Do you know that in 1795, French despot Napoleon Bonaparte offered 12,000 francs as a reward for a grand challenge to preserve food?
Or that Nike’s gamified platform Nike+ helped it to capture nearly 50% of the running shoe market?
Should you hire a General (like Cao Cao) or a highly specialised Sniper? (courtesy of Rongwen’s blog)
In the Human Resource function of any organisation, an age-old dilemma commonly exists.
Should a company hire somebody with years of vertical expertise with deep and specialised knowledge in a niche area? Should it instead recruit somebody with horizontal expertise (ie a generalist) who may even hail from an entirely different profession or industry altogether? How about a candidate with a mixture of both horizontal and vertical areas of specialisation?