Skills that don't normally appear in a single person are likely to be rare. Unfortunately, they might also be impossible to acquire.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/a-fourth-career-moat-pattern/
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/a-fourth-career-moat-pattern/
Isnāt this similar (but not analogous) to Scott Adams career suggestion (in his book How to fail at almost everything and still win big) of becoming very good (1st quartile) at 2 or more abilities?
This is what he considers himself to be, not a great cartoonist, not a great humorist, a decent āmanagerā (office dweller?). But combining all of them was of course larger than the sum of its parts, because it becomes unique.
Adams doesnāt consider it a moat per se, but the similarity of the approach seems to be there.
Edit: correction to book title
Iām familiar with Scott Adamās idea! 
This is indeed similar to that, though with two differences:
- Adams gives his prescription, IIRC, with little discussion about the market. Job markets are two sided; the point of a moat is to be unique, and uniqueness is relative to the job seekers (the ālabour supplyā) you are competing with. This isnāt a knock on his conception of competitive advantage, but ā¦
- The focus of this piece is on the barrier. Some combinations of skills are far more common than others, depending on industry. But as with economic moats, a career moat is only a sustainable advantage if you have a reason for why it is hard to acquire.
I find ācombination of skillsā to be less useful. In practice it is possible to face competition for your combination of skills. A more precise idea is āyour combination of skills is rare because it doesnāt usually co-occur in the same personā.
I agree combination of skills is less useful, but co-ocurrence is not enough either. They need to work well together, to be of any worth as a moat or as a competitive advantage. For instance, I can make bespoke shoes (worked at that for a while a long ago) and I have a PhD in Mathematics. These two are very ātop 25%ā qualities, and Iām probably one of a very small amount of people with exactly these two āpropertiesā. But the competitive advantage of having them is close to nil: there is no market for mathematically inspired shoes or theorems to be had related to shoes (if there was any money in Math research, of course).
There is another case where good top skills appear though. Some countries require that companies hiring a person from abroad place a job offer for the position at home before. In many cases, the job offer is tweaked so it only fits the foreign candidate, this is another case where having first quartile skills can appear: how unique is your top skill combination?
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I agree! But do remember the context of my argument: Iām arguing from within the context of ārare and valuable skillā. I didnāt explicitly mention it, but the point of this post is to explore a fourth pattern, apart from the other three Iāve already explicated elsewhere.
tl;dr: you get a moat through rare and valuable skills; this breaks down to roughly two paths: you can get a moat by being the best in one skill, or you can get a moat by being the best at a rare and valuable combination of skills. The second bucket breaks down to three categories (and now possibly four): a) itās a rare and valuable combination because the path to acquire it is opaque, or b) because itās distasteful, or c) because youāre early or d) because the combination is rare in a single person.
In the interest of full disclosure ā while this is the best Iāve got, Iām still not perfectly happy with it. For instance, I know people who derive power from their network, and I think there might be something there. Iāve also noticed that reputation counts for something. And Iām sure we all know one or two people whose entire career strategy is ābecome unfireable to some company, but be stuck in that company foreverā. Thatās a moat, though whether itās an attractive one is hard to say.
Iām still actively investigating all of these forms.
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I know this is a very late bump, but this conversation really interested me. In particular, the point that some rare & valuable skills, when combined together, do not complement each other at all (as shown in the shoe making + math PhD example). So I think this raises a very interesting point - how can we think about which skills are valuable to combine together? In my mind there are two paths:
- Combining the Obvious Skills - combine skills that are clearly necessary within your organization but are not frequently present in the same individual, such as the example of systems thinking and people skills for effective manager or performance and brand-based marketing for CMOs. These skills very clearly both contribute to the success of the organization on their own but are rare to find in a single individual. Why is combining them so valuable? My theory is that, by being one of the few people who can understand this combination of skills, you can sit on top of departments that are typically separate and reason through how to direct their efforts in unison. This makes you incredibly effective as a manager when compared to other potential hires, as youāll be able to maneuveur the company (or a large subset of it) as a single, cohesive unit.
- The Oddball Mix - this is more akin to Scott Adamās example. Put together a bunch of skills that are extremely non-obvious to combine, and then leverage these skills to produce something highly valuable. This path is much more opaque to me, as I see no good way to determine which non-obvious skills might complement each other. It seems things like writing or coding are easy examples that can probably pair favorably with just about any other skill, but I really have no principled reason for asserting why this is the case. Perhaps itās because you can use another skill while you write (eg. I can write about math for a general audience), whereas in some of the previous skill combo examples, I canāt effectively use both skills simultaneously (eg. I canāt do math and make shoes at the same time).
I think the first path I mentioned offers a fairly straightforward roadmap to becoming rare and valuable:
- Look at the top companies in your industry
- Identify their core competencies
- Identify which of the core competencies tend to sit within different departments/groups
- Learn these orthogonal competencies + management skills
This seems like a fairly fast track to the executive level to me. But, as I mentioned above, Iām not totally sure how to construct a reasonable path for the second approach. Iād love to hear your guysā thoughts.
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Writing and public speaking tend to show up in the āskills stackā because they are how you persuade others to do what you want them to do. Coding is the same idea, just applied to computers instead of people. If you combine any of these skills with the ability to actually get something done that other people want done, that is rare and valuable.
For the executive fast track, the requisite combination is having enough of an understanding of the areas that contribute to business success, and effective people management skills. This enables you to achieve business goals while minimizing risks from second and third order effects. This is why high potential programs tend to focus on job rotations to develop executive-level capabilities.
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I donāt think The Oddball Mix is as strange. It is probably a explore-exploit situation. For example:
You work at a company, have very good business skills and happen to have a quirky sense of humour. On your free time you are exploring some hobbies (or exploring subjects of interest). You start drawing, happen to doodle a comic at work and a coworker laughs out loud. You go into exploit.
As a pretty broad learner myself (hey, look, a squirrel!) I can see this happening relatively easily.
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As somebody who inadvertently followed the Oddball Mix path myself, I didnāt purposefully plan out my career, and instead just pursued whatever jobs looked interesting and gave me a chance to learn new things (physics, software, biotech, product management, revenue forecasting, business strategy, etc.).This looked like a poor choice for the first fifteen years of my career, as my college friends who specialized in one area advanced much quicker. But it meant that when I created jobs for myself that matched my skill set (first Chief of Staff, now executive coach), I have a combination that others canāt match because it took me twenty years to build.
I think the missing piece is the alignment between the skills you build and what brings you energy. No matter how logical a combination of skills looks on paper, you have to actually spend the time to practice those skills to get competent. And along the way, I tried to develop several skills that made logical sense, and just were not a fit for me; no matter how many hours I put in, I didnāt get into flow and never developed even average competence. The skills that fit me pulled me in, and my path to competence was much faster. And then I just had to find business problems where those skills were a competitive advantage.
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