Management
The Return of the Generalist Manager
A decade of functional specialisation produced organisations that struggle to make decisions across their own boundaries.
Eleanor Whitcombe19 May 20267 min read
Specialisation delivered real gains: deeper expertise, cleaner accountability, better tooling within each function. It also produced firms in which no one below the executive committee can reason across finance, operations and product simultaneously.
The scarce capability is now integration. Organisations are rediscovering the value of people who can hold several functional models in mind at once and adjudicate between them without needing a committee.
That capability is teachable, but only by a curriculum that deliberately refuses to specialise, which is precisely the design brief of a general-management degree.