John M. Bernard

Chairman & Founder

Mass Ingenuity

www.massingenuity.com

John is the author of BUSINESS AT THE SPEED OF NOW, being published by Wiley in December of 2011.  He’s a top-rated speaker for the Conference Board, discussion leader on the Harvard Business Review blog, and his monthly newspaper column is syndicated to 41 Business Journals across the U.S.

For 30 years John has been building and reengineering organizations to enable them to aggressively grow the top and bottom line.

As the principal architect of the NOW Management System, his passion focuses on leveraging best-practice management with social media INSIDE the organization to engage employees, sharpen focus and accelerate execution.

John’s deep and varied career ranges from serving as an executive team member at multi-billion dollar StanCorp Financial Group to being the founding CEO of a technology start-up, which he led through its sale.

In the highly competitive state of today’s economy, efficiency and budget optimization are key factors for success. Following the 2011 trend toward product and service customization, businesses are moving toward hyper-specialization, a process that involves dividing up larger projects into bite-sized chunks. Specialists may be found in-house or contracted in from elsewhere and competitions are staged by hirers to attract the best person for each job. Division of labor is not a new concept but advances in technology have made it more viable in today’s market. There has always been a need for specialists to complement the generalists, but the process has morphed in and out of fashion through the ages depending on demand and economic stability. For industrial inventors like Ford, knowledge became a hyper-specialist foundation of the business. Meanwhile, generalist businesses sought out specialists to provide expertise because this would lead to improvement in quality, speed and cost. Hyper-specialization is described on timolsen.com as, “The vertical disintegration of the knowledge worker.” Specialists are easily accessible via the internet; for instance, Topcoder is a well-known resource for IT projects. According to Mark Emmer on blog.vistage.com, “Sites such as Guru or Elance have propelled specialization to a new art form, where one can access dozens of specialists from around the world in any conceivable competency in a matter of minutes.” And the bonus is the hirer doesn’t have to be concerned about worker benefits or other overheads. But, the antagonists claim hyper-specialization may promote the effect of assembly line micro-processes that will pigeon-hole providers’ skills and create issues when putting together the big picture. The result may be low morale “sweatshops” and loss of traditional jobs. The roles of project managers may be recalibrated with hyper-specialization and many other brainworker and knowledge-worker jobs may be streamlined so long as the members of the project team collaborate. As Anthony noted on sntjohnny.com, “A person trained to think in an integrated fashion will be able to do just about any job that’s out there, given good mentoring.  A person trained in only the affairs of their little box will be useful only inside that box.” To turn this trend in to a competitive advantage for your organization, consider the following. Hyper-specialization can speed up your processes. Hyper-specialization can lead to higher quality results. Hyper-specialization, however, is not for everyone or everything. Hyper-specialization does not excuse absent management. Lastly, as in everything, Hyper-specialization is a human endeavor. The right people will make all the difference.