I'd say that the biggest thing that stood out to me was what people call communities of practice. Each professional community has their own knowledge and best practices, but these don't generalize well to other professions. So you have boundary spanners who can bridge two professional communities by being good at both, but those types of experts are rare. Also, the amount of experience and learning required to become an expert in two professional communities, rather than just one, requires such a large amount of time that most people can't be bothered to put in the effort.
It's enough work to do one's own job well already. The go getters can of course do it as a natural course of action, but they are outliers. There are a limited number of job opportunities that require developing this experience on the job, so there are limited opportunities to become a good boundary spanner in the first place. Furthermore, people aren't naturally interested in multiple disparate subjects. True renaissance folks like Leonardo da Vinci who are interested in becoming experts in both art and engineering are rare. Elon Musk types that will try to dive deep into multiple unrelated areas are rare. All of this adds up to boundary spanners being rare. As such, leaders who can develop cultures that handle multiple areas simultaneously (see the founders of Flexport who understand both tech and shipping logistics) are rare.
In short, expertise is hard to develop, expertise in multiple areas is rare, and coordination between two areas that understand different worlds is difficult without boundary spanners. As a result, you get failures. See any software engineer who creates a startup to try to revolutionize some old-school industry and then fails dramatically because they don't understand the problems that actually need to be solved. The outliers will figure it out, but not everyone can become an outlier due to reasons discussed, among other reasons.
It's enough work to do one's own job well already. The go getters can of course do it as a natural course of action, but they are outliers. There are a limited number of job opportunities that require developing this experience on the job, so there are limited opportunities to become a good boundary spanner in the first place. Furthermore, people aren't naturally interested in multiple disparate subjects. True renaissance folks like Leonardo da Vinci who are interested in becoming experts in both art and engineering are rare. Elon Musk types that will try to dive deep into multiple unrelated areas are rare. All of this adds up to boundary spanners being rare. As such, leaders who can develop cultures that handle multiple areas simultaneously (see the founders of Flexport who understand both tech and shipping logistics) are rare.
In short, expertise is hard to develop, expertise in multiple areas is rare, and coordination between two areas that understand different worlds is difficult without boundary spanners. As a result, you get failures. See any software engineer who creates a startup to try to revolutionize some old-school industry and then fails dramatically because they don't understand the problems that actually need to be solved. The outliers will figure it out, but not everyone can become an outlier due to reasons discussed, among other reasons.