The Mosaic Principle: The Six Dimensions of a Remarkable Life and Career

by Nick Lovegrove

Overview

Life -- personally and professionally -- is lived to the fullest as a mosaic, encompassing a rich and complex set of diverse experiences that provide purpose, meaning, happiness, and success.

Yet, the pressures of modern society push us toward narrower focus and deeper specialization in our lives and careers. Our pursuit of specific expertise risks us becoming isolated from those different from us; our lack of shared experience fosters suspicion and conflict. Today we have businesspeople and government officials who persistently distrust and demonize each other; a fortunate swath of society with professional and financial security, increasingly isolated from those left behind; and community leaders who struggle to relate to and connect with the communities they serve. In every walk of life we have allowed ourselves to be pushed into self-defining cocoons from which it is difficult to break out.

Nick Lovegrove's compelling vision provides the way out of this contemporary trap. He supplies vivid portraits of those who get it right (such as Paul Farmer, the physician whose broad and imaginative choices bring health and hope to the world's poorest people) and those who get it deeply wrong (such as Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO of Enron) and connects their experiences with a blueprint of six skills -- a moral compass, transferrable skills, contextual intelligence, prepared mind, intellectual thread, and extended network. The Mosaic Principle will help you to succeed in an ever-changing, more complex, and diverse world, and build a more remarkable and fulfilling life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610395571
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	11/01/2016
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Nick Lovegrove is the US Managing Partner of the Brunswick Group, a global corporate advisory firm. He spent more than thirty years at McKinsey & Company, primarily in London and Washington, DC At various times, he led McKinsey's Global Media Practice, its Global Public Sector Practice, and its Washington office. He served as an independent advisor to the British Prime Minister's strategy unit, and as a member of the board of directors for the Royal Shakespeare Company and TeachFirst.

Since leaving McKinsey in 2012, he has been a senior director at the Albright Stonebridge Group; a senior fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government; a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; and a visiting lecturer at the Blavatnik School of Government. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and four children.

Table of Contents

Prologue: What Is the Mosaic Principle? 1

Part 1 Why Build a Broader Life and Career?

1 The Saint and the Sinner: The Six Dimensions of the Mosaic Principle 7

2 The Perils of Depth, the Gifts of Breadth: Doing What the Specialists Can't Do 36

Part 2 The Six Dimensions of the Mosaic Principle

3 Doing What Seems Right: Applying Your Moral Compass 69

4 On Being T-Shaped: Defining an Intellectual Thread 104

5 The Foundation That Is Common to Them All: Developing Transferrable Skills 131

6 Listen, Learn, Adapt: Investing in Contextual Intelligence 170

7 Structured Serendipity: Building an Extended Network 198

8 Carpe Diem: Having a Prepared Mind 227

Part 3 How to Build a Remarkable Life and Career

9 How to Broaden Your Career 263

10 How to Broaden Your Life 272

Epilogue: Seeking Professional Success and Personal Fulfilment 298

Acknowledgments 302

Notes 306

References 316

Index 325

Editorial Reviews

08/01/2016
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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"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." —Publishers Weekly

“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.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2016-09-17
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.

Kirkus Reviews