The Mosaic Principle

August 1, 2016
Lovegrove, U.S. managing partner for the corporate consulting firm Brunswick Group, delivers a thoughtful plea for breadth of experience and learning over intense specialization. Lovegrove uses the titular mosaic as a metaphor for both society and individuals, explaining that a focus on highly specialized knowledge is damaging to both people’s inner selves and their careers. He believes that, as a society, the U.S. needs to refocus on diversifying professional development and training—the approach of a liberal arts education, rather than of a trade school. He argues that specialists can get hamstrung by a lack of broad information and experience, and provides positive stories of those who’ve succeeded at achieving breadth, including Paul Farmer, U.N. special envoy to Haiti, and David Hayes, U.S. deputy secretary of the interior. Addressing readers at every stage of their careers, Lovegrove explains that having diverse knowledge and interests can help to “overcome your external constraints and internal doubts.” All readers looking to break out of an intellectual box of their own making will find a refreshing new viewpoint on their personal and professional lives in this convincing manifesto. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell Management.

October 1, 2016
Making the case for a mindful approach to career and life development.Any guide to a successful life or career must take liberties in how success is defined. In this book on finding your own way forward, Lovegrove, the U.S. managing partner at the Brunswick Group, takes a more philosophical approach. This isn't to say that the author doesnt consider the how, when, and where, but he makes the case that the reasons why will go a lot further toward building a satisfying career and life. Lovegrove's thinking with his mosaic principle is that the idea of a jack of all trades, master of none" is unnecessarily constricting, that creating a wide-ranging, diverse life is not only healthier in the present, but will also open up more choices as time goes on. The author addresses the trend of specialization in many of its forms, from high school students being steered away from a liberal arts education to the medical profession, in which its commonplace to require different surgeons for nearly every individual part of the body. Lovegrove argues that taking a T-shaped approachhaving an area of deep knowledge that serves as a base, of sorts, from which you expand outward into different subjectsprepares you for a broader range of challenges while avoiding the master-of-none scenario. The author lays out six skill areas he feels are crucial: a developed moral compass, a prepared mind, an intellectual thread, an integrated network, contextual intelligence, and transferable skill sets. Lovegrove compellingly draws on examples from his own careers to illustrate the benefits and pitfalls of each skill area, and he bolsters his narrative with anecdotes about other successful people in a variety of disciplines. Lovegrove balances his book neatly between the nuts-and-bolts approach to being successful and the more philosophical sense of understanding yourself first before seeking to change the world for others.

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