Meal Ticket April 24, 2007
Posted by admin in : Uncategorized , add a commentWe have always had to ‘pay’ for our lives; in the earliest days much time was spent in pulling together the resources to stay alive: food, drink, safe place to rest, clothing etc. Lots of skills were learnt to peak in the self subsistence farmer and long may we have stayed at that point if it were not for the fact that we noticed some chap next door that we could offer a few of our speciality carrots to for one of his nice turnips. So trade was born and we began the division of labour crawl to what we call civilisation today.
Adam Smith’s division of labour has always fascinated me as its always appeared counter-intuitive. Why should I buy skills from outside; surely as risk mitigation I should equip myself with all the skills I need to be self-sufficient without having to rely on others who might fail me.
Consideration tells us that the specialist can use resources more efficiently and we simply do not have the capacity to become the specialist in all things.
What is the flip-side from the self sufficient subsistence farmer? Extrapolating from Smith is our best logical course of action to specialise as deeply as possible?
It quickly becomes clear that there is more than specialisation required; steering our investment of time to harvest skills is vital e.g. without this we could be the world’s best beta-max specialist and despite the qualification we may be struggling economically.
Steering or leadership needs to avoid specialism to be effective; here to be successful we need to get out of the specialist rut and aggregate information across specialisms to select the appropriate course of action.
What we need to assure that our investment of resources is appropriate is synthesis – the skill of gathering diverse information and resolving the best course of action. It’s also a skill that has a high learning curve in terms of the amount of information we are now provided.
Check out Howard Gardner’s book – Five Minds for the Future where he states a compelling case for the synthesising mind. There is more to your meal ticket than being the best pin maker in the world.