A New Species - The Engineering Foxhog

From the current issue of Rotman (my favorite business journal) - Q&A with Ian Leslie:

"This comes from a Greek fable from Isaiah Berlin made famous.  The gist of it is, the fox knows many things, he is very clever, but the hedgehog only knows one thing: spikes up, curl into a ball.  He doesn't need any other tricks.  And so the hedgehog is a specialist, and the fox is a generalist.  What I"m saying is, it used to be okay to be a fox, but increasingly, you also need to be a hedgehog.  Ideally, you should be a specialist with a wide-ranging base of knowledge and a huge curiosity.  You need to be both today: you need to be a "foxhog".

As people think about their careers, they are asking, "Should I be a specialist or a generalist?'  In the last 50 years or so, the trend has been towards greater specializations - and this is true in academia as well as business.  In say, advertising - which is the field I work in - to say that you're an adman like Don Draper doesn't cut it anymore.  You're got to be a "social media expert" or "sponsorship expert" or "a brand strategist".  And that is true across the board, in every industry.

However, there is a counter-trend to the that now, which means that it actually pays to have a generalist mindset as well, and that's because people are collaborating more with people from many different disciplines.  As industries get more complex, you need a lot of different skills at the table to execute any project successfully.  To work well in a team, to be a good team player and collaborator, you need to quickly understand what the other guys are doing, and people who do that best are curious people.  Even though they're specialist in one particular discipline, they'll have some generalist knowledge, and a lot of interest in what the other people are doing and saying.  That enables them to bridge the expertise with different people in their company, and today, that is an incredibly valuable skill."