SERIES: Jack of all trades, master of none? A discussion from marketing and entrepreneurial perspectives

Jacks of all trades have a decisive advantage in certain positions. An overview.

Specialist, expert, even guru. It is amazing how it has become the norm for recruiters to use these terms in job advertisements. It is a fact that more and more markets are adopting complex workflows, forcing employees to focus on a single, precise set of tasks. Because of this shift, one often hears that one has to specialize in a particular field in order to be trusted in his or her professional activity. But what if you’d rather be a jack of all trades, with more than just one area of interest? Are you doomed to stay out of the job market and be seen as a master of none?

We will discuss this subject through the prism of specific activities in a series of articles that will hopefully help you better understand how jacks of all trades can be useful in a working environment.

Being a generalist doesn’t necessarily mean being incompetent

Oxford dictionaries define the term "generalist" as follows: “A person competent in several different fields or activities.” This rather straightforward definition ensures that a generalist, or a “jack of all trades”, cannot be mistaken with an incompetent. However, this still does not prove that this person can master a specific task, which could make the second part of the saying, “master of none”, true. What if, then, the sum of all of the skills one person has was used in a way that the person in question could be considered an expert? Could we find some examples of professional activities where being a jack of all trades actually helps achieve goals more easily than for a specialist?

Building a house versus carving doors

Designer David Cole’s theory about jacks of all trades is that “You can spend a lifetime refining your art at carving doors, but that won’t help you build your house.” It depends on your main objective: do you want to become a master at carving beautiful doors or do you want to build houses? As Cole says, “Learning isn’t a zero-sum activity.” That means the more expert one becomes at a specific task, the less he or she is going to learn about it in the future because making things more and more perfect is asymptotical —meaning that when an expert skill level is close to being reached, it becomes exponentially harder to move to the next level of perfection. So, if one is ever able to reach perfection, it would be by spending one’s whole life doing only one thing. On the other hand, if one wants to build that house, then one won’t invest too much time and energy at repeating a specific task. He or she would prefer learning a bit of everything, making things work together to finish the house quicker.

This example shows the importance of both generalists and specialists in virtually every industry. For a holistic vision of how a goal should be reached –as in thinking strategically—one would have to know a bit of everything and how things interconnect to produce a better product. A generalist profile would be more comfortable doing so. On the contrary, for a very specific task which needs extended knowledge to find a particular solution, a specialist would be most appropriate.

Web designers need to understand web developers, not the other way around

In order to apply this theory to a real-life example, David Cole explains how web designers have to be jacks of all trades as opposed to their colleagues, web developers: “The notion that you can't be good at more than one practice is silly because most practices are themselves comprised of more granular skill sets. Typography teaches you about kerning, font pairing, and legibility. But typography itself is just one component of what we call graphic design, which is the unified application of many additional skills like color theory, layout design, and so on. We may call them different things, but that's an abstraction to aid study and discussion. Their utility, and our primary concern, is in their function as part of a holistic system, where they work together to achieve an outcome. This never stops being true, no matter how far up the chain you go.”

This leads to the topic of implementation, the developer’s actual job. For example, web developers do not have to take ergonomics into account, while web designers do have to understand how code works. It is essential in order to come up with a design that can work and that can be implemented in a CMS (Content Management System) by the developer.

All of this supports the premise that when you accumulate skills, you tend to become a generalist rather than a specialist, because your time is used for gathering knowledge in a broader spectrum of fields.

Now that we know that that jacks of all trades are not necessarily masters of none, we may wonder in what other situations one may find jacks of all trades. Here are two more professions where it’s rather likely that one will find them.

Strategic planners and entrepreneurs: different jobs, same species

The Steve Jobs and Elon Musks of the world have something in common: according to organizational psychology research, entrepreneurs are generalists. In 2013, a Swiss-German study found that while employees are specialists, entrepreneurs are generalists.

Founders have a diverse set of skills. After all, they have to manage the many complex parts of a business. Also, they tend to have a diverse network of relationships, one that they can call on when launching companies.

"It is the jacks-of-all-trades across a whole portfolio of individual resources and not the masters-of-one who are likely to become entrepreneurs," write authors Uschi Backes-Gellner and Petra Moog. "The mere social butterflies or the mere computer nerds are not likely to become entrepreneurs because they are both too imbalanced and thereby less likely to be successful as entrepreneurs."

Stanford University economist Edward P. Lazear first proposed this "jack of all trades" theory: he found that Stanford MBAs who took a broader range of classes and had held a wider range of jobs were more likely to start their own business. A follow-up German study replicated those results.

Another generalist activity is strategic planning in an advertisement or digital agency. It is perhaps less well-known than other job descriptions, but it still demonstrates perfectly that sometimes a jack of all trades is as valuable as a team of experts.

If a brand has to plan an advertising campaign to sell a product, it would not immediately gather its dream team, calling the best UX specialist, plus a graphic designer, plus a developer, plus a system administrator, plus an SEO expert, plus a project manager. That would be too time consuming, not to mention a waste of money. What the company needs is someone familiar with all of the above, because it does not have time to wait days for the team to come up with a solution that could not be ideal, strategically speaking. Plus, all these professionals may not be required to produce the final project. In this situation, a strategic planner may be the best solution. In the manner of an architect designing a building, thanks to his or her knowledge of the specialized tasks needed for the campaign, he or she would be able to plan a campaign according to the company’s strategy before it is actually produced. Today, when companies need to test different solutions, they prefer to avoid going through too many complex and costly processes, producing work that could be discarded afterwards.

Specialists may indeed be better at a specific task, but as soon as it comes down to being more versatile and having a strategic vision instead of a tactical one, generalists can add unexpected value to a project or business.

If you recognize yourself in the definition of “jack of all trades”, please do not think you are destined to be a master of none. Think the opposite. You may simply approach problems with a different point of view and you may be more likely to find innovative solutions than experts in their respective fields.

Our next article in this series will go in more depth by discussing how to be a successful entrepreneur or strategic planner.

Photo credit: By Enoch Lau (Own work (photo)) GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Sources:
http://uk.businessinsider.com/best-entrepreneur-psychological-profile-2015-3?r=US
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053535713001236
http://lifehacker.com/being-a-jack-of-all-trades-doesnt-mean-youre-a-master-511886334
http://irondavy.quora.com/The-Myth-of-the-Myth-of-the-Unicorn-Designer
http://icisil.com/jack-of-all-trades-master-of-universe/