Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

"This is a book that’s going to appeal to anybody like me who thinks of themselves as a generalist and a dilettante with lots of wide interests. The underlying message of the book is that generalists in certain circumstances, and particularly when dealing with complex situations and uncertainty—which we’re seeing quite a lot of in the world today—are actually better at handling these questions than specialists. He’s not saying that specialists can be done away with. Domain expertise is still vital in lots of cases. But he’s suggesting that we have been discounting the generalists. We’ve assumed that they’re just superficial, when in fact the research that he cites is pretty comprehensively in favour of the idea that generalists can move across their domains of inquiry in an ambiguous world and succeed in ways that specialists might not be able to. Yes, and of course he makes the point that Tiger Woods was also extraordinarily successful. So it’s not necessarily an either/or. He makes the wider point that if at university you’re studying some very specific subject, like neuroscience or business, you do worse than people who study a more generalist topic like economics. Economists are able to apply what they have learned beyond the domain in which they specialize. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a way of thinking about the world that he is drawing attention to. It’s a great antidote to years in which specialists have been given lots of credit. For instance, in his book Outliers , Malcolm Gladwell suggests you need to put in 10,000 hours of practice to achieve true expertise. I’m sympathetic to Epstein’s argument partly because, as I said, I’m a generalist myself. I’ve also written about polymaths and generalists—for instance in my own book, Ruskinland , about the Victorian thinker John Ruskin. I think they get dismissed too quickly as being superficial. We push people much too early down silos into very specialized areas. In the UK, for example, high school children specialize in three or possibly four subjects when they’re as young as 16. So it’s a book that appeals to me and it’s very nicely written as well. It’s in that classic genre of books that make quite detailed scientific research accessible. It’s a team effort, but I helped set it up. I was set the task of trying to work out how we could do it in 2005 and with colleagues on the commercial side of the FT and our marketing team and some of our books team we put together the prize. It has remained more or less as we conceived it. One of the central ideas was that we shouldn’t have too many prizes, but just one. It’s quite a rich prize. Each of the finalists gets £10,000 just for being on the shortlist and then there’s £30,000 for the winner. Since we started, we’ve added another prize for the best business book proposal. It’s called the Bracken Bower Prize and it runs in parallel. It’s available only to authors under 35, so the idea is we discover some new talent as well as having the prize for published books."