WHY THE HEDGEHOG?

Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous essay titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” where he divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, like an ancient Greek fable.

The story goes…

A hedgehog wakes up in its burrow every day with the sole purpose of walking to the stream, drinking water and walking back to safety. A fox lives nearby and wants to eat the hedgehog, so it plans a new attack every day, trying new ways to ambush and pounce on the hedgehog. The fox does this every day, and every day the hedgehog curls up into a prickly ball and waits for the fox to give up, eventually succeeding in its singular goal of getting water and getting back to safety. The fox, despite its cunning is unable to break through the hedgehogs defense no matter what it tries.

In essence, if you’re great at one thing and focus your energy where it counts, it doesn’t matter how cunning you are, because putting a bit of effort into lots of different things is unlikely to result in success.

In Jim Collins’ “Good to Great”, he identified that in strategy you can either be a hedgehog or a fox. At MSH we believe everyone should be a hedgehog, and pride ourselves on embedding this idea into all of our work.

Read more about the ‘Hedgehog Concept’ here