Increasing specialization has
created a system of parallel trenches in the world of innovation. Everyone is
digging deeper into one's own trench, too busy to stand up and look over in the
next trench, although the solution to the problem at hand may lie there.
Epstein’s book is well written and timely. A highly recommended read for people in management and human resources. Actually, make that anyone interested in learning what sort of expertise can create success.
The terminology of fox vs hedgehog is now popular - the hedgehog knows only one thing, but the fox knows many things. Epstein credits another analogy to Freeman Dyson – frogs and birds. The frogs know their environment very well, and delight in the details of their neighborhood. Birds can fly high, survey the landscape far. They delight in seeing far and unifying the local insights into bigger thinking. We need to create an environment where both frogs and birds can thrive. The world is both vast and deep.
I thought this observation is spot on. We see 17-year olds are asked to make educational decisions that commit them to a career path. While you can change careers, sometimes that involves resisting family and societal pressure for success. The society in general and the education system today appears to be better at creating frogs than birds.
Epstein illustrates this point with a large cast of characters. Story after story reinforces his point.
Epstein's stories show us that narrow and early specialization alone can't prepare us for the complexity of real world. Steve Jobs credited his calligraphy lessons for the design of font design in Mac. Nobel laureates are 22 times more likely than the rest of us to have a part time occupation as painters, performers or authors.
Tiger Woods started specializing in golf very early in his life. He was in a driving range, while the expected motor skill for his age was to be able to run and kick a ball. He pursued his ambition with a single-minded devotion to his art. Roger Federer, by contrast, played all games that involved a moving ball. His mother was a coach, but never coached him. His parents just made sure that he didn’t cheat and had a balanced childhood. He started focusing on tennis late in his teens. While both the athletes got to the heights of their respective careers, Federer retained his number 1 rank well into his thirties.
Figlie del caro, an all-female orchestra in Venice, who dominated the European music scene in the 17th century, was known for both adaptability and virtuosity of its members. Each girl learnt vocal music, as well as every instrument that their institution owned. They could play compositions few others could play at that time, just by switching positions to create the orchestration that various compositions demanded. They drew royalty, travelers and distinguished members of the society for standing room performances in the church. They are credited for popularizing Antonio Vivaldi’s concertos.
Analogical thinking is possible only with awareness of more than one domain. Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer who is credited with the discovery that the planetary system is held together by gravitational forces made that substantial intellectual leap by a series of analogies. When one analogy failed to explain the behavior of planets, he came up with a series of alternative analogies.
Then there is the story of this boy in the Netherlands who spent an inordinate amount of time staring at insects and labeling beetles. He apparently failed to learn from his celebrity art teacher at school. He started working for his uncle as an arts dealer. He had to abandon that profession, as he lacked the social graces and haggling instincts that the job required. He moved to Paris when there was an explosion of art studios. However, he was not impressed by anything that he saw there. Now a young man, he tried working at a bookstore, teaching and preaching. Frustrated by his lack of success in all these, he started drawing as a distraction. He tried various artistic pastimes, all of which met with unfavorable reviews. Many years and many experiments later, he came to the realization that he could paint, if he gave up the quest for perfect realism. One night, he watched the sky for hours and imagined the sky behind a tiny town with a chapel. The painting was The Starry Night. The young man was Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh had pioneered a style of art, because of his winding path. Not despite it.
Frances Hasselbein’s story is less well known, but equally notable. A woman who loved volunteering ended up having four professional jobs, all of them as presidents or CEOs, despite never having looked for a job. She brought the resourcefulness and the social entrepreneurship lessons from volunteering to the successful professional career, which did not start until her mid-fifties!
Jill Viles, a woman from Iowa, who was suffering from muscular dystrophy due to a rare genetic mutation, recognized the symptoms in a Canadian sprinter, purely through a photograph she had seen on the newspaper. Jill made the diagnosis from the familiar lack of fat on the athlete’s muscles. In these days of Google-based diagnostics, we can understand a patient understanding her own condition by research, but to recognize the same condition in an athlete only from pictures, is impressive. Epstein points out that she had made a connection while no specialist had.
Gunpei Yokoi joined a small, floundering company called Nintendo, apparently because of lack of ambition, and his reluctance to leave Kyoto. He was a hobbyist and tinkerer. In his early days in Nintendo, he had very little to do as a maintenance engineer. In his spare time, he made an extendable arm with crisscrossing pieces of wood, and attached gripping tool to the end, to retrieve remote objects without getting up. The president saw him do this and asked if it could be converted into a game. Yokoi added a set of colored balls, and created Nintendo’s first toy, which was a hit. Yokoi made several more successful games. He did not create or need sophisticated new technology. He thought broadly and made good use of old, cheap technology as no one else had. He expanded his success to hand-held calculator games, and then to Game Boy. Game Boy destroyed the more sophisticated rivals by applying cheap technology to novel entertainment ideas. Epstein cites this as an example for unusual, cross-disciplinary, lateral thinking.
In an organizational context, when we create organizations that are competency-based, we indirectly dictate the tool that a division might use to solve a problem.
Medicine is hyper specialized as well. Epstein quotes Atul Gawande, the surgeon and author as saying, ‘when someone was joking about the existence of a specialist left-ear surgeon, we had to check to see that such a thing did not exist!’.
I work in the software industry. In many organizations, there are divisions that specialize in technologies like Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and the cloud. When they frame a business problem, they fail to generalize the problem statement well enough to factor in possibilities outside their respective domains. This may not be due to any sinister motive; it is just that they are in Epstein’s figurative trench.
Epstein concludes with a chapter titled ‘Expanding your range’. While it has useful suggestions, I expected a recipe for expanding my range. Epstein says that is exactly the wrong thing to look for. Successful innovators found their own paths, often strewn with failures. The apparent disconnect between the skills they learnt along the way actually helped them create their unique path.
In celebrating early success of a young person, we end up discouraging others who explored unusual paths early in their careers. Intended or not, this causes a comparison that may be hard for generalists to take. Even great men are not immune to this. Story has it that Julius Caesar broke into tears when he saw a statue of Alexander the Great in Spain. ‘Alexander had conquered all these nations at my age, and I have done nothing that is memorable’!
So, us lesser mortals just need to relax and do our best to ignore those tiger parents!
The book has many stories in various domains. Normal folks with a typical... range... can't be expected to appreciate all examples that Epstein brings up. But that is perhaps intentional. The author may be nudging us to look outside our normal range.
A totally worthwhile read. I am glad I took my time reading this book.
(This review was originally published in LinkedIn in June 2020).
