I am not a lawyer. I am not an accountant. I am not an asset manager. I am not a psychologist. However, I speak to clients all day every day about laws and regulations, financial statements, asset management and how to solve or avoid disputes between family members. Who am I?
A deceiver? WRONG. I am a trustee, a family office, a client advisor in 2021, and it is time for generalists to get back the respect they deserve.
Henry Ford famously revolutionised the car industry by introducing theories of specialisation of labor. Following his path, big companies took control of the world by mastering mass production, using assembly-line techniques. Goods moved from workstation to workstation, each employee contributing their single link to the chain. Specialists were in high demand, celebrated, trained by families and schools as early as possible to excel in one thing, like a way to get a competitive advantage and guarantee success.
That was the 1940's but it feels like some of our current companies, as well as our education system, are trapped in this old frame of mind. But the world has changed. Henry was brilliant but he could not have anticipated the internet revolution, the environmental and social disasters leading to the ESG wave and the block-chain technology leading to the crypto currencies. His theories were perfectly adapted to his time, but not to ours.
Obviously specialists are still very much required. If your house in on fire you are hoping that the people in the red truck have perfected their ability to put out fires, and would not be interested at all in their cooking or tax expertise. And this is true in many fields as the never ending complexification of our laws, of our technologies, requires highly skilled specialist to master specific domains and drive technical progress.
However the capacity to navigate between fields, to see the world as an interconnected system, to pivot and adapt to new technologies and trends is compulsory to advise modern families on their current issues, how to achieve their goals and, modestly, to solve open world issues.
I find the above ideas, brilliantly argued by the author David Epstein in his book "RANGE", quite refreshing, thought-provoking and most importantly personally comforting : a jack of all trade, master of none. And, as per the book's subtitle, that might just be the best way to "triumph in a specialized world".
“Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones. Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.” ― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
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