevent oxidation of the titanium—which caused brittleness—we welded in specially constructed chambers with an inert nitrogen gas environment.”
Rich, Ben R.. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed . Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.
T-Shaped Professionals
So rather than contract out things, they built up competencies. They operated small and they worked together to do what many thought was impossible, like building stealth aircraft.
There are other companies that today prize what is called the “T-Shaped Model Employee,” especially the folks at Valve Software. In their employee manual, they encourage and describe what this concept means…
That is, people who are both generalists (highly skilled at a broad set of valuable things—the top of the T) and also experts (among the best in their field within a narrow discipline—the vertical leg of the T). This recipe is important for success at Valve.
We often have to pass on people who are very strong generalists with-out expertise, or vice versa. An expert who is too narrow has difficulty collaborating. A generalist who doesn’t go deep enough in a single area ends up on the margins, not really contributing as an individual.
Valve Employee Handbook
Melting-pot Communities
Though the world has gone to the home-office and remote work, to some degree, while Coronavirus plays out, remaining interactive and having dialogues between people of different specialties is still imperative for success. It’s important to look at organizations as communities, then just a bunch of “human resources” working on projects taking n-number of “man-months.”
The world-famous design firm IDEO, which has designed everything from mice for Apple to the once famed Palm Pilot PDA is a shining example of bringing in a lot of ideas under one roof and how doing so in a comfortable space that inspires people to be creative.Thomas Kelly, in his book on the company, talks about the need for community…
“We believe in the importance of neighborhoods and community in fostering innovation. Try creating spaces that draw workers in and encourage interaction. Our spaces, for instance, have been laid out so that a central asymmetrical table functions like a park for three or four team members.
Prototypes, sketches, or blueprints crowd these tables, and if workers aren’t hunkered down, their Palm Vs or cell phones usually signal they’re nearby. Everybody who lives by that "park" can see at a glance whether their neighbors are at home, but they can also slide translucent Lexan barn doors closed if they need to buckle down and work privately on something.
It’s a wonderful mix of community and privacy that seems to offer much of the seclusion of traditional offices without the separation.”
Kelley, Thomas. The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm (p. 123). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The Cornavirus Work from Home Era
So we’re in a new era, and there are many people all too eager to return to the office so they can both keep a more careful eye on their employees and also on the false belief that only under one roof or in adjoined office spaces can people operate at their best.
Additionally, it’s an era where people have the chance to invest in new skillsets, particularly those who are furloughed or unemployed.
The truth is that studies have been done on remote and distributed collaboration. People in the open-source community have been doing this for decades. And their ability to creatively solve problems has been long proven.
Many of them specialize in one area of computing or interface design while having a level of generalist knowledge on a wide variety of technical and design topics. And studies have shown that this modular building of products, like software, can be done effectively.
Working closely can be done remotely and with people of diverse specialties. Having those specialists invest in building a set of more diverse skills can result in major dividends.
And modular development and design can be done with great success if a team properly leverages the tools available for collaboration, and uses effective processes for idea-generation in an environment where people can feel safe to “think outside the box.”
Collaboration remotely can be a challenge, but it can be done with existing tools. And in the future, when even better tools will exist it will be all that much easier for distributed companies to thrive.
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