This week has been a pretty busy one for me. I was taking another class. Four days, 35 hours, very difficult material. Capped by a four hour exam. I did better on the exam than I anticipated—not quite as well as the most prepared students in the class but better than most and well enough to demonstrate a reasonable command of the material. Basically, that’s the story of my life. I don’t have the level of expertise that the specialists in the field do but almost. I’m the second best at everything. A generalist. A better cook than anyone who isn’t a full time professional chef; a better musician than anyone who isn’t a full time professional musician; and so on.
Not that the world values that.
That’s the last class I anticipate taking for a while.
“Not that the world values that.”
I’m surprised to see you say that/for that to be your experience. It’s a prized trait in the world of management. In a relative sense, specialists can always be found and hired, and they come with the baggage of believing that because they are good at some narrow endeavor they know everything. Good generalist managers are fairly rare.
My experience has been that the most common career path is from jobs that require a specialist to those that require a generalist. In other words the Peter Principle practically guarantees that you’ll get specialists in areas in which their specialist expertise is useless.
I recall taking an aptitude test about a half century ago. It found that my preferences and attitudes were in line with those of bank presidents and Fortune 500 CEOs but not in line with middle level managers. You don’t suddenly get made a bank president or Fortune 500 CEO. You work your way up.
I found the middle level of Corporate America intolerable. That’s when I went off and started my own company.
“You don’t suddenly get made a bank president or Fortune 500 CEO. You work your way up. I found the middle level of Corporate America intolerable. That’s when I went off and started my own company.”
You and most of the entrepreneurs we deal with. It’s also largely why I saw PE as a way to get to board level involvement without doing that long slog through large corporate middle management, a very unappealing prospect. I think I chose correctly.
As an aside, I’ve always found the slavish praise of Obama to be odd, when the very same people are generally so critical of corporate America. His chief skills seem to be a smooth tongue/ delivery, showing up to take credit but disappearing when things don’t go so well, and a few specialty items. A classic corporate climber and gamesman. Hard things, like leadership, coalition building, metrics and organization development do not seem to be in evidence, and certainly not of interest. Said another way, being president seems more important to him than doing president.