Your post was primarily from a project-specific perspective, which is good and it makes sense. From a higher-level, corporate perspective, it boils down to the type of talent a firms wants to bring into the fold. Here are two scenarios:

1) Firm A: This firm loves ex-consultants and focuses it’s hiring on people who have strategy consulting or generalist consulting in their pedigree. The outcome of this firm is typically one where you have people who know a lot about a lot, but are quite shallow on most things.

But, the positive side of this hiring approach is that people are scalable and are teachable. That is, they can then focus on a specialization, if they wish.

2) Firm B: This firm prides itself on being very specialized and hires experts in their respective fields. The outcome of this hiring strategy is that the firm has a lot of highly-specialized people, perhaps requiring more hand-off’s because specialists are not easily scalable — that is, the move from specialists to generalist might be harder than the other way around.

3) Firm T: This firm prides itself on hiring T-shaped people — that is, they hire people that are decent generalist, but also very, very good in one aspect of their field. These people are called T-shaped, to describe the generalist and broad perspective and experience, but also the narrow and deep specialization.

I’m stating the obvious: T-shaped people are the ones to find, hire, and keep. These people can be moved all over the company and can add value to most firms. Generalist alone are like watered-milk; Specialists alone might be too much. T-shaped folks fit in almost any organization.

Again, I’m stating the obvious. This was a good post; thanks for letting me rant.