by Michael Arbow, MBA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.
According to Vikram Mansharamani in a recent Harvard Business Review blog, the reign of the “expert” is over. It has long been held (even by Harvard itself) that being a person who had gained “domain expertise” would enable you to have competitive advantage over those “generalist” out there who for whatever reason just couldn’t master one subject and had wide diverse fields of interest. During the 20th century, experts ruled academia, finance, law and risk management to name a few. This environment of deep study and thought is sadly (for them) becoming obsolete. Why? In order for the expert world to exist it relies heavily on a lack of connectivity – that is, what a worker does in rural China does not affect real estate prices in Kansas City. This we are experiencing is no longer the case – events or changes in one area of study are effecting innumerable others. To understand this and foresee this you need a generalist – someone who knows a little about a lot (like the fox).
Risk management departments are loaded with experts whose grasp on seemingly non-related events affecting their world has been called to question repeatedly in the past ten years – especially in the financial world. The question then becomes, is your risk department designed for and living in the past’s non-connective world or has it moved onto being more insightful of how non-related developments will impact their organization’s risk profile. Perhaps a question risk managers may wish to ask when interviewing future hires for this new environment is: “How often do you attend Trivia Night at the local pub?”
For more on this follow the link to the HBR blog: http://tinyurl.com/cc5fh89
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