To be a hedgehog or a fox - That’s the question?
This is a sort of personal question:
- Is it better to be a far-ranging generalist or to take the path of the concentrated specialist?- i.e. Is it better to be a fox or a hedgehog?- Or Is it better to be part hedgehog and part fox?
The Story aka What’s this all about?
In Isaiah Berlin’s best known essay , he distinguishes between two archetypes: the hedgehog and the fox. **“The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows but one.” **
*There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’…[T]aken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel — a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance — and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle…The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes. —Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, 1953 *
The fox is the generalist, who moves from domain to domain with ease and agility,examining large surface areas, covering wide spaces; the hedgehog is the specialist, who slowly and meticulously delves deeply into the nature of a single domain, uncovering secrets that lie beneath.** **
So who would you want to be?
A Hedgehog, who have a single big idea or explanation, or a Fox, which looks for a lot of intersecting causes?
Jim Collins, the good to great fame, says: “The fox is complex; the hedgehog simple. And the hedgehog wins.”
But I also have a different opinion.
It seems that, by and large, the foxes do better at predicting what’s to come, except once in a while when the steadfast hedgehogs see something really important, and don’t get distracted, no matter what.
**So why is this something I have been thinking about? **
for all the obvious reasons - personal and professional.
What do you think?