More on Principles & Dangers

• Look for a specialist niche that suits your talents and temperament, and fits with your personality and interests.
• You must firmly believe that it is right for you to dedicate and commit yourself to a particular area.
• The area of work must be genuinely meaningful: pragmatic grounds, like salary levels, may not be enough.
  

• Complement work-based specialisation with out-of-hours extra reading, studies, or conference attendance.
• Put in personal effort, seek training and obtain qualifications (even if it is at your own expense).
• Be properly equipped intellectually to hold your own within the company, possibly supervising or leading in your speciality.
  

• Selectively choose or volunteer for challenges that help you get more experience in your preferred niche.
• Become comfortable dealing with other experts in your chosen niche.
• When changing jobs, go for the post that enables maximum exercise of your specialist knowledge.
  

• Challenges are commonly avoided or postponed in the workplace, so this provides an opportunity for you.
• Your specialist expertise provides a degree of social acceptance. Together with relevant ideals and knowledge, these should make it possible to get involved in setting goals and persuading colleagues to cooperate.

• You may well emerge as a leader, but even if you are simply one of the group you should be strongly supportive, in the work-group and outside it.
• Look for others who share your convictions and perception of what is needed and what can be done, and create a small team.
• With passion and purpose powering your contributions, you can tolerate frustrations and overcome set-backs.

• In everything you do in your specialty, you should demonstrate a desire for high quality, bordering on perfectionism.
• Take the opportunity to extend applications of your expertise.
• Develop a particular niche within your specialty where you can really shine.

• Expect that your more challenging tasks may fail—but a well-run organization should be able to tolerate such failures.
• If you are involved, it should be possible for you to identify the causes of the failure relevant to your special knowledge.
• Recognize that many failure factors will often be outside your control (e.g. due to resource shortfalls, lack of cooperation, or an unfavourable turn of events).
• Whatever the reason, if the project fails, you must take responsibility.
  

Convictions, unfortunately, are inherently inflexible, and even text-book authority and orthodox techniques may be inappropriate or plain wrong in a particular situation.

Fulfilment at work can produce a narcissistic self-centredness that could disconnect you from others, or from the organization’s main goals, or perhaps from mundane and unappealing but essential duties.

Specialized expertise and knowledge generate the danger of a narrow-mindedness that fails to appreciate viewpoints of experts in nearby different fields. Other functions or disciplines will not take kindly to being looked down upon.

Championing change in your specialist area could lead to blind spots, and your commitment could land you in a «sacrifice trap» in which you waste precious personal resources within a worsening situation.

Exhortations combined with obedience verge on brain-washing that may lead you and your group to avoid communicating to your superiors about a deteriorating situation.

High standards are welcome but they can lead to excessive costs, and may foster intolerance and contempt for satisfactory, pragmatic solutions.

Taking responsibility for failure can expose you to scapegoating.