• by Joe Parrish , Columnist, June 4, 2025

I’m a nerd.

My dad took me to see “Star Wars” seven times in the theater.

I had a website before most people knew what the internet was.

And when I’m concerned about humanity, I rewatch footage of Steve Jobs unveiling the first iPhone to feel better.

So it makes sense that I spend most of my days flying to companies, trying to get leaders to embrace their AI futures before they’re forced to play catch-up.

There used to be this concept of the I-shaped employee. This “company man” had deep vertical expertise in one skill. And he would ride that skill for an entire career, until being given a Rolex and a timeshare.

But the internet changed that convenient paradigm. The “company man” died because the internet made knowledge more broadly available.

Enter the T-shaped employee. T-shaped employees had a spike of vertical expertise and leveraged the internet to expand horizontally into tangential skill sets. These employees pushed the boundaries of job titles and were the hot commodity of the post-dotcom world.

But here’s the problem: Skills now depreciate faster than a crypto meme. Claude writes code. Midjourney designs moodboards. Cursor just passed the engineering interview you’re cramming for. If your resume lists a single “core competency,” it’s only as impressive as the fax machine you probably used to deliver it.

I see a new form of worker becoming successful in the current landscape: the O-shape. A ring of constant curiosity, dangerous in 360 degrees. They don’t expand into tangential areas. They ricochet from skill to skill, never anchoring themselves to one expertise. Their super skill is curiosity: front-end code today, supply-chain analytics tomorrow, photoreal 3-D mock-ups by Friday.

c O-shaped employees understand that an LLM means they can improve at the speed of their curiosity. And in an AI-flattened world, commitment to a single specialty is a sunk-cost fallacy.

Yes, they break rules. They blur org charts. They scare managers whose power rests on hoarding knowledge. Because O-shaped employees don't identify with a job title. They identify with problems worth solving. And in an AI economy, they might be the only people who can keep your company alive.

An O-shaped person doesn’t say, “That’s not my field.” They say, “I’ll figure it out.” They use AI to flatten learning curves. And they make a habit of gaining serial depth.

It’s the same ping-ponging of skills that could imagine The Millennium Falconin “Star Wars,” the first browser, or even the iPhone reveal that still gives me chills. The future won’t reward stockpiled skills; it will reward constantly reinvented ones.

Don’t dig in. Because if you do, O-shaped employees will be writing the code that automates your job, designing the workflows that make your processes irrelevant, and solving the problems you didn't even know existed.

Keep the circle spinning.