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who advocates becoming one of the “glue people” — folks who fit into the inter-
stices of the corporate lattice, tying together a wide mix of knowledge and skills.
Irwin tries to resolve the tension between his outlook and Schmidt’s by dis-
tinguishing different kinds of glue. For Irwin, the kinds of folks Schmidt is talk-
ing about are not Pareto optimized. They are not A.J. Liebling, but the people
who are not-quite-good and not-quite-fast. They are the middle managers in the
movie Office Space who stammer and stutter when asked, “What is it you do
here?” Put this way, it’s easy enough to have the Pareto-optimized cake and eat it
too; everyone agrees that it’s better to know what you are doing, and be good at it.
In real life, though, it’s not always all that easy to know with any degree of
certainty just what kind of glue person you are. In principle, having many skills
beats having just one. But at the same
time, we are all familiar with managers
who are convinced that they have a
wide range of abilities, when in reality
they simply have no skills in particular.
And thanks to the famous Dunning-
Kruger effect (which posits that the
people who know the least are the least able to see what they don’t know), those
managers themselves are sometimes the only people who don’t see it.
That’s probably why Google often seems to hire for the extremes, bringing
on star technologists with an intense focus on their areas of expertise. There is
value in every element of Irwin’s tool kit of sampling, Pareto optimization, and
passing on your skills to ever bigger teams. But there is value, too, in becoming
really good at something and seeing where that leads. In careers, you rarely get to
know the right choice — generalist or specialist? rounded or pointy? — until
you’re well on your way. All you can really do is follow the advice of Yogi Berra:
When you come to a fork in the road, take it. +
There is value in
becoming really good
at something and seeing
where that leads.
Mark Gimein
[email protected]
is a managing editor at the Week
and writes regularly about eco-
nomic issues.