Author: Steve Shu

"Don’t Become An 80s Rock Drummer" … These were the words of hall of fame drummer Dave Weckl (one of my favorite drummers) at his drum clinic in Texas last night.

There’s a lot of talk about specialization these days. Pick a niche and master it. Become the best in the world. There’s a lot of truth in this because people can’t master everything. Plus the professional market is very competitive these days. If you are not a master of something, there is increased risk of someone always beating you out.

Now for those who don’t know, Dave Weckl is one of the world-renowned fusion drummers. He plays jazz, rock, funk, latin, world music, etc. His comment about not becoming an 80s rock drummer was not at all a downplay on rock music. It was actually professional advice. There are many 80s rock drummers today that are unemployed. In essence when the rock music trend died, those who only played rock drumming got specialized out of existence. If you want to stay employed, Dave’s recommendation was that you need to be able to play all types of drumming styles.

In other areas, consider tennis. The old days used to consist of specialist players like John McEnroe that could serve and volley or Bjorn Borg that could play the baseline. Today, specialist players are nearly extinct, and all the pros are all-court players (i.e., can play serve and volley or the baseline). Or consider golf. Tiger Woods used to be just a long game player. He’s improved his short game tremendously. Guys like Phil Mickelson can play both the long game and a phenomenal short game.

So it seems that a case can be made for not specializing and becoming more of a generalist. Having diversity can be a strength too.

But before I go down that path too much, if one investigates Dave Weckl’s music in depth, he has a very signature style to his play, and his drum setup has a crafted sound. If one thinks about other commodity markets (such as haircut places), there can be some differentiation achieved by having different ambiance, etc. Supercuts differs from a high-end salon, say like Mario Tricosi’s. The essence of the difference is a difference in style.

Changing gears a bit, another noteworthy case to mention is crossover innovation and success. People like Tom Parks in the signal processing area took and over-an-under ladder theorem in mathematics and applied it to create equiripple digital filters used worldwide. People like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton became recognized for their communication abilities, one or both of them leveraging from the acting sector (depending on how you count things). People like the founders of Skype came from the P2P world and have changed how people look at the telcom space and the internet.

Now I’ve cut a few corners here on market structure and when specialist versus generalist strategies may be more effective in some markets versus others (sometimes it also comes down to how one defines a "market"), but I think there’s also a duality of truths. People both are and are not a bunch of pluggable parts in an organization.

Update: Dave Weckl also had another good saying. "How do you define young versus old? When does one become old? The answer: When one has to start paying bills. That’s when you become old. Experiment (in drumming) as a youth and when you don’t have to pay for things.