Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

“You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.”

‘Here’s who I am at the moment, here are my motivations, here’s what I’ve found I like to do, here’s what I’d like to learn, and here are the opportunities.

his main goal for his nascent shoe company was to fail fast enough that he could apply what he was learning to his next venture.

The only certainty is change, both on average as a generation ages, and within each individual.

If David is at a giant party, then he seems introverted, but if David is with his team at work, then he seems extroverted. (True.) So is David introverted or extroverted? Well, both, and consistently so.

Popular lore holds that the sculptor Michelangelo would see a full figure in a block of marble before he ever touched it, and simply chip away the excess stone to free the figure inside. It is an exquisitely beautiful image. It just isn’t true. Art historian William Wallace showed that Michelangelo was actually a test-and-learn all-star. He constantly changed his mind and altered his sculptural plans as he worked. He left three-fifths of his sculptures unfinished, each time moving on to something more promising. The first line of Wallace’s analysis: “Michelangelo did not expound a theory of art.” He tried, then went from there. He was a sculptor, painter, master architect, and made engineering designs for fortifications in Florence. In his late twenties he even pushed visual art aside to spend time writing poems (including one about how much he grew to dislike painting), half of which he left unfinished.

you don’t know what’s good and what’s bad when things happen. You do not know. You have to wait to find out.”

Trying things is the answer to find your talent.”

“I don’t have any particular specialist skills,” he once said. “I have a sort of vague knowledge of everything.” He advised young employees not just to play with technology for its own sake, but to play with ideas. Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer. “The producer knows that there’s such a thing as a semiconductor, but doesn’t need to know its inner workings. . . . That can be left to the experts.”

A group of optics specialists he consulted assured him it could not be done, which was exactly what he wanted to hear. “If they say, ‘It’s a great idea, go for it, makes sense,’ what is the chance you’re the first person to come up with it? Precisely zero,” he told me.

His hypothesis is that organizations simply don’t need as many specialists. “As information becomes more broadly available, the need for somebody to just advance a field isn’t as critical because in effect they are available to everybody,”

“If you’re working on well-defined and well-understood problems, specialists work very, very well,” he told me. “As ambiguity and uncertainty increases, which is the norm with systems problems, breadth becomes increasingly important.”

“Look for wide-ranging interests,” they advised. “Look for multiple hobbies and avocations. . . . When the candidate describes his or her work, does he or she tend to focus on the boundaries and the interfaces with other systems?” One serial innovator described his network of enterprise as “a bunch of bobbers hanging in the water that have little thoughts attached to them.”

Griffin’s research team noticed that serial innovators repeatedly claimed that they themselves would be screened out under their company’s current hiring practices.

Often if you’re too much of an insider, it’s hard to get good perspective.”

The very tool that had helped make NASA so consistently successful, what Diane Vaughan called “the original technical culture” in the agency’s DNA, suddenly worked perversely in a situation where the familiar brand of data did not exist. Reason without numbers was not accepted. In the face of an unfamiliar challenge, NASA managers failed to drop their familiar tools.

“If I make a decision, it is a possession, I take pride in it, I tend to defend it and not listen to those who question it,” Gleason explained. “If I make sense, then this is more dynamic and I listen and I can change it.”

Gleason gave decisive directions to his crew, but with transparent rationale and the addendum that the plan was ripe for revision as the team collectively made sense of a fire.

will not intercept your decisions that belong in your chain of command, but I will give and receive information anywhere in the organization, at any time. I just can’t get enough understanding of the organization from listening to the voices at the top.”

“On Saturday,” as Smithies put it, “you don’t have to be completely rational.”

In professional networks that acted as fertile soil for successful groups, individuals moved easily among teams, crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries and finding new collaborators. Networks that spawned unsuccessful teams, conversely, were broken into small, isolated clusters in which the same people collaborated over and over. Efficient and comfortable, perhaps, but apparently not a creative engine. “The entire network looks different when you compare a successful team with an unsuccessful team,” according to Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a Northwestern physicist who studies networks. Amaral’s remark does not compare individual teams, but rather the larger ecosystems that foster the formation of successful teams.