On and off the last couple of months I’ve had the pleasure of reading bits and pieces from Vinnie Mirchandani’s upcoming book The New Polymath. It is now in the final editing stages and I have a preview copy. Vinnie’s publishers don’t want folk to write reviews for a little while yet so I’ll restrict myself to asking questions about how his story applies to professional services firms. A couple of points worth making beforehand:
Vinnie is both a professional colleague and personal friend. We’ve known each other a long time and I value his help across multiple dimensions. I’d like to think we share the same wonder at bleeding edge technology innovation while remaining sharply critical of incumbents that behave with an entitlement mentality to software maintenance, over selling and under delivering and many other ills that afflict technology buyers. It is perhaps best summed up in this quote from the book: “It is waste that makes the much-maligned $600 military commode look like chump change.” The difference between Vinnie and I is that he tends to be more polite. Having had an opportunity to proof read parts of the book, I can confidently say it is one of those rare business titles that is worth the reading. It’s not quite a thriller but every page is packed with examples and written in an easy yet passionate style. I should disclose that in the book, Vinnie talks about how I do things having buried myself in the wilds of deepest Andalucia. I’m humbled by my inclusion alongside tech giants such as GE, Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff who contributes a generous introduction, Ray Lane who engineered Oracle’s second great phase of growth and now invests in greentech along with hundreds of others. Some will be well known, others less so, others are people I regularly reference here and elsewhere. All provide thought provoking takes on the idea that we now need to be more than masters of one trade and participants in a much broader conversation around innovation.
The best way to think about this is to ask the same question as Vinnie does: if Leonardo da Vinci was to return to the 21st century, what would he make of what he sees in the innovations occurring today? Students of history will know that da Vinci was the quintessential renaissance man – a skilled artist, sculptor, scientist, writer and musician. How many of us who have become skilled specialists today can say the same – or even come close?
Back in the day there were three things I was good at: tax, tech and anything to do with financial management. On occasion I’d put on an M&A hat but I never saw myself as an expert in that field. It’s an odd combination but it worked for my clients who were usually high wealth individuals with business specific problems. They often required a lot of attention. Much of the technical stuff was a given – table stakes to serve their needs. Of far greater importance was the need to develop skills around handling them as both individuals and family members. It’s not something that professionals talk about but that ‘people handling’ thing was really the key to meeting their needs. It laid a great foundation for my later doing a degree in social sciences. Fast forward 20 years.
The same need to understand and ‘read’ people remains, perhaps even more so in the marketing and fashion driven world of technology but I’ve had to acquire and/or hone new skills while dropping some I no longer need. As Vinnie describes it in the book, I’ve become a person able to wrangle a number of different media: writing, podcasts aka radio and video aka TV. I won’t claim greatness in any of those disciplines but I continue to learn. And it is this continuing learning that is vitally important. As Vinnie says in the book, polymaths are people who have learned to adapt, change, morph and network from wherever that may come. It isn’t the skills acquired along the way but the ability to learn and network that form the keys to becoming a polymath who disrupts and prospers.
Here is how I see this factoring into the new professional business. As we move forward, I see more relevance in Tom Foremski’s notion that ‘we’re all media.’ He views the world through the eyes of an ex-FT tech journalist watching a dying print media, a struggling online media and a ballooning cadre of super smart bloggers trying to make sense of the new, socialized media in business. Most professionals I know don’t get it. Some others do. Those that do ‘get it’ see the need to acquire these new communications skills as a core part of what will drive their businesses and relationships forward. Despite my disagreements with Mark Lee on the question of Twitter’s relevance, I am convinced it will become a routine part of professional communication while being the platform through which we collaborate both internally and externally. If not Twitter then something similar. In order to do that successfully, we will need to overcome our reticence to share, express opinion in the public domain and just plain say what we think. In that, it is worth reading lessons from a project undertaken by Océ, the print company as described by Jacob Morgan:
Traditionally, employees were not encouraged to ask questions or be open about personal doubts and ideas. Employees were oftentimes perceived as being weak if they had doubts about something and as a result, they refrained from asking questions or challenging ideas.
Does that sound familiar? If so then you are not alone. As we see more of these adoption case studies, my sense is that professional services people will start to understand that they are not so unique after all but that they can create massive opportunity through acquiring knowledge and skills through the shared experience of others. But it is what you do with those technologies and opportunities that marks out those that achieve breakthrough value.
In closing I’ll leave you with these thoughts from Vinnie’s book which come towards the end:
‘Thomas Jefferson, an architect, horticulturist, mathematician, cryptographer, surveyor, paleontologist, author, lawyer, inventor, violinist, founder of a university, and the third President of the United States explained his philosophy on life: “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
Even as enterprises try to formalize the innovation process, the smart ones try to build a culture where ideas feed off each other, go off in brand new directions, and hit “fortunate accidents.”’
Inspired? I hope so.
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