By my mid to late 30s I used to say “I’m a Specialist Generalist”, as my role was to grow the assets of a family-owned business holding company and we invested in widely diverse business sectors, countries, sizes of businesses. The common theme was our focus on growing the valuation of all those businesses.
This meant that, with all that experience, I felt comfortable that I could play that strategic role with pretty much any business.
Fast forward nearly twenty years and my last decade and more has moved that experience into coaching and, increasingly, into supporting leaders.
Guess what, I often am asked to link the two, by helping leaders elevate from good to great to elite, all the while with a focus for them on a “What’s Next” that, yes, is centred on building valuation of their business through asset growth.
What businesses do I work with? Any, as long as they are those kinds of “good to great to elite” leaders.
I suppose you could say I am a specialist in terms of the focus on the types of leaders I work with, but to my clients they work with me largely because I am a generalist and bring a wide variety of experience and knowledge to help them look at things from different angles. Perhaps still a specialist generalist!
Today I got to thinking about this having read a daily blog by one of the top VC investors out there, Fred Wilson.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on “Generalist vs Specialist” based both on my thoughts above and Fred’s, reproduced below.
Generalist vs Specialist
At USV, we have a fairly narrow thesis that sets out what we want to invest in, but all of us work across all of our thesis areas. We see ourselves as generalists not specialists.In an environment when everything is moving so fast, that can be challenging, as I wrote about on Tuesday. But there are also great benefits to working this way. As a team, we benefit from working together on everything versus having silos within our partnership and firm. And as individuals, there is something quite helpful about moving back and forth between domains. It stimulates the mind in ways that going deep and staying deep on one thing cannot.
There are many ways to build a successful investment business. Specializing in a specific domain works well for many firms. But I personally prefer being a generalist. Being able to meet founders in multiple different sectors back to back to back is really something special. It challenges and opens the mind in a way that really works for me.