ScaleUp Yourself: Are you a FOX or a HEDGEHOG?

The Intersection of Entrepreneurial & Managerial mindsets in the Knowledge Economy

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus wrote: “the fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one important thing.” Using this simple typology, the British thinker Isaiah Berlin argued it stood for a fundamental intellectual divide: the fox refers to those who are drawn to the intangible, centrifugal and intuitive, while the hedgehog represents those who are quantitative, centripetal and scientific.

Berlin’s arguments can be usefully applied to practical contemporary problems of management. Corporations, by virtue of their size and authority-making structure, tend to encourage their managers to think like hedgehogs. This works well for many aspects of the firm, which needs to have a clear, unifying strategic vision and to think in terms of quantitative results. But firms that strive to meet the challenges of the knowledge economy are learning they also need to make greater investment in managing intangible firm assets, such human capital, innovation, information-sharing and knowledge-flow. In order to succeed in these areas, firms need to encourage managers to think more like foxes.

The fox-hedgehog duality can help to highlight some of the fundamental tensions in the day-to-day exercise of management functions, since it impinges upon a host of structural elements embedded within the firm, including incentive, team-building, hierarchy, reporting, and goal-setting. 

Speaker:

Rolf Strøm-Olsen earned his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, his MA from McGill University and his PhD from Northwestern University, all in History. A former Fulbright scholar and Social Science Research Council Fellow, Rolf has been Professor of Humanities at IE Business School since 2010. His online class “Critical Perspectives on Management,” available on the popular Coursera platform since 2014, has been rated as one of the top 100 MOOCs of all time. In 2000, Rolf founded UR Mobile, a firm that developed mobile apps in the pre-Smartphone era, which he led until he got bored and decided to pursue his doctorate so he could frustrate students instead of customers