A cake is for eating

The engineer with business acumen.

The baseball slugger with blinding speed.

The agile giant.

The ‘triple-threat’ entertainer.

All of these people reached the top of their game (okay maybe not the last guy) because of their ability to combine what are normally mutually exclusive skill sets. They have their cake, and yes, they eat it too. These people have the luxury to be flexible – they can take on multiple roles, and excel at them.

Both Tim Brown of IDEO and David Armano refer to these people as “T-shaped People”. People who “have a core competency, but can easily branch out”. And I gotta agree with them 100% on this one (check out David’s article for some better insight)

So if there’s a premium being placed on flexible individuals from sports to marketing to business, what does this say about competitive advantage? Is America ready to embrace this as a competitive advantage and encourage our young to be flexible and to build multiple skillsets? Or will we continue to churn out one-dimensional assembly line workers?

In the meantime, I’m going to go look for a cake.

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