Are you a hedgehog or a fox?
There’s this wonderful essay called “The Hedgehog and the Fox” that was written by Isaiah Berlin, a philosopher-thinker; and he basically said there are two types of thinkers. There are hedgehogs and there are foxes. Now, the hedgehog and the fox are different in the following way. The foxes, they love complexity. They love all the moving parts. They love basically showing how smart they are by making things so complex that other people can’t understand them. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, are a different breed. Hedgehogs tend to take the approach of saying, “You know, I know the world is complex, but we can’t function if we don’t simplify it.” What hedgehogs tend to do is get one big idea and focus on that, simplifying a complex world down to a fundamental, simple idea that is essentially right. Now, it turns out that in different walks of life, some walks of life Favor foxes; some walks of life Favor hedgehogs. So, I don’t want to say that hedgehog is always better than fox. In the world of leadership, the hedgehogs win.
Those who built the good-to-great companies were, to one degree or another, hedgehogs. They used their hedgehog nature to drive toward what we came to call a Hedgehog Concept for their companies. Those who led the comparison companies tended to be foxes, never gaining the clarifying advantage of a Hedgehog Concept, being instead scattered, diffused, and inconsistent.
