There’s an unwritten rule in big organizations, and that’s about not growing people that are domain-specific to the C-suite or to General Management. Think of someone that’s only done engineering all throughout their work life. They could be a great addition to General Management, but their thinking will be highly blind-sided.
General Management calls for strategic over-sight, and the people with this kind of skill have hovered across many domains in the work environment. Think of the guy that’s done something in logistics, done something on the shopfloor, moved into Human resources for sometime and even performed something on the legal front. That’s a person with an acquired multi-dimensional thinking.
Ultimately great strategy is about this ability to see things from different planes, different perspectives and then finding the glue that ties all these schools of thoughts together. It’s giving coherence and synergy to these multiple perspectives. Such thinking cannot be taught, it can only be learned, through high agency, through applied range, through exercising of actionable curiosity.