Do Generalists Really Triumph Over Specialists?

David and Blair have experienced a backlash against experts, expertise, and specialization thanks to David Epstein's book, and they disagree on whether or not it's worth reading.

Links

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Transcript

David C. Baker: Blair, this is going to be a new experience for our listeners because, from the reports I'm getting in the field, you have joined the dark side. [chuckles]

Blair Enns: I always thought I was Darth Vader. What dark side? There's a dark side I haven't joined. [chuckles]

David: This is the argument against specialization. This is going to be a very short episode. I'm afraid, the arguments against specialization.

Blair: I suspect we won't have enough time to cover this topic.

David: We'll see.

Blair: Feeling punchy.

David: This was prompted by the book that David Epstein wrote called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. It came out about a year ago now, mid-2019, and like you, this book keeps getting thrown in my face, and so it's a little bit--

Blair: Like people who haven't read it. 

[laughter]

David: I don't blame them. Who wants to read a business book? I mean, they're just not that interesting, and I've written a few of them. They're just not that interesting. How soon after this book came out did you start hearing about it?

Blair: I think I heard Epstein interviewed on Russ Roberts podcast, Econ Talk. I know you're a big fan of that show, too. I've heard him interviewed somewhere else. I first heard him interviewed a couple of times before I read the book, and I had it on my list to buy and read, and then I forgot about it, then people started talking about it, then I've ordered it. I've since read it twice, and it's quite highlighted.

The second go, I went through it in quite amount of detail. I've actually written a whole bunch of notes on this book. There's something about this book that is worth reading, I think, and it's worth talking about, but my frustration is the general message in no small part because of the subtitle which, I think, is an outright lie. The general message is being misinterpreted.

David: Yes, we've made so much progress in this space of all the professional service branches. We were the last to embrace the idea of specialization, of true expertise. Still, there are laggards who are just dying for a book like this that can say, "See, see, I told you so," this is why generalists need to read the subtitle again. This is why generalists triumph in a specialized world. I didn't want to read this thing, but so many people were talking to me about it. I just had to, and I'll admit, I didn't read the whole thing. I read the first two thirds, and then I just couldn't stomach any more of it.

He's a good writer, and it's a good business book in the sense that it's provocative and it makes you think, it forces you to examine what your perspective is on a particular issue. Apart from the book, is there a bigger backlash against specialization, and if so, where's it coming from?

Blair: I see this backlash against experts, expertise in specialization. I think it's inevitable, but I don't know where it's coming from other than the natural backlash of when an idea really takes hold, you can just brace yourself for the backlash to it. Part of me is a little surprised that it's taken this long. I don't know that there's anything else in the water, in our culture, rather than that, just a natural tendency for a backlash, and part of that backlash is quite valid in that people grab on to this idea, and I think maybe I've been guilty of it in my younger professional life.

Maybe I'm still guilty of it now. They grab onto this idea, and then they embrace it, they get, go all in on it to the exclusion of other ideas. I suspect if I've been guilty of that at points in my career, certainly others are guilty of it, too. In fact, David Epstein, he says he's first and foremost a sports journalist, and his previous book is called The Sports Gene, which I haven't read. He is a very good writer. He says in the book that the impetus for writing the book is, he was frustrated by going to these conferences and listening to people talk about hyper-specialization early in your career as a career hack.

He wrote this book as a backlash to what I interpret as somebody taking a solid idea, which is an idea embedded in nature, in evolution. It's embedded in other sciences. It's embedded in business, this idea of variation and adaption, and the benefits that accrue to you through specialization like Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations way back in 1776. He's the first one who really put this idea out there. He talked about a pin factory and how, if you had 20 men working in a pin factory, and this would be 18th century, you could increase the production of that pin factory by two orders of magnitude. From like, say, 12 pins per- person today to 1200 pins per person per day, by specializing the labor that each of those individuals did. It's everywhere in science, it's in business, it's in economics. On one hand, to argue against specialization, that's, if not a losing position, it's certainly a provocative position, but I think that's why he's written the book. He just got frustrated with people taking the message a little bit too far, and it was a backlash against that. I think that's inevitable.

David: I think there are a lot of valid arguments in the book. I don't necessarily want to look at the sports world though and assume that that's how the rest of the business world looks. Like you think about the quarterback for the Super Bowl winning Kansas City Chiefs, who had to make a tough choice between playing professional baseball or professional football. He's a remarkable athlete, and I think anybody would say that playing both of those sports helped him be better in all ways.

Then, there's all kinds of examples of that, but yes, it's pretty bold to argue this. There are some really good points in the book though. Maybe we should talk about those first, and part of me loves the fact that he wrote the book because I feel like it justifies how so many of us are doing things that we weren't trained for. My early academic work, and then my graduate work was all in language and anthropology and theology, and which has nothing to do with what I'm doing now, so it's, I guess, a vindication of that. What are some of the parts of the book as it relates to our audience that really does resonate with you?

Blair: If I could back up to something you just said, which is him referencing sports, because that's the world that he comes from. There's a key premise in the book he borrows from Daniel Kahneman who wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman talks about these different learning environments. He talks about a kind learning environment and a wicked learning environment.

He says, "Specialists tend to excel in these kind learning environments." A kind learning environment, according to Kahneman, is where patterns recur frequently, they're easy to spot, and you get quick and accurate feedback. In the book, Epstein uses Tiger Woods and golf as an example. Tiger Woods was hyper-specialized at a very young age. His father was very driven. He was very driven. His father had this vision of Tiger being the best golfer in the world. I think he was on The Tonight Show back when Johnny Carson hosted it, at like two-years-old or six-years-old or something as this prodigy golfer.

Epstein borrows from Kahneman's work to say, "Golf is a kind learning environment where you can see the patterns, you get the movements down very specifically, and with proper coaching and feedback, you can fine-tune and you become a specialist."

Again, specialists tend to excel in these kind learning environments where you can see the patterns and you'd get accurate feedback quickly. Then, generalists, on the other hand, again, this is still quoting Kahneman. He says, "Generalists tend to flourish in wicked learning environments." He describes a wicked learning environment as "a place where the patterns are less obvious and accurate feedback is elusive."

What Kahneman is saying and Epstein is boring from, is that, if it's really messy, if you can't spot the patterns, if you're not getting immediate feedback, you're better intuiting your way through things, being a generalist, pulling on all kinds of different experiences to make decisions and move ahead. Now, you think of our client's world. Are these kind learning environments, or are they wicked learning environments?

David: Who's typing in a Google search box? I'd like somebody who isn't much of an expert but can notice patterns in all kinds of areas.

[laughter]

It's so ludicrous to think about. I guess most of it, I would say, is probably a wicked learning environment, except that what clients are asking us to do is to produce as if we are in a kind learning environment. They don't want to waste time. They want you to get it right out of the gate.

Blair: I would challenge that. I think marketing is in a kind learning environment, especially as more time goes by, more of marketing is digital. We have all of this data. It's so easy for us to see what works and what doesn't work. Like the idea of CRO conversion rate optimization. It didn't exist 15 years ago because we didn't have the data, so there's so much data. There's so many patterns. You can get immediate feedback by tweaking a little thing in your marketing. It's an extremely kind learning environment. I think creativity in general tends to be more wicked. We get this combination of wicked and kind environments, but for the most part, creativity is this thing that you bring to bear in what I would argue is mostly a kind learning environment where you see the patterns. Our listeners, you're listening to this. You've all been in situations where you sit down with a new prospective client, they start talking about their problem, and you immediately go, "Yes, okay, I've seen this before. I know what your problem is and what the solution is." That happens all the time. A big part of the training that we do at Win Without Pitching on, the value conversation is getting subject matter experts, specialists to unlearn that pattern matching in the moment.

When you're trying to teach somebody to unlearn pattern matching, just temporarily let go of it, you realize how good they are at it. I think marketing is a very kind learning environment, and specialization in the marketing world makes absolute sense.

David: How would you tie this to a time frame? Because one of the emphases in the book is that our educational pursuits should be as broad as possible. He does allow for some specialization, but he brings in this element of timing. Talk about that. Talk about the relationship of timing, how early, how late, what's your perspective on what he gets on that point?

Blair: Yes, that's a great question, because he nails this. He really gets this right. If I think of the backlash, it's when I think of people who have- probably I was like this too 20 years ago, people who have glommed on to this positioning thing, and they're taking it to the marketplace the way you and I did early in our careers. I look at some of these people who are giving advice. I see this hyper-specialization advice telling young, creative, specialized now. That's a mistake, you should pursue, and Epstein talks about this. There are other sources for this too. You should pursue breads early in your career, and then you specialize.

There's a quote somewhere in the back of the book, I think it's Oliver Wendell Holmes. Yes, it's actually the last sentence in the entire book, is "You shouldn't be forced to decide what you are before you've decided who you are." I think that's a profound statement. Epstein's, his net takeaway, he tries to distill the lesson of this book into one sentence, and his sentences don't feel behind.

His advice to people is, if you're looking at others who are specializing ahead of you, don't worry about it, whatever you're doing, whatever you're pursuing today, dropping, going and picking up something else tomorrow, when you decide what you want to focus on, you will be able to focus and move so quickly. You will be able to bring to bear a lot of the experience that at the time, you thought maybe you're wasting your time or you were worried, you spent two years doing something that you no longer want to pursue, you will be able to draw on that later in your career, and specializing early is not an advantage. That is a net takeaway from the book. I would say to you, the mistake that you made with this book, if I may, is that you didn't begin by reading the last chapter first, which is a great way to read a business book.

For those of you who are out there kind of trumpeting these words, saying, "Oh, you shouldn't specialize, David Epstein in this book says you shouldn't specialize," he doesn't say that at all. I'm convinced that most of the people who've been citing this book, to me, as examples of why they shouldn't specialize. I've asked the question to most of them, "Have you read the book?" They all said, "Yes." I suspect none of them made it to the last chapter, because the last chapter is where Epstein is fully honest, fully discloses the initial premise of the book and the net takeaway, and even has a line about it. I'm not saying specialization is bad.

Here it is. "Remember, there's nothing inherently wrong with specialization, we all specialize to one degree or another at some point or other. My initial spark of interest in this topic came from reading viral articles and watching conference keynotes that offered early hyper-specialization as some sort of life hack."

David: I completely agree with that. I just feel like he set up a bit of a false dichotomy here. Because when things really matter, just using myself as an example, when things really matter, if I have a pressing legal issue, I've been sued by somebody or I have a very difficult to diagnose medical issue, I'm not looking for a generalist to help me, but that's obvious. He's not even saying that that's true, but can we make a distinction between the person and the business? That the business is made up of all these people. I talk about this a little bit. I call it the T-shaped expert. Let me just read a couple of paragraphs here.

"Enter this notion of a T-shaped expert or expert firm with deep expertise and broad context. The T in my mind means that we have deep, deep expertise up and down and then a very broad context. You'll never get discovered and followed unless you're an expert. You'll never be a good expert unless you're grounded."

It's not either-or, we need to have both of these. In our personal lives, we need to be wildly ADD in terms of what we're interested in so that that provides a context to our specialization. I also want to comment on the timing thing. You were talking just a minute ago about how as individuals we should be really careful about this expertise hack of this hyper-specialization early. I certainly agree with that completely.

Even when you look at firms, in the early days, they seldom are as specialized as they are later. That's not a bad thing, because all of the things that they don't make money from later are the things that give context and meaning to the things that they do make money from later. When I'm advising a firm about specializing, there's a relationship between how long the firm has been around and how much they disagree with the principle. Over time, they start to settle into an expertise, but their broad learning, from a contextual standpoint, gets even broader during that time. We're learning it in all directions. It's a really healthy discussion.

Blair: Yes, we're absolutely learning in all directions. I think I've talked about this on this podcast before. This big problem that I see with people my kids' age, so early 20s generally, give or take, I look at these young people and I think, "Man, all the decisions they face in life." They think, and maybe I thought the same thing at that age, but they think, "Oh, I have to make this perfect. This is a life-or-death decision about what school am I going to go to, or what am I going to major in, or is this job right for me or not?" I keep saying to them, "You know what? Just do something. Just pick something and move forward. You might learn that you don't like this or you're not good at it."

That's valuable information moving forward. Then, 5, 10 years down that line, you might find yourself drawing from something that you've learned from that experience that you previously thought was a waste of time. All experience is good.

Range and breadth is really important early. How are you going to know what you want to specialize in unless you try a bunch of things? I would just say to people, "Don't feel like that's wasted time." Your career early on should be meandering, it should be inefficient, it should be experimental, it should have a fair amount of sense of failure in it, not an overwhelming sense of failure, but you should fail at multiple things. So, you're still pissed off by this book?

David: Yes. I think it's intellectually dishonest.

Blair: You and I were at your cabin, and I had a stack of reading material. This book was in that stack. I think you said, "That's the most intellectually dishonest book I've read in a long time." You said that to me before I'd read it, but I'd already listened to the author in a couple of podcasts. I think there's only one part about this book that's intellectually dishonest, and I'm willing to give the author a full pass on that part. The part that's intellectually dishonest is the subtitle. The book is called Range:, the subtitle is Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. I think that's the book he thought he was writing. In the end, that is not the conclusion that he arrives at.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the discussions between him and his publisher. I think, if I had written this book, that's probably the provocative subtitle that I would have included too, even though it's intellectually dishonest. If you take that aside, if you take the subtitle away and just read this book for what it is and start with, read the introduction, read the conclusion, and then go back to the beginning and read it through. If you skim the middle stuff, that's great. If you read it that way and you let go of the subtitle, this is a great book, full of great advice.

David: [chuckles] Do you realize what you just said? This is a fantastic book except for the subject matter.

Blair: [laughs] No, except for the subtitle.

David: You could get me riled up here. What I hate about the book the most is that he just cherry-picks stupid stories as if these make his point. Like, one of them is that the modern Navy is creating these amazing chips that don't require as many sailors to run, and what we need now is 1/8th of the number of sailors. These sailors need to be brilliant generalists who are not specialists, and somehow that translates, stop and think for a minute, this ship is built by specialists, right? We don't want somebody welding underwater who's never done that before. You're just cherry-picking stories, but okay, I need deep cleansing breaths.

Blair: Yes, and I even think in the kind versus wicked learning environment, he uses Tiger Woods as the specialist example, in a kind learning environment, which he says golf is, and then he talks about Roger Federer, the tennis player, and he explains how tennis is a wicked learning environment. I didn't buy that at all, it felt like a real strawman argument to me. That was the beginning. He was trying to pay off that subtitle. In the end, in the last chapter, he's quite honest about everything in the conclusions. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.

David: No kidding.

Blair: I think it's a worthwhile book because I think there is some great advice in the book, but if you don't read the last chapter and if you don't come to the conclusion that this subtitle is misleading, then you have been fooled. You missed the value of this book.

David: We're clearly in the minority because it's sold really well. It's highly thought of on Amazon and so on.

Blair: We just did a whole podcast on a book for the first time ever. He has succeeded, and if I could do what he's done, I would do it too.

David: Yes, no kidding, his book has more reviews than my notes.

Blair: I'm going to lie in the subtitle of my next book.

[laughter]

David: Can we rescue this episode, though, and just bounce ideas off each other on the arguments against specialization? Because the people who are throwing this book in my face are basically doing so because they want to make arguments against specialization, so let's play with that. What are the arguments that you hear against specialization? Let's just bounce them back and forth?

Blair: There's a ton of them. We could almost do a whole second episode on this.

David: We don't want them to go away because then, all of a sudden, we wouldn't have a job anymore, so keep coming up with these lame ones.

Blair: Some of them are really valid.

David: Some of them are, yes.

Blair: Yes. I've got like eight of them here. Why don't we do a second episode on this one. We'll come back and we'll go through all of the other arguments against specialization, and we'll find, just like I've done in this book, David.

David: Oh, don't turn that voice around on me.

Blair: [laughs]

David: That's like, you're not reading bedtime stories to me at the moment.

Blair: I was interviewing a procurement guy yesterday and the challenge was, "Okay, convert me to your point of view that procurement people are real people. Go.

David: [laughs] 

Blair: Then, 30 minutes in, he said, "I can see by your tone, Blair, now you're using your late night DJ voice. That tells me that you're coming around to my point of view. I said, "No, I'm just exhausted by my anger."

[laughter]

David: Bottom line, should people read this book?

Blair: I would absolutely recommend that people read this book. I think there's great advice in this book, but again, ignore the subtitle because that is not the takeaway, and this is a great way to read lots of business books. Read the introduction, the first chapter, read the last chapter. Read those chapters in full, then go back to the beginning and read as much as you, if the story's captivating, read. There's lots of good stuff in the middle, and he's a good writer. That is how I would read this book. If you read it that way, absolutely. There's some great stuff in it.

David: Oh, gosh, I hope we have an audience for our next episode.

[laughter]

I do like the idea. I really like the idea of an episode on the arguments against specialization, but we need to be fair, we need to rate them like, "This is the best argument. This is the worst argument," and we need to maybe bring in some examples of different firms, because there are some really good arguments against specialization. There are also a lot of firms who are very successful, who are not specialized, and I want to talk about that too.

Blair: Yes, sounds good. Let's do it.

David: All right. Thank you, Blair.

Blair: Thanks, David.