Smaller Companies: The Polymath and The Innovator
By Dr. Brett Trusko, Skytop Contributor / February 6th, 2023
Brett Trusko is a speaker, writer, consultant and educator. He has appeared at hundreds of conferences, radio and TV as well as written extensively and helped fortune 500 companies as well as local and national governments prepare for an innovation-oriented future.
The Polymath
Most of us are familiar with the term “renaissance man (or woman)”, but did you know the synonym for those terms is polymath. The former term(s) are defined by Webster as “a person who has wide interests and is expert in several areas.” Perhaps the most famous is Leonardo Di Vinci. We all know that Leonardo was a musician, artist, engineer and likely many more things that have been lost to history.
Hyper-Specialization
Today, polymaths are a little more difficult to find than during the renaissance. This can be attributed to a modern world of hyper-specialization. There are many reasons for this including that there is so much more to learn about specific topics today than 600 years ago. One can see this hyper-specialization in medicine, engineering, math, and chemistry, with less emphasis on humanities and how to lead. In short, the world is a much more complicated place today than it was 600 years ago. Compounding this trend towards increased knowledge is a relatively recent trend away from classic liberal arts education and demands by employers to train graduates more intensely in the student’s chosen field. Therefore, we find fewer and fewer polymaths than even 50 years ago.
Silos
One might ask why, in this modern world, do polymaths even matter any longer? I would argue that polymaths are more important today than ever before due to the simple fact that silos of engineers, chemists, computer scientists, etc. are failing to see the world of opportunities outside their specialties.
Better Innovators
As an innovation professional, I have met hundreds of innovation professionals, some successful and some not. I have worked with industries from office cleaning to the most well known tech companies and healthcare providers.From this experience I have developed a hypothesis that we will work with for the rest of this article:
Polymaths make better innovators.
As with anything in the world, we don’t want to deal in absolutes. Everything in this discussion will have notable exceptions, but in general here are a few observations.
The Simpler an Organization, the More Innovation Potential
When one needs to understand a problem, the simpler the problem, the easier it is to understand. As a landscaper, I might need a better way to move large decorative rocks, and may invent a machine to pick up and move those rocks or not. With this simple example, consider what the inventor may need to know. Do I need to know hydraulics, basic engineering, welding, tension requirements, and the dynamics of truck size to weight ratio so that the truck will not topple?
Now consider a new way to do micro surgery. I might need to know optical engineering to see tiny things, robotics to manipulate the arms of the machine, computer science to operate the joy stick, FDA requirements so I can get it approved and billing procedures to be sure I can make more money than the machine costs.
Obviously in a place like the Mayo Clinic, a physician could go to the engineering department
to marshal the needed resources and pull the project together. But the rub is that the average physician may not know everything that would be involved in developing the new surgical procedure. In fact, finding anyone who is at least functionally familiar with all the aspects of an invention such as that described are rare, and becoming rarer.
A smart person I know has a favorite saying. The engineer takes an idea for the best computer in the world to the business person who tells them that they can never sell one because people would not pay what it would cost. The engineer thinks the business person is stupid. The business person thinks the engineer is stupid. Because the engineer knows nothing about business, he may not understand material costs, supply chains, etc. On the flip side, a business person tells the head of engineering that we could get rich if we just built a toll bridge to Europe, and of course the engineer says it’s impossible, or at least impractical given the depth, width and currents. Once again, this leads the business person to think the engineer is stupid, and vice versa. The fact is that neither has enough background in the other’s discipline to understand the bigger picture, and so we continue to talk in circles.
Smaller, Simpler Organizations
The real world is much more complicated. As a result, smaller, simpler organizations are better positioned to innovate than larger, more complicated organizations where almost no one knows how a product is made. It is likely that eventually Apple would have come up with the iPhone through R&D, but it took a polymath (do I need to say Steve Jobs?) to see the bigger picture. Just by virtue of its size, this means that true innovation in government is much less likely than a dozen startup founders in Silicon Valley, where most startup companies are really very simple.
Narrowed Curriculum Versus Innovative Applications
Getting back to a problem we introduced earlier in this article, consider how many universities have narrowed their curriculum to offer more major specific classes at the expense of philosophy, ethics and other so-called “soft skill” courses. Employers want technicians, not philosophers. This leads to people who are great doctors, lawyers, engineers and nurses with little interest outside of their specialization. In fact, as most readers will relate to, most medical specialists can do a single thing (brain surgery, endocrinology, ophthalmology) really well, but may not be able to pull a splinter from someone’s hand. Of course, that is an exaggeration. But it is not too far from the truth, as many of us can relate. Contrast this to a mechanic. Imagine one telling you that they only do oil changes, transmissions or tires, but not an entire car. Well, if anyone has been to a custom car show, you know that some pretty innovative things for cars originate in a car enthusiast’s garage.
Innovations in the large Silicon Valley firms are just as likely purchased as developed internally. Single use, innovative applications are more likely to be developed by a small startup than a larger company.
Polymaths and Start-Ups
There are polymaths everywhere. It is likely you know at least one, if you are not already one yourself. They tend not to be the best employees because they may only be marginally proficient at their specialty. They do not spend all their free time learning more about their discipline, but instead play in a band, build airplanes in their garage, learn languages, write books, pursue art, or grow the biggest tomatoes in the state fair. The polymaths master a “thing”, then move to another “thing”, never feeling like they have a complete understanding of the world, the universe or whatever, but with a strong desire to do so. They seek self enlightenment, and many times frustrate their employers because they are interested in too many things. To most executives, these are employees that can’t focus and they are fired or not promoted. This is why some polymaths end up in start-ups, where they can pursue their passions until they are acquired and thrown back into an organizational life that doesn’t appreciate what they did to create a company they just had to pay a billion dollars for.
Chief Innovation Officer Track
In the not so distant past, companies identified high performing individuals and placed them in a
executive track position. For example, my cousin was an executive at IBM. Over the course of his career, he moved half a dozen times, doing completely different jobs so that he could understand the company better. He finally made it to Vice President after 25 years of moving around.
Could your company also create a Chief Innovation Officer track? Identify polymaths early, and using the “discipline” from their college education, help them move about the organization with the expectation that they will likely be a misfit in most of what they do, but it will lead somewhere. This approach serves several purposes, including development of a network of specialists, development of patience with people who may not be as intelligent as them, and seeing the organization at a deeper level than an executive track employee by being “thrown into” the most critical functions of the organization (and possible in partner organizations). Keep them interested and excited. Allow them to be entrepreneurs, with the tools to experiment across the organization instead of having a single worldview in an innovation department that is looking for a broad perspective. There was a famous commercial that Apple ran that celebrated the misfits.
In conclusion, build a program to find the polymaths, the misfits, and the crazies. Make sure the program has a way to keep them interested and engaged in the company before they leave and build the business that puts you out of business.