Being Good at Many Things

In my professional career I hear time and again how the best way to "find" an opportunity is to explain or brand oneself as being good in one thing. I understand the argument. It is always good to put the one single most significant label that you are good at first and foremost. Most people cannot really focus in on more than one thing at a time usually. There are many what I call "tag lines" that people use: genuine innovation, integrity-because it matters, etc. While at times they can be somewhat corny, they are also truthful.

What is very frustrating however is how often business leaders put what I would refer to as blinders on when it comes to the variety of value an individual can bring. In working with start-ups, they have very lean and multi-talented individuals who tend to cover more than a single area at one time. Admittedly necessity requires this, but the fact that they are able to do it is very refreshing. As companies become more mature, I do tend to see less value suddenly being placed on this flexibility with many corporate cultures starting to expect employees to "focus" or become more specialized. In time, these larger corporations suddenly have employees who can do only a single function well, but very little else.

This evolution while commonplace has had in my opinion a tremendous detriment to organizations being able to adapt quickly to marketplace changes. When they have such specialized viewpoints on what people can or cannot do for such a long time, it becomes tremendously challenging to adjust to significantly different operating environments such as the latest recession.

More agile organizations, one that sees their employees as valuable contributors, tend not face this issue. They respond quickly to changing times with products and services that resonate with their customers. From one perspective they are true to form in that they focus on core products/services. However this by no means limits their vision of the future for their company.

The most public example of this is Apple. By all accounts, most people know the company more for computer products and services until very recently with the introduction of the iPhone. Most people have forgotten how much of a difference in vision the iPhone is for that company. It is a wonderful product that has changed how smartphones are viewed, but Apple changed direction filling a need that it noticed among it's customers. That action illustrates and demonstrates the challenge in looking at a company's future with more than a single view. Apple could have remained a personal computing company. Instead it chose to reinvent itself into a mobile computing company. Very few companies have made such a shift.

Still in light of that success, most business leaders still see it as an exception, an aberration. Something that does not fundamentally mean anything to "business as usual". Yet from companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, HTC, and the like "business as usual" has changed. It has changed from a single focus on the here and now, to a single focus of what a company can be. That shift in attitude is obviously heavily influenced by the recession, but as more companies start to adopt this position being able to look at the future compare it with what an organization is doing now, and how to change it, requires an acceptance that things have to change. This means any number of things from being innovative, agile, lean, creative, etc. Yet what it fundamentally means at the core for businesses and professionals within businesses, is that they have to look at things in a broader more holistic sense, not with singular, narrow-focused blinders.