World-class companies tend therefore to be run by foxy CEOs who are not obsessed with the “vision” thing. They are prepared to contemplate views that are contrary to their company’s conventional wisdom and “official future”. They seek to attract people who are lateral thinkers and who can negotiate the rapids if necessary. As one foxy CEO said: “It’s the bombshell you don’t expect that can do you in. The best protection is to have commanders under you who can make split-second decisions under enemy fire. Each decision may not be for the best, but the next one corrects what’s bad about the previous one. So the chain of decisions holds up in the end.” Clearly, this has not been the case with the way mad cow disease has been handled in Europe. Ministers have had to resign because at first they didn’t take the issue seriously enough and responded with denials that there was a problem. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and governments are trying to make up lost ground with draconian laws which could jeopardise the beef industry. As if that is not enough, European farmers’ misery has been compounded by the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. The latter is so contagious that strong measures are a necessity to halt it. All in all, a cool, foxy head is required to steer any country affected through these shoals of uncertainty.
Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart Stores, which is now the largest retailer in the world with over one million employees, was a fox. He spent most of his time away from his office visiting the stores, checking standards and more importantly inspiring his staff to think of ways of doing things differently and better. He walked the walk. He had a good nose for business and was forever sniffing out promising innovations developed at store level which could be applied throughout the group. This is in marked contrast to hedgehog leaders who hibernate in their penthouse suites surrounded by their equally aloof, hedgehog-like assistants. They seldom venture out of the cloistered calm of their offices to meet real people in the real world – but then they feel it is unnecessary to do so since they’ve already worked out the grand solution. To all intents and purposes, hedgehog leaders are invisible except for the odd photograph and ceremonial function. They rule by remote control.
Have you seen the movie Brassed Off? It’s about a brass band from a Yorkshire colliery winning the national championships against the background of the closure of the colliery. In one scene, a young female executive asks the managing director whether he has read her viability study into ways of keeping the pit open. He says no, the decision to close was taken two years ago and coal is history. Her retort is that clearly reports have to be seen to be written rather than written to be seen. That’s the way sleek head-office hedgehogs like it!
The unnatural, inward-looking and incestuous atmosphere of a hedgehog lair resembles that of a royal court of old plagued by intrigue and infighting among the courtiers. The only measure of success is how favourable a courtier’s standing is with the king or queen. In the resulting competition in which each courtier is vying for the eye of the monarch, the hedgehog species show their expertise at stabbing their rivals in the back. They have so many spikes to do it with! Conspiracy theories abound, and any questioning of the party line laid down by the ruler is viewed as treachery. Niccolò Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century Florentine philosopher who promoted the use of unscrupulous statecraft to preserve power, would have been quite at home in the company of modern, smooth-talking hedgehogs. The only thing he would find unfamiliar in today’s world is the speed of travel and communication which has reduced us to a global village. Unfortunately, it has also produced a superclass of globe-trotting hedgehogs with no fixed abode and no fixed commitments to any community or country. Their entire time is spent chasing the bucks across national boundaries, cooped up in the intensive care of a 747’s first-class cabin. You can be sure that if Machiavelli had been alive at the beginning of the 21st century, he would have had multiple passports, several aliases and would be clocking up millions of air miles. Even as the prince of hedgehogs, he had respect for the fox. He had this to say about his rival: “As a prince must be able to act just like a beast, he should learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion does not defend himself against traps, and the fox does not defend himself against wolves. So one has to be a fox in order to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves.”
It goes without saying that hedgehogs are natural centralisers who want to achieve change from the top down. They are conceited enough to think they have all the answers for the working classes. Development – with a capital “D” – should radiate out from the centre. Foxy executives, on the other hand, support the idea of change from the bottom up. Decentralisation, without losing all control, is the name of the game for the business fox. On a slightly different note but in the same context, foxy monarchs in the old days used to employ court jesters with the aim of the latter bending the royal ear with unorthodox opinions on matters of state. As they say, there’s many a truth that lies in jest. Nevertheless, the court jester had to invest considerable humour in putting across his contrarian views in order to make the sovereign laugh and thus minimise his chances of being beheaded! We naturally choose friends that we agree with, but we learn something new from people with whom we don’t. An old Spanish adage goes as follows: “He who advises is not the traitor.” So, in plain English, don’t shoot the messenger.
A lesson from Mother Nature, flying frogs and sea-foxes
You needn’t have salt water coursing through your veins to imagine the following analogy: an angling hedgehog, if there ever was one, would prefer to fish within the known, protective waters of a cove where the effects of tide and winds are relatively certain and controllable. In contrast, a sea-fox would prefer to investigate other fishing grounds beyond the protective waters of the cove and be willing to operate in the uncertain and uncontrollable elements of the open sea.
Thus, an essential element in the difference between the mind-set of the fox and the hedgehog is the fox’s preparedness to strike out for the unknown. This in turn means an acceptance that mistakes do happen. What is more, mistakes are not just golden opportunities for learning; they are, in fact, sometimes the only opportunity for learning something truly new and making progress. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin accidentally when he saw that a bit of mould, which had fallen from a culture plate in his laboratory, had destroyed bacteria around it. Basically, he won the Nobel Prize, and a knighthood into the bargain, for a mistake which he had the intelligence to follow up on.
Hedgehogs balk at this approach because it may well expose them to peer ridicule. Indeed, they view mistakes in two possible lights. If it is somebody else’s, that person is to blame because somebody has to be held responsible and punished. If the mistake is their own, no-one is to blame because it was the result of circumstances beyond anyone’s control. In the latter case, hedgehogs are very good at producing an expression of injured innocence, reminding one of professional footballers about to be given a yellow or red card for a foul. Either way, mistakes are perceived by hedgehogs as aberrations which don’t advance you up the learning curve. Failure has the same penalty attached to it as drawing the “chance” or “community chest” card in a game of Monopoly that says: do not pass go, do not collect £200, move directly to jail! Better be right all the time is the maxim of the cautious hedgehog; or at least don’t be caught out if you’re wrong.
Foxes can take solace from the fact that their approach to learning and problem-solving has been used successfully for many years by the world’s most powerful and foxy CEO – Mother Nature. As pointed out by Professor Daniel C. Dennet, the Director of Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts: “For evolution, which knows nothing, the leaps into novelty are blindly taken by mutations, which are copying ‘errors’ in the DNA. Most of these are fatal errors, in fact. Since the vast majority of mutations are harmful, the process of natural selection actually works to keep the mutation rate very low.