Can generalists thrive in this new world order? To answer this, let me go back to the McKinsey I saw a decade and a half ago, which was full of generalists.
Even specialists were hired as generalist consultants. For example, it was common to see medical doctors on financial services assignments and lawyers working with Pharma clients.
Why was this the case?
Problem solving in the business world can be split into two layers:
1. One layer involves generic problem-solving skills common to all business problems, such as clarifying the problem, structuring the problem-solving process, generating hypotheses, data collection and analysis, and synthesizing the answer.
2. The second layer involves domain-specific insights. For example, to help a pharma company improve their drug discovery pipeline, an experienced consultant would know the right (and wrong) directions almost intuitively.
Now, here is my speculation: Specialisation will grow and take over larger portions of the economy.
Even strategy consulting firms (e.g., BCG, McKinsey) are now doing a lot of technology work, and are hiring software engineers and data scientists, which was once unimaginable.
However, no matter how specialised the world gets, the demand for the first layer (generic problem-solving skills) will always exist.
While I used the consulting industry for illustration, I suspect one could generalize this trend. If you are a top 5 percentile generalist (e.g., in areas like problem-solving, people management, leadership), you will thrive. But the 50th percentile generalist has a hard road ahead.
The world will prize exceptionally skilled generalists; however, just being good enough won’t suffice.
To thrive, you have to be outstanding.
– Rajan