Expertise is obviously an interest of mine – I wrote a dissertation on it so…. there you go. It seems to me that lately expertise has become what ‘leadership’ was for the last decade – everyone wants to be an expert at everything. I choose to hold Al Gore responsible….  is he really an expert on the climate?  I don’t know that he ever claimed to be, but he was one of the first to use new media to ‘talk like an expert’ about something that is a complex topic requiring a certain degree of scientific aptitude to fully appreciate.  And suddenly everyone is an expert!

So what is expertise? How do we get it, how do we maintain it, what do we do with it? What does it accomplish to be an expert in a topic versus just knowing a lot about it, or being interested in it? What does it take?