World needs Jacks and Jills of all trades
Estonians have a saying: “Nine trades, the 10th one — hunger.” In Korea, they believe “a man of 12 talents has nothing to eat for dinner”. The Greeks say the person “who knows a lot of crafts lives in an empty house”.
English-speakers will recognise the echo of their proverb: “Jack of all trades, master of none.” Such Jacks and Jills ought to be highly employable. As warnings mount that adaptability is critical at a time of disruption, demand for recruits who have mastered many crafts should surely increase.
The evidence that the multiskilled can now put food on the table in Korea, or furnish their homes in Greece, is mixed, however. Expectation, education and the employment system itself still drive many people down specialisation’s single-track path.
Companies pay lip service to the idea that they hire people with multiple talents, according to Waqās Ahmed, author of The
Polymath (from which the earlier proverbs are taken). But when a specialist role needs filling, “who takes seriously the CV of an all-rounder?”
When the term “T-shaped leader” was first introduced in 2001 in a Harvard Business Review article, it described executives with a strong focus on their business unit and the ability to communicate their ideas across the organisation.
Morten Hansen, Berkeley professor and co-author of that article, says by cultivating wider skills and interests entrepreneurs become more aware of connections between different disciplines and threats on the edge of their business.
Nowadays, companies seem to want to stretch the vertical stroke of the T, creating an almost impossible tension between breadth and depth. Hansen says his students often study a range of subjects — industrial design, information economics, accounting, anthropology — as well as, say, computer science. But they are “very wary of coming on to the job market without a speciality”.
The danger of overspecialisation, though, is that “you become very narrow in your skill set and tribal in your attitude”. As employees dive deeper into a specific area, they lose perspective and find they qualify only for ever more tightly drawn roles.
This concern is not new. Victorian polymath John Ruskin advocated a school curriculum spanning science, art and handicrafts. He took issue with the obsession with arid mathematical prowess, based on “the notion that every boy is to become first a banker’s clerk and then a banker”.
Polymaths are decidedly more M-shaped than T-shaped. They must demonstrate mastery in at least three different domains. That makes them rarities. Only two Nobel Prize winners have won a second prize in a different domain, for instance: Marie Curie for physics and chemistry, and Linus Pauling for chemistry and peace.
Polymathic range is less unusual, though. We are all born with it, for one thing, and it should be celebrated and cultivated. It may even be a prerequisite for excellence in a single field. A study by psychologist Bernice Eiduson, cited in The Polymath, found Nobel science laureates were 25 times as likely as the average scientist to sing, dance or act, and 17 times as likely to be a visual artist.
Some people evolve into master generalists by necessity. Writer Maya Angelou pulled herself up from her tough childhood, becoming a civil rights activist, foreign correspondent, linguist, historian, dancer, singer, actor and film director. Others choose a multifaceted career. Nathan Myhrvold quit the plum job of chief technology officer at Microsoft to pursue interests in cookery, inventions, volcanology and wildlife photography. The pressure to specialise usually drives people in the opposite direction: towards neglect of hobbies, withering of skills, stagnation of talent, and wilful ignorance of wider opportunities.
THE DANGER OF OVERSPECIALISATION, THOUGH, IS THAT YOU BECOME VERY NARROW IN YOUR SKILL SET AND TRIBAL IN YOUR ATTITUDE
Those who persist with polymathy risk being labelled as dilettantes. Yet you do not need to be an Angelou, a Myhrvold or a Ruskin to reap the advantages of being a master generalist.
Studies by Cláudia Custódio of Imperial College Business School and others found generalist CEOs earned more and fostered more innovation than more specialised counterparts. Wide experience gave these bosses more job options and helped them “bring more diverse knowledge” to their companies.
“Polymath” is a term often applied in obituaries and biographies of people known for a single speciality. It is as though the value of breadth is clear only when surveying a life posthumously. That is a tragedy, because the average narrowminded specialist usually does not merit an obituary at all. /©