The age of generalists

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This is a piece I've been thinking about for years. I always advised people in their careers to go narrow and deep vs be generalists, yet I've begun to tweak this. Going narrow and deep as a specialist is no longer enough.

The media business is fascinating because many of the pressures it feels will cascade into other industries. This happened with the internet. Media always goes first. And what’s happening now in media is that safe paths have turned out, in many cases, to be a sucker’s bet. Joining a big, stolid media company a generation ago would have been a safe, if uninspiring, path to climb the corporate ladder. That ladder got obliterated. 

I regularly talk to people near 50 who are caught in the great compression. They’re at the tail end of their prime earning years – income typically peaks around then – and the executive roles they’d normally expect to have in a career ladder are gone or downsized. 

The media business always narrowed. Digital publishers were typically filled with young people. I would always tell reporters that 25-27 was the best age in the business since you’re still cheap enough because you don’t have a mortgage or kids, but you know enough. 

The war on the managerial class will continue under the more-with-less mantra. Tech always sets the pace. And it has clearly shifted to slim down organizations that have grown too bureaucratic. Media companies are following suit. But the real shift will be from pure coordination roles to making managers more player coaches rather than activity coordinators. As Elon Musk has said, there’s no sense in having a cavalry captain who can’t ride a horse.

The end result of this, I think, is going to put a premium on generalists. The new kind of generalist is not a dilettante but someone with a core specialization able to flex across several additional areas. It’s having a major but several minors and a few intense hobbies. Too much of modern work organizations in the “knowledge economy” became modeled off the assembly line of industrial organizations. The world is moving beyond command-and-control approaches to being more networked. 

Adaptability will be the core competitive advantage for people and organizations, if you bet that rapid change will only accelerate. Organizations will be slimmer, if only because the ceiling in media is lower, requiring the need to rethink how to build organizations. Hungry dogs run faster, as the great philosopher Jason Kelce once said. 

The specialists will need to adapt. As a veteran exec was telling me this week, the new world isn’t made for sales people who can’t make a deck or media planners who can’t traffic a campaign or performance marketers who don't understand brand and the reverse. On the editorial side, I wouldn’t suggest being an editor who moves around copy and sends Slack messages about articles but hasn’t written one in a generation. Reporters who turn in four good stories a year will be rare. “Appointment journalism” will be the norm. You probably want to be good on camera because vertical video is the new norm. I can remember being in a newsroom where reporters pretended to be on the phone to avoid the event programmers. Nowadays, the not-my-job mantra is a major liability.

Part of this springs from the rise of the indieverse, which is a phenomenon that will spread to other industries. The direction of the economy will continue to favor more flexible organizations with lower cost bases designed to do more with less. The influx of no-code tools and AI-driven productivity will lead to an explosion of small businesses. 

Last week, I spoke on a session at The Athena Project, an event put on by Rishad Tobaccowala and Drew Ianini to examine the critical issues of a new world of work. Rishad has a book coming out on this topic, and he’s written persuasively in favor of a “company of one” approach. This is the feral option. The most risk averse will embed in organizations and fight the efforts to change them. The dockworkers’ strike was a sign of things to come. I’d expect unionization to both grow over the next five years and become more activist. This tends to slow down adaptation rather than reverse it. It will also serve as another disadvantage to large organizations in need of changing their way of operating.

In my session, Andrew Swinand, a veteran ad agency exec and CEO of Inspired Thinking Group, said the inevitable application of AI will eliminate much of the versioning work being done by agencies. This will result in a flattening of organizations. Small boutique agencies are growing far faster than big agencies, which for the most part rely on the opacity of their media agencies to make money with “transparently untransparent” practices. 

The future of the creative side is a few very talented true creative people and then relying on AI to do versioning. On the media side, automation will accelerate. The biggest growing areas of advertising are those around self-serve platforms. That’s what powers the massive tech platforms that have left publishers as a rounding error of ad spending. 

This is a necessity. The ceiling in media these days is simply lower. One media executive was musing to me over lunch recently how many of the upstarts now are hovering around $25 million in revenue. I can remember when I would see digital publishers hit a wall at $100 million. Meanwhile, I continue to have many conversations with indieverse companies of 1-5 people that are thriving. They have problems, but they’re in the good-problems-to-have bucket because they’re about being stretched too thin or being unsure of the direction to take. Building an independent media company is hard, without a doubt, but the risk ratio is arguably lower than joining a legacy player still in triage and shrinking mode.

One exec at a new digital publication advised me, “Don’t rebuild the processes of places you want to replace.” And a lot of that comes down to bureaucracy built in the name of specialization. As another media exec put it to me: 

“Ten-plus hand-offs on an RFP, 15+-person brainstorms are recent ‘innovations.’ You don't need a custom research team, and a 1P insights team, and a syndicated research team. Stop it. You win 30% of the RFPs you receive, in a good year. The inefficiency is wild.” 

Indieverse companies will be efficient by design. The needs of these types of companies are varied and work against specialization. It used to be you scraped by with imperfect generalists until you could get to the point where you broke into departments and specialists. That will continue, but I think companies will look to put it off as long as possible. 

That’s where fractionalists come into the picture. There are many experienced media operators who now have a portfolio rather than a career. They serve in fractional roles, allowing the company flexibility while not straining resources. That leaves the fractionalist to piece together projects. In some ways, it’s the gig economy moving upstream. I don’t know if that’s an overall good thing, but I do know the incentives are there for this to become more of the norm.

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