Last week, I was talking with a retired hospitality executive at the gym about moving between industries.
He spent decades leading resorts and private clubs before moving into real estate. His point was simple: business skills transfer. Sometimes someone coming from a different background can see an option that people inside an industry have stopped considering.
That conversation made me think about my degree.
I earned a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies from Arizona State University. I used to explain it as something like two minors combined into one major. That is close, but it misses the point. The program brought together two concentration areas and taught students to integrate them, examine problems from multiple perspectives, and apply that thinking in the real world.
I did not realize when I graduated how much that approach would shape my operating career.
Every industry has its own language, regulations, economics, and hard-earned expertise. Those things matter. A fresh perspective is not a substitute for subject-matter expertise.
But expertise can develop a blind spot.
When a process has been repeated for years, it starts to feel inevitable. People improve individual steps without questioning why the work moves that way or whether the handoff between those steps still makes sense.
That is where a new set of eyes can be useful.
Research comparing problem solvers from inside an industry with those from analogous markets found that the outsiders produced substantially more novel ideas, but those ideas had less potential for immediate use.
That is the argument in one sentence. Fresh eyes can find more options. They still need people who understand the work to separate the useful from the unusable.
The strongest team is not made entirely of outsiders or entirely of industry veterans. It puts both perspectives in the same room.
If your organization needs an operations leader who can bring an outside perspective, learn from the frontline, and carry change through implementation, I would welcome the conversation.
A construction example
I saw this while reviewing one preconstruction bidding workflow. One company, one process. I am not claiming every general contractor works this way.
The general contractor sent plans and specifications to electrical, plumbing, and other trade partners. Each subcontractor reviewed the documents, completed its own takeoff, built a price, and returned the bid. There is a legitimate reason for that: the subcontractor needs to understand and stand behind the scope it is pricing.
But the general contractor had already completed much of the quantity work for its internal estimate. The same plans were being analyzed again by every bidder, even though only one would ultimately win each package.
So I asked a different question:
Why not give each bidder a structured, preliminary takeoff as a starting point?
The subcontractor would still review the plans and specifications, verify quantities, identify anything missing, state its exclusions, and stand behind the bid it submitted. But it would no longer start with a blank page. Even an 80-percent starting point could help trade partners respond faster and organize their proposals with more detail.
That matters because the duplicated work creates a ripple effect. Preparing bids costs subcontractors time, and they will not win every package. Under pressure, some understandably return a lump-sum proposal such as “Electrical: $20,000 based on the drawings,” with little detail behind it.
Now the general contractor has to reverse-engineer what each number includes, chase clarifications, identify scope gaps, and normalize the proposals before making an apples-to-apples comparison. What looked like one redundant task at the beginning becomes hours of bid-leveling work at the end.
Sharing quantities is not a new idea. On some projects, owners or engineers provide a bill of quantities to establish a common bidding baseline, while contractors remain responsible for verifying the quantities against the plans and specifications.
There are legitimate arguments against sharing an internal takeoff. Information provided by a general contractor can create reliance and exposure. Independent takeoffs also provide multiple readings of the drawings and may reveal an ambiguity or missing information.
Those considerations do not kill the idea. They define where it may fit. A structured preliminary takeoff makes more sense when the scope is well defined, the drawings are reasonably complete, and the bid instructions are deliberate. On a chaotic hard bid with incomplete plans, independent takeoffs may be providing an important control.
A broad disclaimer is not a magic shield, either. Quantities and verification responsibilities would need to be clearly defined in the bid and contract documents, and any company implementing the practice should have its approach reviewed by qualified construction counsel.
This is a workflow option, not a prescription. The operating idea is to preserve accountability without forcing every party to repeat work that has already been done.
The larger question is:
Where has the work already been done, and why is that work not flowing forward to the next person?
“But AI can already do the takeoff”
That may be true. AI-powered construction platforms can now automate portions of quantity takeoff, symbol detection, and plan analysis.
But if five subcontractors each use AI to recreate the same takeoff independently, the technology may make each task faster while leaving the duplicated workflow, inconsistent bid structures, and broken handoff untouched.
AI can accelerate a task. It does not automatically decide who should perform it, how the information should move, what must be independently verified, or how outputs should be structured so they can be compared.
That is why the process comes first. Fix the handoff, define the accountability, and then decide where AI or automation earns its place.
The questions an outsider may ask
Cross-industry thinking often surfaces questions like these:
What work is being duplicated because information does not travel with the process?
Which controls exist because of a real risk, and which survive mostly because of habit?
Can we preserve accountability while reducing unnecessary effort?
Are we giving the next person what they need to perform, or simply handing them source material?
Where are unstructured inputs creating inconsistent outputs and extra clarification?
Those are not construction, logistics, hospitality, or technology questions. They are operating questions.
My background in logistics makes me pay attention to handoffs, bottlenecks, cycle time, and information flow. Someone from hospitality may notice the customer or frontline experience. Someone from finance may spot uncontrolled risk. Someone from technology may see where structured data could replace manual interpretation.
Each discipline provides another lens.
Fresh eyes still require humility
Coming from outside an industry does not give someone permission to ignore the people who understand it.
There is an equal and opposite failure mode. Put a room full of brilliant outsiders around an industry problem, but remove too much domain expertise, and they can build an elegant answer to a version of the problem that does not exist.
The model may make perfect sense on a whiteboard and still fail when it reaches the frontline because the underlying assumptions were wrong.
Intelligence without ground truth is not innovation.
The right approach is to learn the language, listen to the subject-matter experts, go to the frontline, and understand why the current process developed. Some constraints are real. Some practices exist because someone already learned an expensive lesson.
But respect for expertise should not require accepting every inherited process as permanent.
The best operational improvements combine both sides: the depth to understand what cannot be ignored and the distance to see what no longer needs to be accepted.
That is what interdisciplinary thinking has come to mean in my career. It is not disruption for the sake of disruption. It is the ability to bring patterns from one environment into another, test them against reality, and ask whether there is a better way for the work to move.
A challenge to hiring leaders
I see the same pattern in job postings.
Companies often look for an operations leader with a long history in the same industry. That can make sense. Some roles require licenses, regulatory knowledge, technical depth, or relationships that cannot be learned overnight.
But industry experience is sometimes used as a shortcut for lower perceived hiring risk, even when the real need is operational leadership.
If you are hiring a vice president or director of operations and find someone who has led complex operations, built accountable teams, managed a P&L, improved margins, fixed broken workflows, implemented systems, and led change, do not automatically dismiss that person because those results came from another industry.
Interview them.
Ask how they enter an unfamiliar operation. Ask how they investigate a problem, learn from the frontline, test assumptions, lead subject-matter experts, transfer useful patterns from elsewhere, and turn a diagnosis into execution.
Those answers may tell you more about their ability to improve your business than a matching industry keyword.
The right cross-industry operator is not coming in to pretend to know more than your experts. They know how to surround themselves with strong people, ask better questions, create accountability, lead change, and ultimately get things done.
A company can differentiate itself through marketing, but it can also differentiate itself through the way the work actually gets done.
Marketing communicates the promise. Operations determines whether people experience it.
Sometimes the breakthrough is not knowing more about an industry. It is being willing to ask the question the industry stopped asking.
If your organization needs an operations leader who can bring an outside perspective, learn from the frontline, and carry change through implementation, I would welcome the conversation.
Depending on the business need and mutual fit, that could take the form of a focused Operations Diagnostic, a bounded Fix Sprint, or fractional operations leadership through Berlin Management Group.