Strategy Consulting: Why does the generalist approach work?

Arbitrage. That’s what comes to me when we are looking at the business problems. Gone are those days of providing strategic solutions where one wears only the hat of either a financial, marketing or technology analyst. The more holistic approach starts with looking at the ecosystem and the enterprise analysis. Now that throws open the question – when attacking the business problems – who fits in more - a generalist or a specialist?

A proposed problem solving technique would be to bring the leaders from various specialized fields in the same meeting and then debate and discuss. But it has been seen, such meetings fail as the stakeholders are not able to reach consensus.

The image above illustrates the divide and conquer approach. It is common in the industry to conquer a complex business problem by dividing it into manageable smaller modules based on multiple dimensions. Each module is led by a dimension/domain specialist. But in the process, are we not forgetting the generalists? Don’t we require someone to systematically connect the dots, oversee the system of connected dimensions and thus, order the chaos! From the above image, it appears the modules are in silos but in reality, the module overlap and talk to each other. And hence, the overlaps are best handled by generalists whose thinking cuts across domains.

With a complex nonlinear system, we just cannot divide the problem into parts and just add the things up and say this is the whole. The strong interactions between the modules needs to be analyzed based on the different dimensions.

Adding a new dimension say financial - to marketing, culture and technology is like putting a new pair of glasses and we could see stories we haven’t seen before. We can identify the causal chain of events that we never identified before. And thereby, it can enable us to see the “invisible hands” and the handcuffs that are impeding business eaders from doing things that increase stakeholder values!

Thus, the key role of the generalist is to be present on the dimensional/domain overlaps and spot the interactions and entanglements of the different dimensions and then take a crude look at the whole. The generalist can talk to the domain experts (or the specialists) and then arrive at a comprehensive solution to the business problem or opportunity.

Now, coming to the question in the first para of this article – ”… when attacking the business problems – who fits in more - a generalist or a specialist? ”.  Are we able to arrive at a decision now ?

Irrespective of the answer, one feels generalists are equally important as the specialists. Though from a career standpoint, it’s little harder to find jobs if you’re a generalist, but it’s easier to adapt to the changing business environment especially, in this age of Technology Disruption. Also, as generalist one can have a bird’s eye view of the issues at hand, which can help him to take up leadership roles.

Did you like the article and want to carry the discussion forward? You connect with me at d.santanu1@gmail.com