The Last of the Generalists?

For the last five years or so I’ve been wondering if I represent a dying breed; the last of the business generalists; managers who came up through the ranks working in different departments and without a specialty other than to make sure that all of the various parts and functions of a business work well together.

I’ve been thinking about it because hardly a day goes by that I’m not asked what my specialty is. Is it marketing? No, I have a good sound understanding of marketing and we’ve created some very successful national marketing plans.

It must be operations. No, I’m really fairly strong in operations and do well in reorganizing work processes to make them more efficient. Some of the processes we’ve restructured have produced millions of dollars in new profits.

What about finance? No, I can interpret financial reports, key ratios and pro forma reports with the best of them but I wouldn’t call myself a financial expert.

Sometimes in these conversations people will look amazed or at least surprised. They’ll almost always ask again “Then what IS your specialty?”  It’s almost as if I’ll disappoint them if I don’t come up with something specific.

I’d like to turn that question around and ask: Why do we want to believe that everybody has a specialty? Perhaps it’s because we’ve become a culture that buys everything in neat packages. We’re accustomed to picking things off a shelf, turning them over to see if the package looks and feels like something safe and reputable before we have the confidence to put it in our cart.

Advertisers and marketing firms have been perfecting the science of catching your eye and winning your confidence with simple phrases for years. They’ve been so successful that we’ve become uncomfortable if we can’t size something up and understand where it “fits” in our lives in less than a few seconds.

That perspective has been easily adopted by corporate human resource managers. Just read the job opening announcements. The ideal candidate not only needs experience with designing widgets, he or she needs experience designing widgets that are blue, have removable wings and are no wider than one inch.

What does our pre-occupation with specialization mean for the effectiveness of our management teams? There was once a day when the executive manager at the helm of his ship could read a compass, chart a course and read the weather. Today there is one specialist to tell us where we are, another to develop a plan to get us to our destination and a third to anticipate the challenges and obstacles along the way. Each of these specialists has a narrower view of the world than the captain. Each of them has different and limited number of tools in their tool boxes.

Translate that to the executive conference table and you have a sales director who believes that every company problem can be solved by making product and production changes that make products easier to sell, a marketing director who believes that the key to reversing a decline in sales is a new marketing campaign, an operations manager who wants to keep sales out of production decisions and to put more supervisors in the right places, an HR director who wants everybody to be part of one upbeat team, an attorney who doesn’t want the company to experiment with new products and a CFO who thinks everything will improve if everybody else can just cut back on expenses.

If everybody is a specialist who is the arbiter than combines the key elements of all of these perspectives into a cogent and viable plan? Hopefully, it’s the CEO. But what if the CEO is another product of years of highly segmented specialization? If he or she is the former director of marketing, will the company be inclined to prefer marketing strategies and solutions even when the concerns to be resolved are based on operational or production issues?

The answer is probably yes. People, even executives, are inclined to first look to strategies and solutions they understand and into their own toolboxes for tools that have served them well in the past. A leader’s perspective and wisdom will widen and evolve over time but it’s hard to escape from all the conditioning that specialization entails.

I’m looking forward to a time when the pendulum might swing part way back to an interest in managers who have eclectic business backgrounds; to people who know and understand all of the basic drivers and challenges that businesses face.

When that happens I’d be happy to see the job announcements that read “Wanted: Business Generalist. Hello? Is there anybody still out there?”

Tom Aranow is a former CEO who now consults with CEOs and other executives as a Senior Advisor with Harrington Daniels Advisors, LLC. He may be reached at Tom@hdadvisors.com.