In a newsletter, Christopher C Penn (link to his blog Awaken your Superhero) writes about the ‘demise of the T-shaped marketer’ with the argument that AI is eating the concept rapidly – producing quickly mediocre content but thus replacing the generalist aspect.
The ‘T Marketer’ is someone with a vast array of generalist skills and a particularly deep area of specialization. It is widely recognized to be a rare beast – and that such people have a very high value on the market. It is quite rare because it is difficult to be both a strong generalist and a strong specialist as this requires quite different intellectual approaches.
Any way, Christopher C Penn’s point here is that as AI develops (and while it is still producing quite mediocre output), it is much better at bringing together all sorts of information and it thus in competition with the generalist aspect.
“Why does this myth of the T-shaped person endure in marketing and business? The reality is that most of the time, mediocrity is sufficient to get the job done.” “As the line of mediocre output from AI advances, it will do more and more of the mediocre work, the stuff that everyone can do to some degree. That line advances a little more each year; three years ago, natural language generation was in a sorry state of affairs. You wouldn’t even consider using machine outputs for final product. Today, machines can write the same bland press releases humans can, with the same average level of quality. Three years from now? Those machines will probably crank out better blog posts than the average person.” The conclusion would thus be rather to focus on being really good at something special. “Good enough isn’t good enough any more.”
It is quite a good question before I personally strive to achieve something like a T-shaped competency, because I believe complementing deep expertise with the breadth of generalist approach is quite beneficial. The question is really how much generalist thinking can inform and make even better the specialization area. I am convinced that while one must definitely be very good at a narrow domain, keeping a broad overview is still quite essential.
