cute fuzzy bunny
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
By the way, my 'verticalization' comment was not in reference to socially retarded people that are good at doing some single activity while barely being able to maintain some level of human sentience.
I was more referring to someone who a decent employee with a solid singular strength yet might lag in other areas. When I was a manager in IT I had two guys that were pretty good employees. One could write more bulletproof professional documentation 3x the speed of anyone else and one was the very best meeting organizer i've ever met. Neither one was a developer type or best suited for dealing with customer service issues. So I'd couple the documentation guy with a group of 8 engineers knocking out a project and have him do all the documentation. The engineers could focus on the work while the documenter kept all the paperwork consistent, of good quality and done on time. I'd have the "meeting guy" organize and drive all the group meetings. We always had a solid agenda, meetings ran on time, they stayed organized, and we finished on time with the deliverables we walked into the meeting to obtain.
Yet there was often criticism that "that guy only does xxx although he's very good at it...but he's not as good as this other guy that does 4 different things at a mediocre level".
I disagreed. A focused function made the most of that individuals skills and abilities in the areas where they were superlative and freed other employees who were less skilled (but still capable) to focus on THEIR areas of expertise.
Note that I continued to press people to develop in areas they were less comfortable or proficient in.
I'll have to make a football analogy here...my hometown Patriots have made a pretty good case for building a system that relies on people with very specific skills to do a very specific set of things within a very specific part of the field, rather than trying to develop players who are outstanding athletes and have them running all over the field trying to make big plays. In their system, fairly unexciting athletes and often street free agents can be plugged in, asked to do a few specific but important things, and exist within the systems framework, relying on others around them to do their job.
And they win.
I was more referring to someone who a decent employee with a solid singular strength yet might lag in other areas. When I was a manager in IT I had two guys that were pretty good employees. One could write more bulletproof professional documentation 3x the speed of anyone else and one was the very best meeting organizer i've ever met. Neither one was a developer type or best suited for dealing with customer service issues. So I'd couple the documentation guy with a group of 8 engineers knocking out a project and have him do all the documentation. The engineers could focus on the work while the documenter kept all the paperwork consistent, of good quality and done on time. I'd have the "meeting guy" organize and drive all the group meetings. We always had a solid agenda, meetings ran on time, they stayed organized, and we finished on time with the deliverables we walked into the meeting to obtain.
Yet there was often criticism that "that guy only does xxx although he's very good at it...but he's not as good as this other guy that does 4 different things at a mediocre level".
I disagreed. A focused function made the most of that individuals skills and abilities in the areas where they were superlative and freed other employees who were less skilled (but still capable) to focus on THEIR areas of expertise.
Note that I continued to press people to develop in areas they were less comfortable or proficient in.
I'll have to make a football analogy here...my hometown Patriots have made a pretty good case for building a system that relies on people with very specific skills to do a very specific set of things within a very specific part of the field, rather than trying to develop players who are outstanding athletes and have them running all over the field trying to make big plays. In their system, fairly unexciting athletes and often street free agents can be plugged in, asked to do a few specific but important things, and exist within the systems framework, relying on others around them to do their job.
And they win.
