Generalist/Specialist Expertise
One of the greatest balancing acts I have ever encountered in business is the choice between being a generalist or a specialist. I’m not sure how many people focus on this juxtaposition, but I believe it is a primary choice that every professional must make. Some will suggest that this does not apply to people who choose a specific professional track like medicine or law, but I think this choice exists in almost all arenas and merely differs in degree of penetration. An expression I have been fond of using is to say that I never wanted to be a “left eye specialist”. This obviously implies that specialization and compartmentalization are attributes that can be taken too far and to the point where they lose relevance. I’ll bet there are ophthalmologists out there who will read me chapter and verse about why the left eye is quite unique and demands specialized attention. That would lose the focus (eye humor not withstanding) of the point. What I am suggesting is that every professional makes choices about how specialized they want to be and must therefore understand the trade-offs in those choices.
I can’t be certain that my observations on this topic are either important to many people or are, indeed, universally perceived as I see them. I suspect that the core issue has to do with the degree to which you are inclined towards creative solutions or innovation. I always said that I would rather do different things every day than do multiple iterations of the same thing. Going through iterations (perhaps as many as 10,000 times as suggested by Malcolm Gladwell) is surely a path to expertise. What could you possibly not know about something if you had done it repeatedly that many times? I would note that there must also be a point of diminishing returns, but let’s ignore that since it almost takes on a treatise of its own.
In my early career I had a friend named Jay. Jay was a smart guy, but he was very different from me. We were both working with big multinational clients to serve their transnational banking needs. One particularly attractive financing idea came to our attention. We both jumped on it as a concept and began searching for those clients in our respective stables that would benefit from it. We both found a logical guinea pig and sold into them. We both got green lighted to proceed and went about the process diligently, operating somewhat collegially by sharing ideas and structural knowledge we picked up along the way. Not all aspects were equally interchangeable, but we optimized the experience in the way that our firm would have wanted. We were not competing with one another and there was no zero-sum game involved. Being first to execute held no prize since this was not an ingenuity contest. We both closed our respective deals, high-fived one another and went home to calculate our respective bonus expectations. That was all just the set-up for the situation.
The story of what happened next is the real issue. There were limitless opportunities to transact with our clients. We were mostly limited only by our time and ability to sell our ideas. The deals that we had done were good deals, but like all deals, there are generally some limit to how much of anything a bank wants to do. Every bucket has its limits.
Where Jay and I each turned next is the nub of the issue. I moved on to work on another interesting transaction that I felt would add value to my clients and bring us a few bucks. Jay decided he had a skill that he wanted to exploit, and he drilled into his client list to find others with which to do the same fundamental transaction. He did several more of these transactions and then even set up shop to work with other officers to help them tap the opportunities within their client base. He would fee-share with these officers such that his expertise would blend with their client knowledge. By contrast, I was on to the next new thing and was doing a broader array of things with clients. I never tallied the results, but I suspect we each brought in comparable revenues from our efforts, we just did it quite differently.
Jay had chosen a specialist path and I had gone about my generalist path. Wall Street generally rewards the specialist because it cares most about efficient revenue generation. Lip service is given to staff development and best-of-breed client servicing. Smart observers of the jungle will tell you that what specialists gain in the short run will be offset in the long run by their specialty running its course and eventually shutting down.
You can see this phenomenon in many areas. Take hedge funds for example. Most hedge funds start with a very specific investment thesis and a specific arbitrage that they seek to exploit. The managers are expert in that trade and hammer it to the advantage of investors. As happens, arbitrages narrow and eventually close. The proper thing is probably for those managers to close that fund and move on. That rarely happens. What happens is called “style drift”. These specialists look for other opportunities. Sometimes they are in the neighborhood of their expertise and sometimes they look very far afield. Specialists tend to think that their specialized skills are very adaptable. Indeed, specialists often go so far as to declare themselves as generalists by edict, or worse yet, specialists in multiple fields. There may be smart people who can mutate their skills and truly be multi-faceted specialists, but I posit that they are really nothing more than conveniently specialized generalists in that case.
I have always preferred the generalist route to that of the specialist. Does that make me a jack of all trades, master of none? Perhaps. But I would rather think of it as a decision of fit. It simply does not suit me to be an expert. It is presumptuous and stressful to be an expert. To me, it is like being comfortable saying you are the smartest person in the room, even though in a narrow range. I would always much rather suggest that I am able to identify the smartest person in the room on any given issue and run with that expertise. By definition, that is the role of the generalist. As for productivity (some might call it earning power), I also believe I would rather be paid as a generalist that gets better and better (in some ways, this is coincident with being a good manager) rather than be paid a premium for expertise when it is valuable and change things up (reposition or style-drift) when the particular skillset is out of favor.
I think I have now beat this simple but pervasive issue to a pulp and would leave it to others to be mindful that everyone must choose their path and one of the forks in the road is the generalist/specialist fork. Think carefully and follow your instinct as to which route serves your tendencies best.