David Armano created an interesting presentation this week that I wanted to share with you here as well. The presentation was submitted as a panel idea for the upcoming SXSW conference so if you’re going to the conference and you like the panel idea, then vote for it here.
I was wondering how much of this ‘being fuzzy’ is linked to being a generalist, funny enough something David wrote about a day later. On Twitter David replied that the idea of the fuzzy tail is based on being comfortable working outside of silos, being more nimble and that it’s only somewhat linked to generalists, but not limited to. And he’s right, this is indeed not limited to generalists but I can’t help thinking that it’s easier for a generalist to ‘get fuzzy’. I think generalists have a more natural interest for what other people are doing, they don’t stick to their comfort zone (or maybe their comfort zone is just really big) and that just helps to go beyond your own silo. Although this is not saying we don’t need both generalists and specialists, because we definitely do.
Coming back to the presentation, I have to share this with some of my colleagues at Microsoft. It’s probably linked with the magnitude of the organization but we do tend to work a lot in silos and I couldn’t agree more that we should go beyond these borders. But I consider myself a generalist, I want to know what other people are doing in- and outside the company so maybe it’s easier for me to do so than it is for some others – I like fuzzy :)
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