Excerpt from the New Range Foreword

Generalists are in demand, but feel unsupported

A five-year anniversary edition of Range just came out from my U.K. publisher, Pan Macmillan.

It has a snazzy new cover. Embossed! Green fluorescent pantone! Spot UV! (I had to look that last one up.) And it also has a new foreword, by yours truly. Pan Macmillan kindly gave me permission to excerpt a short section of the foreword here.

If you’re in the U.K. (or Australia, or India, or anywhere in the British Commonwealth except Canada), here’s a link to pick up the new edition of Range from the seller of your choice. And if you’re a person who arranges books by color, you can finally fill that empty green fluorescent pantone spot on your shelf and in your heart. You’re welcome.

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Every year, the company O.C. Tanner — which helps businesses improve workplace morale — puts out a lengthy “Global Culture Report,” highlighting international trends in work. In 2023, a section of the report was titled: “Rise of the Generalist.” 

“The post-pandemic workplace,” it reads, “is fluid, unsure, and ideal for workers with a breadth of knowledge and skills.” The report features stats about the influence of generalists in leadership and innovation, as well as anecdotes from companies around the world. It quotes a senior recruiter at Google explaining: “If you just hire someone to do one specific job, but then our company needs change, we need to rest assured that the person is going to find something else to do at Google. That comes back to hiring smart generalists.” 

The less inspiring part of the report is this conclusion: “Despite the demand for generalists, most feel unsupported….Some generalists feel it’s easier to see the goals and accomplishments of specialists, because their roles are more defined and specific.” I would venture to guess that “some” is an understatement. And yet, the report notes that a 10-year study of 17,000 executives found that more than 90 percent of CEOs had broad management experience. Future CEOs in the study had often made lateral, or even what looked like backward career moves — going from a large, prestigious company to a small, unknown one, or even just to a smaller division within a company — which allowed them to develop a more diverse skill set than their peers. 

In other words: career zig-zaggers are more likely to feel unappreciated while on the path to developing a broad skill set, but also more likely (eventually) to ascend to the highest echelon in their work. This gets at a fundamental conundrum that I think courses through every page of this book (but that would have made for a drab subtitle): optimizing for the short-term feels safe, but often undermines development in the long-term. As you will see in the pages that follow, this holds true whether the goal is choosing an area of study, a career path, or simply trying to learn a new skill. 

In 2021 (again, too recently to have made it into the main text of this book), a group of scientists led by Northwestern University’s Dashun Wang published a remarkable study of professional trajectories. Wang and colleagues had previously shown that most people produce the highest-impact work of their careers in a cluster, or “hot streak.” Most of us only have one hot streak; two if we’re lucky. The new study analyzed the careers of more than 26,000 artists, film directors, and scientists, and found a consistent pattern: no matter the individual’s age, a period of broad exploration preceded the onset of a hot streak. 

As Wang put it: “Our data shows that people ought to explore a bunch of things at work.” Along the way, we should be thinking about where, eventually, to focus. Wang’s work is part of a large body of research on the “explore/exploit trade-off.” “Explore” is just what it sounds like — trying new avenues, solutions, or ideas, and seeking new knowledge or skills. “Exploit” means digging into what you already know and maximizing the benefit from it. Getting the balance right is crucial. The trouble is, in pursuit of a head start, we often skip “explore” and jump right to the more narrow “exploit.” 

As Wang and his coauthors wrote: “We find that when exploitation occurs by itself, not preceded by exploration, the chance that such episodes coincide with a hot streak is significantly lower than expected.” 

Curtailing exploration could be an especially acute problem in a world of fast-changing technology, where many of us are going to need to broaden or update our skills. 

Thanks for reading this excerpt. Other sections in the new foreword get into my post-publication chat with Serena Williams, a bit of tech-disruption history, and an editorial I co-authored with Malcolm Gladwell in … drumroll … the journal Ophthalmology.

If you’re in the British Commonwealth (except you, Canadians), you can pick up the new edition of Range from your preferred bookseller at this link.

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Lastly, if you just want to see neat pictures of a 200,000-pound printer rolling out thousands of copies of a book with a neon cover (not mine), you can check that out here.

Until next time…

David

P.S. If you like wide-ranging interviews, I recently did one for the podcast Diary of a CEO, where I discussed ideas from both of my books, and — for the first time — a few topics in the book I’m currently working on. You can listen to or watch that here.