RE: Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for January 18, 2020
I am overly happy to read that generalism is a primary source of disruptive innovation rather than specialism, as I am an inveterate generalist, and use that breadth of experience practically daily to incessantly innovate means of repairing residences. Folks that aren't experienced in fixing structures subjected to rot generally don't grasp the diversity of problems and solutions that are necessary to understand in that field. There is not any specific list of procedures to repair a rotten structure that does not include extremely general instructions like 'survey the extent of rot, remove, and replace.'
For example, automotive mechanism repair can often specify exact procedures, even to how many twists to apply to a nut, while in residential repair whether a nut is even called for is entirely subject to the experiential base of the worker. As a result I innovate every single day on every aspect of every job I do, which is gloriously boredom proof. I have innately believed that this is potentially very useful in technological innovation and advance, despite that corporate institutions have strongly focused on specialization and neglected generalists financially.
I have participated in consulting with innovation vectors, facilitating ad hoc groups of specialists working to solve problems and meet industrial challenges faced by corporations, and saw that principle in action, while observing the strong resistance of institutions to it, despite the observable results of innovation that spanned disciplines.
It is this principle that most encourages me regarding decentralization of industrial production and how that will transform society by increasing individual prosperity and freedom. Institutions necessarily specialize industry, as that produces economies of scale that are the source of their potential to create profitability. Individuals necessarily generalize in order to meet their diverse needs, and I observe that decentralization is the cutting edge of technological advance across all industries today, suggesting we have reached or crossed a threshold which denotes the limit of institutional power relative to individual power.
I believe that freedom will either increase as technological advance proceeds, or that institutional power will increase and technological advance will decline, or even reverse. I'm betting on increased prosperity and freedom, but cannot deny the increase in governmental oppression ongoing globally today. The fact is that the breadth of the market includes subsets where one aspect gains, and subsets where the other does. I hope that market forces ultimately prevail, rather than force and oppression undertaken to prevent loss of privilege of the ruling class.
We shall see whether reason and good faith outproduce venal self interest in the long run.
Thanks!
I was encouraged by the finding in favor of generalists, too. I think there is a time and a place for both, but in today's corporate world I think generalists are undervalued. I really liked the way Nagle described it. If you want incremental improvements in a narrow area, use specialists, but for disruptive change, generalists are preferred.
It's been my experience in the corporate world since the 1980s that many companies desire to promote things like "eliminating silos", "empowering employees" and "sharing knowledge", but (as with the article's example of cross-disciplinary activities), bureaucratic momentum often works in favor of specialization.
I share your hope that the new decentralized platforms will lead to a better balance between specialists and generalists.
One caution that I kept coming back to while reading, however, is that it was a single study of a single technology, so additional supporting research on the topic is definitely needed.