"There is no organizational structure keeping you from being in close proximity to the people who you’d help or be helped by most."

"Since Valve is flat, people don’t join projects because they’re told to. Instead, you’ll decide what to work on after asking yourself the right questions."

"What’s interesting? What’s rewarding? What leverages my individual strengths the most?"

"…our lack of a traditional structure comes with an important responsibility. It’s up to all of us to spend effort focusing on what we think the long-term goals of the company should be."

"Nobody expects you to devote time to every opportunity that comes your way. Instead, we want you to learn how to choose the most important work to do."

"We should hire people more capable than ourselves, not less."

"We value “T-shaped” people…who are both generalists (…the top of the T) and also experts (…the vertical leg of the T). This recipe is important for success at Valve."

"When it comes to profit and satisfaction, craft business is showing how American manufacturing can compete in the global economy. Many of the manufacturers who are thriving in the United States (they exist, I swear!) have done so by avoiding direct competition with low-cost commodity producers in low-wage nations. Instead, they have scrutinized the market and created customized products for less price-sensitive customers. Facebook and Apple, Starbucks and the Boston Beer Company (which makes Sam Adams lager) show that people who identify and meet untapped needs can create thousands of jobs and billions in wealth. As our economy recovers, there will be nearly infinite ways to meet custom needs at premium prices."

[See also in Japan: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204542404577157290201608630.html?mod=WSJ_Magazine_LEFTSecondStories ]

"A master is often considered a specialist, not a generalist — but I disagree. They are defined by a specific perspective, which they have hone through weaving together many threads of experience and craft.

The richer their experiences, the richer their perspective.

"Japanese chefs are now cooking almost every cuisine imaginable, combining fidelity to the original with locally sourced products that complement or replace imports. When they prepare foreign foods, they’re no longer asking themselves how they can make a dish more Japanese—or even more Italian, French or American. Instead they’ve moved on to a more profound and difficult challenge: how to make the whole dining experience better."

(via this WSJ story on Japanese cuisine)

To know what’s better is to choose where you stand."

"Hasler has several of these skills in spades…interests are transdisciplinary…a "T-shaped person," w/ both depth in 1 subject & breadth in others…demonstrates cross-cultural competency (fluent Spanish, living abroad) & computational thinking (learning programming & applying data to real-world problems)…intellectual voracity that drove him to write 50k words on Western cultural history while running coffee shop is a sign of sense making (drawing deeper meaning from facts) & excellent cognitive load management (continuous learning & managing attention challenges)…desire to synthesize his knowledge & apply it to helping people & his ability to collaborate w/ those who have different skills, shows high degree of social intelligence."

"…not every older worker is frightened by the 4-year career. Some…have been living this way for decades, letting their curiosity—or their faster metabolism—guide them. What stands out is their sense of confidence that things can (and will) turn out okay."

"…professor coming here to our office to talk about philosophy & the cosmos. We also edit an architectural periodical…architecture is just the pretext…magazine's real purpose is to provide young people with the information they need. In all disciplines, from medicine to engineering, when young people finish their studies, as specialists they can only talk about their idea of architecture, or more in general their job…haven't yet thought about or taken much notice of all the rest, of life itself, which is more important than architecture."

"…phrase I once used as motto…"Life is more important than architecture. The fight goes on. In defence of Latin America and the progress of the world.""

[Interviewer] "Looking from above, on the other hand, I was surprised at how the favelas seem more integrated with the environment and that, extensive as they are, they're paradoxically more respectful of it."

"Brasilia is nothing anymore. It is not an example, simply a provincial capital."

"Bit Depth, by Neven Mrgan: At my dayjob, I design Mac software UI/UX, websites, T-shirts, and office signage. In my spare time, I’ve designed 8-bit games. I think every creative professional would benefit from fully executing projects of different complexity, history, and purpose."

[All great stuff. Totally agree with him about the gamification bit.]

[See also: http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/14868098046/focused-dabbling ]

"1. You are creative.
2. Creative thinking is work.
3. You must go through the motions of being creative.
4. Your brain is not a computer.
5. There is no one right answer.
6. Never stop with your first good idea.
7. Expect the experts to be negative.
8. Trust your instincts.
9. There is no such thing as failure.
10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are.
11. Always approach a problem on its own terms.
12. Learn to think unconventionally."

"Some of the most talented and prolific people I know have dozens of interests and hobbies. When I ask them about this, the response is usually something like “I love to learn.” I think the new discoveries and joys of learning are the crux of this beginner thing I’ve been thinking about. Sure, when you’ve mastered something it’s valuable, but then part of your journey is over — you’ve arrived, and the trick is to find something you’ll always have a sense of wonder about. I think this is why scientists and artists, who are usually experts, love what they do: there is always something new ahead. It’s possible to be an expert but still retain the mind of a beginner. It’s hard, but the best experts can do it. In making things, in art, in science, in engineering, you can always be a beginner about something you’re doing — the fields are too vast to know it all."

"However, in the information age I can in many cases write a program to repeatedly perform each of these tasks and record every single step that it makes for later review by me. The individualized skill and knowledge is not so important because it can all be dumped into a database."

"We must train generalists. We must train specialists…<br />
Skills of craft, building, and beauty are more important than theory or systems thinking. Theory and systems thinking are more important than craft, building, and beauty…<br />
<br />
We must focus more on ethnography, anthropology, and the social sciences. We must focus more on science, cognitive psychology, math, and engineering…<br />
<br />
It's clear that a change is needed in design education, and it's equally clear that the discourse of this change must advance beyond simply calling well-intentioned designers to action…"

"We make important decisions every day -- and we often rely on experts to help us decide. But, says economist Noreena Hertz, relying too much on experts can be limiting and even dangerous. She calls for us to start democratizing expertise -- to listen not only to "surgeons and CEOs, but also to shop staff.""

"By abandoning the assumption that gold-plated credentials equal expertise, the press might even change history. Could journalists have helped to take down, say, Bernie Madoff, before the feds did if they had questioned the sec’s experts more? Shirky wonders.<br />
<br />
And then there’s the chance that authentic experts (not necessarily credentialed experts) could become journalists of some kind. It’s happening already. Take the flock of professor-bloggers masticating the news on the Foreign Policy Web site or economist bloggers like Tyler Cowen. There are journalists who have become experts via either peer or crowd review…To cheaply paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, journalists can’t all be clever hedgehogs, but perhaps some generalist foxes can start growing some quills."

"Paul Slazinger…non-fiction…The Only Way to Have a Successful Revolution in Any Field of Human Activity.<br />
…most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team w/ peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb…<br />
…team must consist of three sorts of specialists…Otherwise, the revolution, whether in politics or the arts of the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.<br />
…rarest…authentic genius — person capable of having seeminly good ideas not in general circulation. 'A genius working alone is invariably ignored as a lunatic.'<br />
…second…highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands & admires the fresh ideas of the genius, & testifies that the genius is far from mad…<br />
…third…person who can explain anything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be…"

"The global skill gap arises because neither the high-level specialist within a discipline nor the policy-school graduate is likely to be equipped with the skills needed to solve global problems of a cross-disciplinary nature. The experts provide crucial insights, but their skills are typically focused on generating research, debating ideas, and addressing narrow issues rather than large-scale professional problem solving and management. Meanwhile, the policy graduate typically lacks the grounding in core scientific principles across the appropriate range of topics. The solution lies in training sophisticated science-educated generalists who can coordinate insights across disciplines while managing complex agendas for results."

"We need some faculty who are irresponsible to their disciplines & responsible first to integrating & connecting knowledge. This is a precise & concise summation of what I’ve tried to do for many years now. There’s a price to be paid for this kind of thing, of course: expanded interests do not yield expanded time. The day’s number of hours remain constant…So the more I explore topics, themes, books, films — whatever — outside the usual boundaries of my official specialization, the less likely it is that I will read every new article, or even every new book, in “my field."…Is the unswerving focus on a specifically bounded area of specialization the sine qua non of scholarship? Is it even intrinsic to scholarship? Is there not another model of scholarship whose primary activity is “integrating and connecting knowledge”?

I think there is such a model…I’ll be looking for new and interesting connections for the rest of my life. That’s how my mind works…"

"It's easy, the way the system works, to simply go w/ flow. I don't mean the work is easy, but the choices are. Or rather, the choices sort of make themselves…

Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life. It means not just going w/ flow. It means not just "getting into" whatever school or program comes next. It means figuring out what you want for yourself, not what your parents want, or your peers want, or your school wants, or your society wants. Originating your own values. Thinking your way toward your own definition of success…

Morally courageous individuals tend to make the people around them very uncomfortable. They don't fit in w/ everybody else's ideas about the way the world is supposed to work, & still worse, they make them feel insecure about the choices that they themselves have made—or failed to make. People don't mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out."

"Some of the best bits about working at BERG are how everyone, despite having particular specialist skills, gleefully ignores boundaries, disciplines, labels and predefined processes, and allows themselves space to just run with things when they get excited. Deciding to do the music for the first Making Future Magic film ourselves was one of those moments."

"I just wrapped up a final project for an aesthetics course this semester, the assignment being to create a “Database of the Self.” I chose to make the database as a representation of the roles we play in terms of how we interact with information online. The roles are overlaid on a panarchy, which shows a visualization of adaptive lifecycles. Though the evolution of every idea or meme won’t necessarily follow this specific path, (it may in fact be rhizomatic, with multiple feedback loops), this begins to flesh out what we become as nodes within an enmeshed series of networks." [via: http://bettyann.tumblr.com/post/905732940]

"10 things that were constantly reinforced during my 12 years of public school in America that had to be unlearned as an adult desiring to be an entrepreneur.

1. Fit in instead of be original

2. Follow the rules instead of questioning why they exist

3. Helping others is cheating despite the fact that everything you do as a successful adult is a team effort

4. Have good handwriting instead of teaching me to type

5. Do it because the teacher said so, instead of teaching me to understand why doing it is important

6. Don’t challenge authority instead of teaching me that I deserve respect too

7. Get good grades in all my classes, even though I will never do trigonometry ever in life. (Sine these nuts. lol)

8. Don’t fail instead of teaching me to value trial and error

9. Debating and arguing with friends is a bad thing, instead of encouraging independent thought and self confidence

10. Be a generalist and learn things I hate, instead of developing my genius at things that i like.

More Dumbshit that I still dont understand.

*Getting to school late will be punished by making you stay home for 3 days…WTF

*Memorize stuff that now can be looked up on Google.

*Learn to do calculus by hand, despite being required to purchase a $200 calculator.

*Appearing smart is more important than being effective…. REALLY?

These are all that I can think of now. Feel free to add dumbshit you learned in the comments section.:

"Generalists...produce content that covers range of topics...necessarily scattershot, & people will dip in & out when content matches their own interests. But if you find a generalist whose interests match your own, it’s all gold. That’s rare.

"In case you're new to this subject, Scanners are people who are interested in so many things they can’t bear to limit themselves to just one. The rest of the world seems united in their opinion of this problem: it must be changed. Everyone knows that if you don’t focus on one thing you’ll never get anywhere. And most people seem pretty sure that if you’re interested in everything and lose interest in most things before you’ve completed them, that you are almost certainly lazy, shallow (ever been called a ‘dilettante?), self-indulgent and afraid of hard work. As a result you are un-deserving of respect unless you change your ways."

"The most pressing problems in science and technology, and more broadly in business and the economy, don't lend themselves readily to specialists' solutions. They require not just inter-discipinary teamwork to make progress, but transdisciplinary thinking - literally, we need people that can have converstaions between disciplinary appraoches to problems inside their own head. In fact, you could argue that most of the gridlock around big problems like global warming, health care, and so on, stem from the inability of narrow specialist and interest groups to speak each others' language, translate heuristics and integrate complex concepts and data. They're too specialized, having become more and more isolated in focused communities, thanks to the web."

"The arts offer both a key educational component & the unique experience of handling each stage of a project – coordinating hand, eye & mind – from inspiration to finishing touches. In contrast, business realities necessitate specialization. Schools also practice specialization, both in the estrangement of various studies & by progressively narrowing the focus. Perhaps because expertise pays, it is not generally the case that the "higher" people go in education, the broader, more interconnected, integrated & holistic becomes their vision. If the arts provide an alternative metaphor applicable to education, it is that elements must balance & synergize. The attractive color, "catchy" musical passage, or favorite rhyme that doesn't fit only weakens the work."

"When we’ve got hard problems, we turn them over to experts. That might be the wrong thing to do, Lehrer suggests."

"Polymaths possess something that monomaths do not. Time and again, innovations come from a fresh eye or from another discipline. Most scientists devote their careers to solving the everyday problems in their specialism. Everyone knows what they are and it takes ingenuity and perseverance to crack them. But breakthroughs—the sort of idea that opens up whole sets of new problems—often come from other fields. The work in the early 20th century that showed how nerves work and, later, how DNA is structured originally came from a marriage of physics and biology. Today, Einstein’s old employer, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, is laid out especially so that different disciplines rub shoulders. I suspect that it is a poor substitute.

"illusion of neat set of bins into which you can place all knowledge & experience is reinforced & rehashed in school, where the entirety of your school experience is defined in terms of concrete units of time given names like “Math” & “English.” As the underlying structure behind the defining, dominant activity for most youth (i.e., school), this classification exacerbates the confusion between activity (what you do) & identity (who you are)...The end goal [should be] to empower a person to approach an activity w/out comparing themselves against some sort of stifling, mental standard, requiring the activity to be common or otherwise unmysterious, diversely peopled, & open to engagement at many levels...Just because Tradition has already homesteaded words like “scientist” & “artist” & “philosopher” doesn’t mean that needs to matter. You can either attack that problem directly — makers & hackers have been calling themselves engineers for years — or you can make the question irrelevant."

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

"Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education -- one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day."

"How do you follow your curiosity?...A template? Maybe something like this: Spend a year listening, reading, learning about a new practice. Find out who the thought leaders are and why. Ask everyone who is in the particular practice community three questions: what’s your story? ... who’s your hero in your field? who else should I meet? Go to the trade conferences & dive deep. Listen to everything. Read everything. Filter by simple keywords...Spend the next year helping out & apprenticing. Be a humble servant, asking questions but also getting hands dirty and trousers scuffed. Be active, modest & become a learner. Move about, but focus on the nuances of the craft aspects of the practice community. Another year making/creating/building on your own, whatever the field might be. Prepare to be a contributor in a more active way. Find a voice of your own. You would’ve created a network that knits you into the community by this time. And subsequent years, refining and polishing that “voice.”"

"I've often quoted this, from Robert Heinlein: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." ...quoted most recently in 2003, in another blog post about obsessions, and whether or not it is possible to know a lot about one thing without knowing less of another"

"Adam Smith, in his famous pin factory description, wrote that labor specialization improves productivity. He should have specified which species he was referring to.

“there are conditions under which it helps to have generalists, especially for fairly small groups...might have to pay them more, they might often do the wrong task, but if you don’t have them, whole notion of specialization leading to greater economi

"In what way am I delayed by paying attention to more, different, inarguably interesting stuff? Gratifying stuff?"..."Called a flighty dreamer all too often, I think increasingly that I stand on the side of realism. I will be finished when I’m dead."

"...an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations...Specialization is for insects."

"Generalists...hard to interrupt, once interrupted...weaker, shorter negative reactions...have alternative paths to realize their plans. Specialists...easier to interrupt...stronger, more sustained negative reactions...fewer alternative pathways to realiz