Range - David Epstein Page 0,84

more recently have declined. “Specialists specifically peaked about 1985,” Ouderkirk told me. “And then declined pretty dramatically, leveled off about 2007, and the most recent data show it’s declining again, which I’m trying to understand.” He is careful to say that he can’t pinpoint a cause of the current trend. His hypothesis is that organizations simply don’t need as many specialists. “As information becomes more broadly available, the need for somebody to just advance a field isn’t as critical because in effect they are available to everybody,” he said. He is suggesting that communication technology has limited the number of hyperspecialists required to work on a particular narrow problem, because their breakthroughs can be communicated quickly and widely to others—the Yokois of the world—who work on clever applications.

Communication technologies have certainly done that in other areas. In the early twentieth century, for example, the state of Iowa alone had more than a thousand opera houses, one for every fifteen hundred residents. They were theaters, not just music venues, and they provided full-time employment for hundreds of local acting troupes and thousands of actors. Fast forward to Netflix and Hulu. Every customer can have Meryl Streep on demand, and the Iowa opera houses are extinct. So much for thousands of fully employed stage actors in Iowa. Ouderkirk’s data suggest that something analogous happened for narrowly focused specialists in technical fields. They are still absolutely critical, it’s just that their work is widely accessible, so fewer suffice.

It is an extension of the trend that Don Swanson foretold, and it massively increased opportunities for Yokoi-like connectors and polymathic innovators. “When information became more widely disseminated,” Ouderkirk told me, “it became a lot easier to be broader than a specialist, to start combining things in new ways.”

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Specialization is obvious: keep going straight. Breadth is trickier to grow. A subsidiary of PricewaterhouseCoopers that studied technological innovation over a decade found that there was no statistically significant relationship between R&D spending and performance.* (Save for the bottom 10 percent of spenders, which did perform worse than their peer companies.) Seeding the soil for generalists and polymaths who integrate knowledge takes more than money. It takes opportunity.

Jayshree Seth rose to corporate scientist precisely because she was allowed to pinball around different technological domains. Staying in one technical lane isn’t her thing. Seth was unenthusiastic enough about the research she did for her master’s degree that she ignored warnings and switched labs at Clarkson University for her PhD in chemical engineering. “People said, ‘This is going to take too long because you have no fundamental knowledge in this area and you’re going to be behind people who have already done their master’s there,’” she told me. To clarify: the advice she received was to stick in an area she knew she didn’t like because she had already started, even though she wasn’t even that far in. It is the sunk cost fallacy embodied.

When she entered the professional world with 3M, she dared to switch focus again, this time away from her PhD research, and for a personal reason: her husband was coming to 3M from the same Clarkson lab, and she didn’t want to occupy the spot he might apply for. So she branched out. It worked: Seth has more than fifty patents. She helped create new pressure-sensitive adhesives for stretchable and reusable tapes, and diapers that stay on wiggly babies. She never studied materials science at all, and claimed she is “not that great a scientist.” “What I mean,” she said, “is I’m not qualified fundamentally to do what I do.” She described her approach to innovation almost like investigative journalism, except her version of shoe-leather reporting is going door-to-door among her peers. She is a “T-shaped person,” she said, one who has breadth, compared to an “I-shaped person,” who only goes deep, an analog to Dyson’s birds and frogs. “T-people like myself can happily go to the I-people with questions to create the trunk for the T,” she told me. “My inclination is to attack a problem by building a narrative. I figure out the fundamental questions to ask, and if you ask those questions of the people who actually do know their stuff, you are still exactly where you would be if you had all this other knowledge inherently. It’s mosaic building. I just keep putting those tiles together. Imagine me in a network where I didn’t have the ability to access all these people. That really wouldn’t work well.”

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