Think of Leonardo da Vinci and such images as “Mona Lisa” or “The Last Supper” probably come to mind. Labeled by scholars as the original Renaissance Man, Leonardo was known in his day as scientist, inventor, and artist. And while many historians believe that a mind like Leonardo’s comes along every generation, one prominent author argues that today there’s too much information for scientists to wade through to produce anything even close to his discoveries.
Leonardo da Vinci was the ultimate jack of all trades, with expertise across many disciplines in science and art. As painter, he was known for the masterpieces listed above and also for dabbling in sketching, sculpting, writing, music, and mathematics. His contributions in science include discoveries in human anatomy, botany, astronomy, and more.
And of course, Leonardo wasn’t the only genius of the past four hundred years as Galileo, Blaise Pascal, Einstein, and even Bobby Fisher attest. So then, who is today’s great mind—that once in a lifetime cross disciplinary genius able to see the big picture? No one, says author Tim Hartford.
Harford makes the claim in a recent Financial Times article that there will never be another Leonardo da Vinci because today’s thinker is swimming in too much knowledge. The amount of knowledge available today is unparalleled in history. Harford notes that approximately 3,000 scientific articles are published each day, and the rate of scientific papers is quadrupling every 30 years. With all this information, he says, “the percentage of human knowledge that one scientist can absorb is rapidly heading towards zero.”
Leonardo lived during the Renaissance, a period of significant cultural and intellectual achievement. Harford says Leonardo was able to contribute so much because so little was known. It was possible, he says, to make significant leaps in understanding the world around us because there was much to discover, especially for someone like Leonardo who pursued a multidisciplinary approach to knowledge.
Fast forward to today: With so much knowledge available, and more produced every day, Harford questions whether there will ever be another person with the ability to learn, understand, and then forge the necessary connections to produce new insights. In short, he claims there will never be another Leonardo, not because the individuals alive today are sans the requisite brainpower, but instead because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to acquire the knowledge necessary to make significant—i.e. non-incremental—contributions.
With worldwide data volumes growing 59% a year, we definitely live in an information age of plenty. Our hope then seems to lie in the use of technology to help us separate “signal from noise” in analyzing mammoth stockpiles of social, blogs, and other data. Focusing today’s minds on data worth paying attention to is probably one of the few ways we’ll increase our odds of significant scientific advancement.
• Harford says that too much specialization in science and business means it will take us longer to make significant discoveries. Do you agree?
• Do you agree with Harford that indeed there will never be another Leonardo da Vinci?
Tags: analytics, data deluge, discovery, information, knowledge
That is a good point. I think we must still balance specialization with having a bigger picture. Specialization has enabled us to increase expertise and efficiency of each unit of activity. At the same time, progress in specialization has lead to complexity and fragmentation of efforts such that overall effectiveness and efficiency can decline. In business we need ways to integrate specialization around the common goal. The immediate common goal is to serve customers, and that goal aligns the interests of other stakeholders: employees, investors, community, and nature (see Carol Sanford’s new book, The Responsible Business). So while everyone has to specialize to some degree, people also have to be generalists in select ways to understand how their speciality serves customers, and some impacts on other stakeholders. We need to talk a common language for cross functional coordination. Marketing can develop the language of customer needs and help translate the voice of the customer and arrange direct collaboration. Marketing would thus expand its role from the narrow specialty of the four Ps which are means of pushing products, to focus on the ends of customer that can pull sales, marketing, design, and operations. Marketing should be about the 3 Cs of customers, capabilities and competitors to define strategic positioning as the overlap of what customers need, the firm’s capabilities, and what competitors are not doing. Employees can be enagaged in improvement and innovation for customers. Marketing can also be a generalist skill set to help integrate the specialities. Japanese firms have done this, see Nonaka’s book, Relentless. The guru of designing customer centric organizations is Jay Galbraith. The fields of TQM and six sigma provide many processes for doing this, along with the filed of design thinking.
Paul – thanks for contributing to the discussion. I like your approach and definition regarding the role of marketing. Expansive and strategic, much as I have contended it should be. I see from your comments that you would have marketing “integrate the specialities” across a company. First, how might this be accomplished, and second, what is the role of a marketer to become more of a generalist themselves so that they can gain cross disciplinary insights? Or should they?
To answer your question directly: You can become more cross functional by participating in cross functional teams if they exist, or rotating through a variety of jobs in other functions, when that is practical, depending on the job, and if the organization supports that. But the issue is much larger because a systemic change is needed just to get to the point where that makes sense.
I am talking about changing the entire organizational system. I think marketers can start by studying customer focused strategies and organizations and try to influence managers. Change has to come from the top or from middle managers that can influence the C suite. Management needs to take a marketing perspective, and a different one, not just focused on market share, but on customer needs and changing the whole organization to meet those needs a new way. That may take some time, so for now, you can study the emerging strategy and look for opportunities for local improvement. Then maybe you can make proposals to management and expand the scope of your improvements. Here how I see the new strategy:
Marketing speaks for, or with, the customer. Marketing provides new metrics to align all the other functions. The organization is structured horizontally as a chain of customer to supplier relations with cross functional coordination. These ideas are not new but are rarely assembled into a single presentation of how to change a whole system for the benefit of all stakeholders:
Marketing and sales stop pushing products, if that is what they are doing, and are pulled by customer needs–not just what they say they want but a deeper interpretation of solutions that are confirmed by customers in the process of product development.
Product development is done through concurrent engineering: with collaboration between marketing, design, operations, and other functions to translate customer needs into features and process of manufacture or service delivery in ways that prevent problems at the design stage for quality control, speed, and cost reduction.
Operations can produce for immediate customer demand by being flexible rather than make large machine runs (in the case of manufacturing) for economies of scale that accumulate inventory and waste. Flexible machines and people pursue economies of simplicity to improve speed, cost and quality that increases value for the customer and firm. Distribution and operations are tighter.
Human resources shifts to supporting generalists:
People can rotate through different functions on their career path. Japanese firms have done this so that people can better understand each other in cross functional meetings because they have been each other’s shoes.
Job classifications have been made very general so people are not constrained in where they can contribute and can think in terms of innovation.
The role of inspection should be incorporated into all jobs for quality control by everyone as the first step to process improvement.
Rewards need to be balanced more toward the collective to facilitate team cooperation and alignment to the common goal of serving customers to produce revenue for the firm.
The new accounting is lean accounting. Accounting shifts away from being used by management to control unit costs. Most accounting is a wasteful control activity that measures the wrong things and distorts decisions and can be replaced by calculating total costs of the system and trusting people with the details. Lean accounting uses metrics of impact on customers and the causes of impacts in processes like cycle times and defect rates.
Customer focused management facilitates implementation of strategy with collaborative discussion to generate data and ideas, and align efforts. A new principle is “management by facts” about what customers need and process capabilities for meeting needs. Collaboration with customers and within the firm is necessary to get as many facts as possible, and become aware of the tacit and implicit dimensions of well.
Organizational culture is based on an ethic of care for customers and stakeholders. Management shifts from a culture of blame and, instead, takes responsibility for outcomes by realizing that most outcomes result from the system that management designed—this can be proven statistically. Fear is reduced so that people are encouraged to expose problems to be corrected and take risks for innovation. An ethic of contribution encourages recognizing individual achievement toward the common goal of serving customers at a profit.
A customer focused organization responds to customers on main street first, and thus creates better returns for investors on wall street—if it can keep wall street at arms-length to avoid short term cost cutting and manipulation of figures. There is still more work to be done in the area of finance.
This is how marketing can introduce a customer focused strategy to change the whole organization, and change it must to be really customer focused. If management, accounting and HR don’t change, then implementation will be limited. I have written this up more detail in an article based on my dissertation research. There is not much written about systems that is detailed like this, it has taken years to make the presentation clear—I hope—at this level of complexity.
Paul – wow, wow, wow! You really put some thought into this, and the conversation is much richer for it. Let me tackle some of your thoughts and I apologize in advance for not being more thorough.
1) I like your idea of participating in cross functional teams. Good idea and something that every manager should attempt in order to see the bigger picture
2) You said change has to come from the top or from middle managers to influence the C-suite. I’d modify that a bit and say change has to come from executive team. period.
3) “Marketing speak for, or with the customer”. As a marketer for 18 years, I hope this is the case, though I realize it’s certainly not always reality.
4) “People can rotate through different functions on their career path”. Great idea, wondering how practical this is with most people flat out and working multiple jobs within an organization. Do most companies have the patience to see such a strategy through? Can companies – in the short term – afford such strategies?
Thank you for commenting!
B.S. Today, there is much MORE opportunity for cross-disciplinary pollination that there ever was in Leonardo’s day. Back then, he was the exception. Today, it is much easier to become a polymath– the opportunities for self-directed learning are much greater. It is the culture of specialization which makes such a path unlikely… a person is socialized to think they can only be an expert or good in one discipline. To which I say: Nuts to such insular thinking! – geologist, writer, poet, conservationist, caver and industrial machine operator.
Hi Astrelfrog and thanks for commenting! You say it’s much easier to become a polymath these days as there are plenty of opportunities for self directed learning. That may be true, but in my view that requires one to first identify that they want to pursue such a goal, and then the discipline to make it happen. In the “Great Recession” most marketers and managers are doing the job of 2-3 people, and there are so many other things competing for our limited availibility. So then, would you not agree that to truly become “an expert” it requires more than just reading a few books or investing in a course or two? Interested in your thoughts…
It’s not just marketers and managers wearing multiple hats– most positions from janitor to CEO have a plethora of job duties today, as opposed to the “putting wingnuts on Chryslers” industrial model of yesterday. Education, unfortunately, tends to be of two extremes: the generalized, liberal arts based college education of various sorts, and the hands-on vocational-technical track. True genius happens when those two get together, a synthesis which one assumes happens after school but in many cases, does not. Most formal education is still way behind the curve of the world, whether it is due to ivory tower distancing, or simple lack of resources. The truly educated person knows when they can learn by investing time and their wits, and when it may be better to ask for help.
Of course one has to identify that they wish to pursue any goal and that takes choices and discipline, but how is that any different from Da Vinci? One has to give Renaissance people a certain due, and a pass at the same time: they had more gaps in general knowledge to fill than we do, so in that sense they had it easier. Still, they had to eat and have shelter and make a living somehow, in between aha moments. That’s a given in any society.
I’m a bit confused by your last sentence. Self-directed learning is not by definition shallow. The knowledge that an amateur has, gathered over decades, often trumps the 4 year paper degree. The 4 year degree is just a grounding to jump forward from. All learning that sticks is learn by doing: taking the classroom and applying to real world problems, whether in work or play. What you describe is a dilettante, which is different than a dedicated amateur.
As a friend of mine says: “Ya gotta wanna!” Well, if you want mastery of a science, an art, a practical skill and human relations you can have it. You just have to give up a lot of TV or internet fiddling time. I have.
Astrelfrog – you said; “True genius happens when those two get together, a synthesis which one assumes happens after school but in many cases, does not.” I’ll agree – a cross disciplinary approach has much value. Sadly, business schools these days seem to prepare students for a vocation – not a bad thing in this economy- but surely a lost opportunity.
And I’ll also agree that the school of hard knocks often trumps what can be learned in a classroom setting. Experience, life lessons, and capturing of best practices along the way sure helps cut down on wasted efforts, rework and more. And you’re right, self directed learning for most is a life long obsession and vocation.
I appreciate that you’ve added your insights and expertise!
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I think one of the bigger issues is we are so much more jaded now too! We hesitate to call people brilliant because it can be very dividing. Think about those who have changed the face of the last 100 years: Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Bill Gates, JD Rockefeller, etc… ask one person and they’ll say brilliant, another will call the same person a biggot, an idiot, or a thief. Brilliance is personal perspective…but because we have so much more access to the inner workings of these people, we see more than just what they create, we can actually see them as real people (which is not always good).
Kirsten, your comment about Jobs reminded me of a great article I came across recently. It’s an oldie, but with long tail of the internet, the good but old stuff sometimes bubbles to the top:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/sj1.html
So yes, to your point, we see what leaders like Jobs have created in the products they proffer, but we also get a strong impression that talent like his does not suffer fools lightly! Thank you for commenting!
Hey Paul,
As I said on Twitter…great piece, but given some of the work I’m doing, I have another perspective to throw at you. I’ll let you and your readers decide whether or not you think I’m awash in corporate Kool-Aid. One thing in my view that is sorely missing here and in Hartford’s piece is some level of commentary from people in the scientific research community. The data points re: that they have a lot of stuff to sift through and it’s growing are great. I’m just not sure they are the running in fear of the Data Tsunami types, at least not the ones I know.
Like you, I’m a marketer and I read, ask questions of people I think are in the know and share what I learn. That’s hardly empirical when it comes to the impacts of business problems of this magnitude or discerning whether or not we’ve taxed ourselves to the point of no return.
I do take issue with this, however:
“With all this information, he says, “the percentage of human knowledge that one scientist can absorb is rapidly heading towards zero.”
And This:
“With so much knowledge available, and more produced every day, Harford questions whether there will ever be another person with the ability to learn, understand, and then forge the necessary connections to produce new insights. In short, he claims there will never be another Leonardo, not because the individuals alive today are sans the requisite brainpower, but instead because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to acquire the knowledge necessary to make significant—i.e. non-incremental—contributions.”
Based on what I’ve learned from people I work with and with whom we are working within the pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors, the future predicted by Harford and others is not a foregone conclusion.
In fact, the true problem problem we are all facing isn’t the sheer volume of the information available. It is a lack of intelligent filtering based on the needs of the individual to do their jobs. And, conversely, the filtering out of the irrelevant.
People in fields of scientific, legal and competitive intelligence research now have the ability to comb the the web and internal business system, bring that together on a single server and get the most relevant information delivered to them, instead of having to go out and look for it. Then the system recommends content based on the content attention profile for each of its users.
As a result their time-to-intelligence is drastically reduced in their quest to get the latest information that hopefully leads to breakthroughs.
I contend that breakthroughs are more possible than ever before, provided you can automate the processes for gathering all available information on a topic that lives inside a company and on the web, filter it based on who needs to know and deliver it to them where ever they need it.
If you want to talk more or see what I’m talking about, shoot me a note on Twitter at @MarkAEvertz I’ll withhold the company name to avoid being a total hack, but I will share a link to a recent white paper that dives a little deeper on this: Reducing Information Overload in the Enterprise: http://bit.ly/jlyPIQ Send me a note if you don’t want to offer up your email address and I’ll provide a direct link.
Thanks for weighing in on this topic and keep writing.
Best,
Mark Evertz
Mark, you share thinking similar to what I’ve offered as a solution to the data deluge. To your point, it’s not so much the data deluge that will inhibit breakthrough discoveries, it’s the ability to identify, gather, curate, analyze and then put into action those learnings. Intelligent and advanced algorithms, much like Google’s MapReduce, or other recommendation algorithms are helping assist with information overload. So then, as you mentioned, there may be even more opportunity for discovery! I’ll send you a private note regarding the whitepaper once I read it.
Thank you for adding to the discussion!
Throw into consideration the contention that professional expertise takes about 10 000 hours of focussed study and practice. (e.g. per “Bounce” & several referenced studies). Now try doing this for multiple fields of expertise in widely diverse fields, particularly with expert tuition. Probably it didn’t take 10 000 hrs continuous development to be an expert back then, just as in the normal amount of schooling has markedly increased from my grandparents day (less than high school) to now (undergrad uni, probably PhD is base level education for the next Leonardo).
Many people do multiple undergrad degrees (e.g Arts/Law) – but not diverse technical research programs. We use research teams instead, e.g. for developing artificial organs (medicine, materials science, electronics, manufacturing processes, marketing, intellectual property). Our equivalents to Leonardo now are probably technical business people, e.g. Ford, Nobel, Edison, Dyson, the NASA organisation & Google business as communities. We discourage individuals from knowing multiple fields to expert level – we pay for people to form communities of experts and know enough to communicate with each other.
He could achieve expertise in multiple fields at a younger age, but conversely didn’t live as long.
Experts then had patrons of the arts. We have employers looking for saleable outcomes (even universities as equivalents to patrons expect results).
Leonardo had diverse ideas and starved.
Ideas aren’t enough now, there are trillions of them – they need to be further developed now to be noticed (e.g. through publication that is read & noticed, thru patents, through commercial products). That takes time and immediate relevance (value) to others, not just a sketch in a notepad, e.g. of a helicopter that can’t be built. If a new Leonardo came along and compiled lots of ideas, with as little development, no one would notice even after they were dead.
Sais – thank you for commenting. You had some real gems. I loved that you had knowledge of the ten year rule for expertise and also some knowledge of how Leonardo was funded. I also particularly enjoyed your comments about how ideas aren’t enough for today’s professionals – the trick is developing and promoting these ideas to gain traction in a world of plenty. Makes me not envy the job of VCs!
Good stuff – thanks!
Adding to the discussion, here’s a related thought stream on use of “personalized filters” to deal with oceans of information coming at us:
http://rick.bookstaber.com/2011/07/condemned-to-be-free.html
[...] is according to a post by Paul Barsch on MarketingProfs titled “Data Deluge Means No More Leonardo Da Vinci Types“. I have to admit, this one really made me think, and ask the question: is there such a [...]
From what I have read I see a lot of ideas I could agree with and many I could easily doubt.
I think the one area which has not been discussed is the role of teams in future renaissance. Sure we may not have another Leonardo or Einstein but what about a Facebook team. Who has mastered communication, technology, information, and entertainment. What about the Google team, who has created countless innovations.
I think the reason we will never see the Pascals and Newtons of the world is because they are working in teams at companies where they can adapt, create, and innovate quicker together than alone.
Simply put, I think if we had the ideal case of Renaissance genius it would be a team composed of Archimedes, Leonardo, and Einstein. If that team existed today they would undoubtedly choose to work at one of the companies listed above.
Genus is not a function of individuals efforts any more but the exponential leverage gained from utilizing teams to solve the problems of the world.
The biggest question is if we have to wait for a new Genius Team each generation or if we can get more Genius teams by making more friends on Facebook or Google+.
Thoughts?
Brian, I like your thinking on the role of teams. Taking a look at Leonardo Da Vinci’s wikipedia profile, it appeared he apprenticed at a workshop that produced other great Renaissance painters. This was also an interesting nugget; “Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus’ robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master’s that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again.” Long way of saying that while Masters may not have necessarily worked in teams, they often bounced ideas off each other and collaborated sans technology tools.
You make a great point -however – in that today’s technologies (from Social Media to Sharepoint) provide platforms for collaboration and sharing across the globe. Teamwork, comprised of multiple geniuses (I’m thinking Manhattan Project for example), may yet produce even greater contributions. Good stuff and thanks for adding to the discussion!