For as long as I can remember, the professional world has been telling generalists to pick a lane. Specialise. Go deep. Become the world's foremost expert in one narrow thing and defend that territory with everything you've got. The job market rewarded it. The recruiters demanded it. The LinkedIn bios reflected it. "I help B2B SaaS companies optimise their mid-funnel conversion rates." Great. Good for you. That used to be enough.
It's not enough anymore. And the reason it's not enough has arrived faster than anyone expected.
AI has fundamentally changed the value equation between depth and breadth. When anyone can summon specialist-level knowledge in seconds -- when a strategist can build a product, when a designer can write backend logic, when a writer can create data visualisations -- the premium on going deep in one domain starts to erode. What becomes scarce, and therefore valuable, is the ability to see across domains. To connect things that don't obviously connect. To bring range to a world that suddenly has unlimited access to depth.
The specialist era had a good run
I'm not dismissing specialisation. It was the right strategy for a world where knowledge was hard to access and skills took years to develop. If you wanted to build a website in 2010, you needed to learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and probably a backend language. That investment in deep technical skill was genuinely valuable because the barrier to entry was high. Specialists thrived because they held keys that nobody else had.
But the barriers are falling. Not slowly, not partially -- they're collapsing at speed. I built fourteen products without writing a line of code from scratch. Not because the code doesn't matter, but because the tool I use understands the code so I can focus on what the code should do. The specialist's moat -- "I know how to do this thing you can't" -- is getting shallower by the month.
What generalists actually do
The word "generalist" has always carried a faint whiff of inadequacy. Jack of all trades, master of none. The implication being that breadth is just failed depth -- that you're spread across many things because you couldn't commit to one. This framing was always wrong, but now it's dangerously wrong.
What generalists actually do is pattern recognition across domains. They see that a problem in advertising has already been solved in hospitality. They notice that a design principle from architecture applies to digital interfaces. They understand that the reason a brand resonates isn't because of its product features but because of a cultural shift they spotted in a completely unrelated category.
This is what I did for fifteen years as a strategy director. I sat at the intersection of brands, culture, technology, and consumer behaviour. My job was never to be the deepest expert in any one of those things. It was to see the connections between them that nobody else was seeing. To walk into a room and say: "This thing happening in streetwear culture is going to change how your financial services brand talks to twenty-five-year-olds, and here's why."
The Strategy Director who ships
Here's the specific version of this argument that I'm living right now. A Strategy Director who also builds products, understands culture deeply, has aesthetic taste, and can actually ship things into the world -- that person didn't exist five years ago. The strategy skillset and the building skillset lived in different people, different departments, different companies entirely.
AI collapsed that distance. Now one person can hold the insight, shape the vision, make the aesthetic calls, and build the thing. The same brain that understands the audience also decides the typography. The same person who writes the positioning also writes the product. There's no translation layer. No handover document. No brief that gets watered down through four rounds of interpretation.
That's not a small improvement. That's a fundamentally different way of making things. And it favours generalists -- people who were always comfortable holding multiple ideas from multiple domains simultaneously -- over specialists who went deep in one layer of the stack.
Range as competitive advantage
David Epstein wrote a book called Range that argued exactly this point before AI made it urgent. He showed that in complex, unpredictable domains, generalists outperform specialists because they can draw on a wider set of mental models. The specialists win in kind environments -- where the rules are clear and the patterns are stable. Chess. Golf. Routine surgery. But in wicked environments -- where the rules shift, the context changes, and the problems are novel -- breadth beats depth every time.
The professional world is getting more wicked by the day. The problems worth solving don't sit neatly in one domain. They're cultural and technical and commercial and aesthetic all at once. The person who can navigate all four dimensions simultaneously isn't a jack of all trades. They're the only person in the room who can see the whole picture.
The revenge is quiet
I call it revenge, but it's not really about payback. It's more about vindication. Every generalist has sat through a career review where someone said they needed to "focus" or "pick a lane." Every wide-ranging mind has been told that their breadth was a weakness, that they'd be more hireable if they specialised, that the market wants T-shaped people with deep expertise in one thing.
The market is changing its mind. Slowly, messily, reluctantly -- but changing nonetheless. The people who built careers on range, on curiosity, on connecting dots across domains are discovering that the world has finally caught up with how they've always thought. The tools exist to turn their breadth into output. The problems exist that require their cross-domain thinking. The moment exists where being interested in everything is not a distraction but a superpower.
I spent fifteen years being told I was too broad. That I should pick advertising or technology or culture or brands and go deep. I ignored that advice, mostly because I couldn't help it -- my brain just doesn't work in narrow lanes. And now, at forty, with fourteen products shipped and a portfolio that spans culture scoring to pub guides to Japanese learning apps, the breadth isn't a weakness on my CV.
It's the whole story.
