Peter Drucker once commented on the difference between generalists and specialists which differs to the common perception of a generalist as a jack of all trades. He said, “The only meaningful definition of a generalist is a specialist who can relate his own small area to the universe of knowledge.”
To Drucker, it was not a question of having knowledge in more than one area, because that alone makes a person just a specialist in X different areas. He saw it as the ability to relate one’s work to the efforts of others.
Even more harshly, he notes that as a knowledge worker, if you can’t communicate what you know, or make it useful for other people from other areas of specialisation, you will not be very useful.
There are some ideas that are spoken of only in jest, that you later find out that someone had already implemented them over two hundred years ago.
The New Lanark cotton mills founded in 1786 used a unique visual management system to allow a factory manager to judge the behaviour of his work force at a glance. As Robert Heilbroner writes in his book The Worldly Philosophers:
Over each employee hung a little cube of wood with a different color painted on each side: black, blue, yellow, and white. From lightest to darkest, the colors stood for different grades of deportment: white was excellent; yellow, good; blue, indifferent; black, bad…. It was mainly yellow and white.
This small four-sided wooden block was known as a ‘silent monitor’ and was used by Robert Owen as a means of imposing discipline at his New Lanark Mills. Source: https://www.peoplescollection.wales/items/10456
The Scottish Maritime Museum further elaborates:
The superintendent was responsible for turning the [cubes] every day, according to how well or badly the worker had behaved. A daily note was then made of the conduct of the workers in the ‘books of character’ which were provided for each department in the mills.
As inappropriate as this sounds to modern ears, in the context of it’s time this system was intended to be benevolent in nature. It’s inventor, Robert Owen, devised it as he was strongly opposed to the use of corporal punishment as a method for imposing discipline. Far from being known as a tyrant, history has marked him as an influential social reformer of the industrial revolution dedicated to improving the lives of working people.
