Revisiting The New Polymath

Six books and six years ago, I wrote a tome that I feel honored people still quote and debate like Jon Reed just did at Diginomica and on Twitter. The New Polymath came about because I was seeing so many STEM disciplines –in infotech, cleantech, biotech, nanotech – become available to us to create a new generation of blended products and services to solve some of the world’s grand challenges.

Even though I had sections on many Renaissance people of old – Da Vinci, Plato, Thomas Jefferson and others and of today – Bill Joy, Nathan Myhrvold and others, the book was more about organizations like the GE Global Research Center and products like the iPhone which blend many sciences. The debates I hear around the book are usually personal – should I stay a specialist, or should I diversify? Can one ever expect to become a Polymath in today’s specialized world?

I think the questioning is even more necessary these days. As I research my next book about automation, it is striking how the definition of “work” in changing in so many industries, occupations and countries. While most people worry about machines replacing jobs, even bigger changes are happening as a result of industry redefinition (the emergence of so many micro-verticals), globalization, crowdsourcing, customer self-service and other trends.

It’s a “recombinant” labor economy. New occupations are emerging with technology and societal changes. Many jobs now are inter-disciplinary and have “computational” in their titles – chemists, linguists, statisticians. Also, did you know there is now an association of wedding planners, a profession which has largely emerged in the last decade? More mature occupations are being decomposed into newer job blocks, the jobs are being broken into tasks, the tasks are being spread around the world.

More and more people are working for multiple “employers”. It’s not just taxi drivers who work for Uber AND Lyft AND also do something else. Doctors have their own practices and visit with hospitals. Farmers work through cooperatives.   Amazon has ecosystems of authors (through Kindle Direct Publishing), eCommerce retailers (its Associates), couriers (its Flex), temps (its Mechanical Turk).  As a blogger, consultant, speaker and author, my corporation’s revenue sources change every quarter. Many of my blog readers  consult with multiple clients in a given year.

I spent some time with my kids over the holidays discussing my latest book research. They don’t seem as worried as my older peers appear to be about automation and the changing definitions of work. To them it is the “new normal” to be surrounded by technology and accents – they were born digital, born global. Now, they are early in their careers and their views on careers and specialists and generalists are still immature. I look forward to their debates about The New Polymath over the next few years.