Omni Universal

A new book explains how finding your niche too early may hinder your success in life.

A generalist is a dabbler, an explorer, a learner — someone with broad knowledge across many topics and expertise in a few.

Imagine that you’re a doctor and that your patient has just died on the operating table. Now, you have the difficult task of telling the family the bad news. You’re an expert in medicine but you ha…

What’s the best way to boost creativity on your team? One view is that the key to creative breakthroughs is being able to combine or leverage different areas of expertise. This suggests you should encourage employees to explore new fields or hire more generalists — they can connect dots where others don’t see a link. Another view is that there are costs to generalizing and that you’re better off hiring specialists — employees who have very deep expertise in an important area — or encouraging your employees to become specialists in whatever they do. There’s considerable evidence supporting both sides, so researchers set out to study whether generalists and specialists shine in different circumstances. They theorized that the benefits of being a generalist are strongest in fields with a slower pace of change, as they can find inspiration from other areas, and that the benefits of being a specialist are strongest in fields with a faster pace of change, as they can more easily make sense of new technical developments and opportunities. A study of theoretical mathematicians before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union supported their theory.

Do's & Don'ts about structuring their roles, hiring and finding them

In his study of scientific breakthroughs, Kevin Dunbar found that diverse backgrounds and the common use of analogies from various domains are the keys to creative problem-solving. This finding is highly applicable to early-stage startups.

A collaborative tool for discovering images.

Sarah Dietrich works on the network operations group for the Earth Observing Satellites at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She is a self-taught computer coder who mentors for Girls Who Code Howard County with BeYou Inc. Sarah has published 6 peer reviewed research articles on human and animal behavior while training dogs, dolphins, and the occasional undergraduate student. She holds a master’s degree in Communication from SUNY Buffalo and a BA in Psychology from McDaniel College.

The world we live in today worships the Specialist – the person who knows more and more about less and less. I’m not convinced that’s the best option for our future. I think the time has come for the Generalist to be taken more seriously, for the good of a more equal society.

You should specialise, but you should keep your options open! Sound familiar? Zach thinks we need a modern day renaissance to meet the complex problems our society faces.

What do you want to be when you grow up? Well, if you're not sure you want to do just one thing for the rest of your life, you're not alone. In this illuminating talk, writer and artist Emilie Wapnick describes the kind of people she calls "multipotentialites" -- who have a range of interests and jobs over one lifetime. Are you one?

People build relationships with companies based on positive stories and experiences. We picked out some of the best storytelling Ted Talks we could find.

New challenges require new approaches. All organizations have new challenges on the table all the time, but most are not equipped to come up with new approaches to conquer them because they can’t…

Expanding your skill range might be essential.

Analytics products and systems are best built by small teams of generalists. Large teams of specialists become dominated by communication…

Editor’s note: Eric Colson brings a unique perspective to organizing data teams as Chief Algorithms Officer at Stitch Fix, enlisting…

Learning is underrated.

The debate over whether to hire a generalist or specialist for a product or UX role has been around for as long as product and UX have.

In the Data Science and Analytics community, specialists are heavily favored over generalists — that’s just the way it is. We inherently…

Economists tell us that the history of human labor is one of continually increasing specialization. As we progressed along the economic continuum from hunter-gatherer through agrarian and industrial and now into post-industrial economies, the labor force has become more fragmented, with workers having more and more specialized skill sets.

by Zat Rana

Polymaths are specialists with a knack for fresh ideas.

Research suggests that generalists are more creative, better problem solvers and lateral thinkers — aka ideal Product Managers

Or, why polymaths aren’t foxes

Being ‘T-shaped’ will make you more effective and more valuable

If there’s one thing the design industry loves it’s false dichotomies.

When I’m out teaching, I frequently get asked “What’s better? To be a jack of all trades designer, or someone that specializes in one…

Today’s world calls for range, not specialization. An excerpt from Range.