Don't Be So Specialized

Excellent essay posted by Olivier Blanchard (a fellow Corante marketing network blogger) this week about the importance of hiring people who aren’t hyper-specialized. As he discusses, this is especially critical to strategy & innovation.

To think big, teams needs people with a broad range of interests (not just a wizard at hedge fund financing, but an avid mountain biker, German opera enthusiast, etc.). I find this is critical to having people who can look at a business or organization from different contexts, able to benchmark from outside their industry, and get ideas even from beyond business altogether.

Besides, these people are much more fun.