Sean Murphy is the CEO of SKMurphy, and offers customer development services for software entrepreneurs. The interviewer is Floyd Tucker from DreamSimplicity. Here’s a quote I found interesting from the video:
People who do well in early stage startups tend to be generalists.
To prosper, to scale up you’ve actually got to hire specialists.
Now I don’t have anything against specialists or the idea of specialising in one field. That’s great, and we need those people. My gripe is that we don’t have enough generalists.
I believe having more Leonardo da Vinci’s will help solve a lot of world problems. You and I might not envision a solution, but that might be because we’re tunnel-visioned. They aren’t.
I’ve been reading a book about being a generalist, or a “Scanner”, as the book calls it. I’ve always been a generalist. I think it’s valuable to at least have an appreciation of jobs other than your own, whether you’re in a startup or not. I find it a lot easier to work with people where there’s knowledge and respect in both directions. I hate it when people are taken for granted.
I believe “being open-minded” is a criteria of being a generalist. You must be receptive to knowledge from other fields to be a generalist. This also means you’re open to opinions from other people.
There *are* specialists who are open-minded too. It’s not a binary distinction. On the range of generalists and specialists, I fall more on the former, that’s all.