Specialists vs Generalists

Who is better, a Jack of All Trades, or a Master of One?

Venture Capitalist Vani Kola, one of the most powerful women in Indian Business, and investor in companies like Dream11 and Myntra recently posted this on her Linkedin account:

I am currently reading this book ‘Range - Why generalists triumph in a specialized world’ and it brings a fresh perspective that being ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ does have merit. It is counterintuitive to what we all have been told since childhood - Pick a #career and specialize in it. In the world full of specialists, having dabbled in a range of work exposes one to different ideas and the ability to have diverse perspectives. In some sense, traditional companies always encouraged senior leadership roles to work in different departments to understand the business more holistically.

Coming to #entrepreneurs, I have personally seen that the ability to wear different hats at the same time and the ability to deep dive into these different subjects is a hallmark of a good entrepreneur

On similar lines, Robert Heinlein says:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.e

Update 19-Mar-2021: There’s a great discussion about specialists vs generalists on Hacker News, and the top comment stands out:

The best thing I ever read on this topic came from biology. In "The Diversity of Life," E.O. Wilson describes how specialist species thrive in stable environments. The stability allows them to evolve "deeply" into a niche and outcompete any species less specialized for that same niche. So if I'm really great at plucking fruit from tall trees, and you suck at it, I win. In unstable environments, however—say all of those trees burn down in a forest fire—it's the generalists that triumph, because they have more options and are therefore more resilient. Of course specialization and generalization are abstract terms. Reality can operate on a spectrum, often a discontinuous one at that. So maybe I'm a finch that's best at poking my long beak into a particular kind of tree, but in a pinch I can also hoover up ants off the ground better than most of the other creatures in my ecosystem. So it goes for humans competing in an economy too.

Links:

• Book Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

• Linkedin discussion on Vani Kola’s page with lots of comments

• Hacker News Discussion