In his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, based upon an ancient Greek parable: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
What does all this talk about hedgehogs and foxes have to do with good to great? Everything.
Those who built the "Good-to-Great" companies identified by Jim Collins 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.
We at XKNS think of ourselves as Hedgehogs, doing the same sequence of routines years after years, carefully crafting our skills into perfections and eliminating errors along the way. Improvements are the key to success and we hope to share with all who believes in them.
