I am constantly amazed and bewildered by what spreads on the web and what doesn’t. And now I am bewildered by when ideas spread. Consider a post that I put up here in February (which is a thousand years ago in blog time, from what I can tell) called Why Specialists are Grumpy and Generalists are Happy. This post describes one of my favorite paragraphs ever written in an academic journal, by the University of Michigan’s Karl Weick. It got picked here somehow, and over 1200 people have stopped by to see it today. I actually don’t even know what this site is — hacker news or something. But I love this quote so much that I am glad to see it getting recycled and seen by new people.
You can read more about it in the original post, but here is Weick’s inspired paragraph if you just want to see that:
Generalists, people with
moderately strong attachments to many ideas, should be hard to
interrupt, and once interrupted, should have weaker, shorter negative
negative reactions since they have alternative paths to realize their
plans. Specialists, people with stronger attachments to fewer ideas,
should be easier to interrupt, and once interrupted, should have
stronger, more sustained negative reactions because they have fewer
alternative pathways to realize their plans. Generalists should be the
the upbeat, positive people in the profession while specialists should
be their grouchy, negative counterparts (page 526).
P.S. This is from Weick’s article in the October 1989 Academy of Management Review article called "Theory Building as Disciplined Imagination." Here is the abstract and a place to buy it, if you are really curious.
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