EclecticLip

We recently covered Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, in our business book club.

The tome is responsible for popularizing the hedgehog metaphor, namely that a company should stick to what it’s best at, and not diversify into other sectors where it has no competitive advantage.  (I’ve heard of this kind of diversification being jeered as “deworsification” by irritated investors.    )

I’d heard that the fox / hedgehog contrast originated from Aesop’s fables…  but when I double-checked, it turns out that Aesop’s fox/hedgehog story was a parable about how when the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie, it just leaves a power vacuum for a new and even-more-rapacious aristocracy to move in.  Or at least, that’s how Marxists would put it. 

Turns out the fox-and-hedgehog comparison comes from an even more obscure Greek guy, Archilochus, who said: “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”.  That’s about the only thing of his that’s survived.  Who knows — but for selective scribes, equally pithy aphorisms about, say, the hippo and the oxpecker, or the cat and the giraffe, might have inspired future business books!  (Hippos and oxpeckers are symbiotic species, while I chose cats and giraffes arbitrarily.)

Now, the real test as to whether the fox-and-hedgehog parable holds true, is whether there are more foxes in the world, or hedgehogs.  Sadly, I couldn’t find any population numbers in a quick online scan.  Though given how dumb hedgehogs are reputed to be, I’d sort of imagine foxes would be more genetically successful… which would contradict the saying. 

(Mind you, foxes are near-top-of-food-pyramid predators, and there are generally far fewer such predators than any prey species.)