This is particularly evident in the enigmatic rain forests of Borneo which boast one of the largest concentrations of gliders – at least thirty different species of animals as diverse as lizards, squirrels, lemurs or colugos, snakes, geckos and frogs – that have changed their physiological structure over the years to allow them to glide from tree to tree. Why is this island so rich in gliding species while other rain forests like the Amazon have none? The answer – Mother Nature and evolution. The rain forests of South East Asia are dominated by giant dipterocarp trees which tend to crowd out other trees and, to add insult to injury, offer hungry residents infrequent and unpredictable bounties of fruit. To work within this context of inconsistent and non-controllable food sources, the frogs and other animals that lived within the area took to an ingenious way of moving from one arboreal restaurant to another – jumping large distances. A creative strategy indeed! They realised that this provided the most effective way of getting around without excessive climbing and exposure to the danger of predators. Gradually they evolved to a more manageable mode of movement – gliding. Understandably this didn’t happen overnight, nor without its fair share of bruised and battered little bodies. But it was all part of the learning experience.
The point of the gliding, flying frogs? The mind-set of making mistakes and learning from them to expand one’s knowledge, so intrinsic to the mind of the fox, is nothing new. It is a natural process, and it has been around for millions of years. The other important lesson to derive from this example is: think the unthinkable. A frog that glides? You’re pulling my leg. But it’s a fact like the flying hedgehogs in the previous section – except that the latter travel first class! Mind you, in the world of political affairs, the Florida recount in the US presidential election was also unthinkable until it happened in 2000.
How else can the advance in the forest gliders be construed to be of relevance to the global economy? How can those blessed with a higher cognitive function than a flying lizard benefit from this insight? Humans have the tendency to try and pre-empt a future to which they link adverse consequences by taking actions to head it off. To a risk-averse person there is nothing wrong with this strategy. Ironically, however, such restrictive thinking was not the type that laid the foundations for, and made possible, a global economy. The great explorers of the past, like Marco Polo, David Livingstone and Christopher Columbus were all foxes who were responsible for establishing trade routes and the exchange of ideas and cultures. The hedgehogs followed in their tracks as settlers. Much of the time these pioneering foxes didn’t know where they were going. Columbus thought he was heading for Asia, but intercepted America by chance.
Indeed, in determining their position at sea, the early navigators implemented a learn-from-mistakes philosophy. They would first make a guess about where they were. Next, they estimated – to the nearest nautical mile – their latitude and longitude. After that, they worked out how high in the sky the sun would reach at midday if, by some incredible coincidence, that was their actual position. They would then measure the actual elevation of the sun, compare the figures and adjust their initial estimate accordingly. If they were still wrong, they would indulge in a process of iteration till they obtained an answer that was approximately correct. Today, on the same principle of taking the plunge and then revising one’s position in light of further information, the global economy is being significantly reshaped by the new-age sea-foxes – the Internet pioneers. Take Amazon.com and eBay. The former, even with its ups and downs, has revolutionised retailing with its on-line marketing of books. The other set up a website which has changed the nature of auctioneering forever. Have you ever heard of cyber-fleas? Probably not, but eBay is the world’s biggest cyber-fleamarket. You can sell or buy almost anything on the site. At the heart of eBay’s success is that nobody in the world of bricks and mortar can imitate it. Its uniqueness lies in its virtuality.
A philosophical interlude and moment for introspection
Pause here for a second and ponder: “OK, what am I? A hedgehog or a fox?” Whether we like it or not, most senior business people are more likely to be of the prickly variety. Hedgehogs, according to Isaiah Berlin in his celebrated essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, “relate everything to a central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel”. The twentieth-century accent on strategic planning with rigid structures and objectives has made employees march unquestioningly to the same tune. But managerial hedgehogs shouldn’t worry; they share the same characteristics as writers and philosophers of the likes of Dante, Plato, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Proust. You may ask why there is such a preponderance of hedgehogs in the senior ranks of business today. Well, most senior managers are middle-aged folk who belong to a generation where lifetime employment was the idea. Back in the last century, parents would send their children to respectable schools so that they could qualify to go to respectable universities and thereafter join respectable organisations – for life. From womb to tomb, twentieth-century man was programmed to be a hedgehog. The fact that this world is vanishing fast is leading to a much higher proportion of the younger generation becoming foxes. The 21st century belongs to them.
Nevertheless, what cannot be denied is that, over the last few hundred years, business has owed a great deal to the foxes. These, according to Berlin, “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory. Their thought is often scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the vast variety of experiences.” In the world of philosophy and literature, full foxy points go to the likes of Shakespeare, Aristotle, Molière and Goethe but, in the commercial sphere, we must not overlook foxy families like the Medicis, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers.
Bertrand Russell, a fox of considerable stature in British philosophy in the last century, gave a delightful description of how differently hedgehog and foxy philosophers arrive at the truth. Hedgehogs, like the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, produce a vast edifice of deduction pyramided upon a pinpoint of logical principle. Foxes draw comparatively modest conclusions from a broad survey of many facts. If a principle proposed by a hedgehog “is completely true and the deductions are entirely valid, all is well; but the structure is unstable, and the slightest flaw anywhere brings it down in ruins”. As against this, a philosophical fox such as John Locke or David Hume makes sure that the base of the pyramid “is on the solid ground of observed fact, and the pyramid tapers upward, not downward; consequently the equilibrium is stable, and a flaw here or there can be rectified without total disaster”.
Interestingly, Immanuel Kant, the greatest philosopher in modern times, who died at the ripe old age of eighty in 1804, was a hybridised version of the two creatures we are talking about – in other words he was a “hedgefox”. In his masterly book, The Critique of Pure Reason, he combined the pronouncements of the rational and empirical schools of philosophy. The former states that, through pure reasoning, you can derive the meaning of existence and everything else in the world from first principles (hedgehog stuff). The other maintains that the only source of knowledge is experience (foxy stuff). Kant drew on both perspectives to come up with his theory of synthetic a priori propositions like “every event has a cause”. He argued that this belief could not be divorced from experience but neither could it be derived from experience. It was part of our inherent nature to believe that every cause has an effect (and vice versa) in that it gives coherence to our perceptions. Hence, the concept of cause and effect transcended experience.
The greatest mind of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein, was also a hedgefox. Like Plato, he believed that you could shed light on the mysteries of the universe by sitting in an armchair and contemplating the problem in a singleminded manner. You could even play thought experiments in your mind and see where they led. However, unlike Plato and like a true fox, he believed that all theories had to be grounded in fact and confirmed by observation. For example, in 1905 he presented his special theory of relativity, which included the famous equation E = mc2. It was only in 1945 with the detonation of the atom bomb that the equation was verified. Likewise, in 1916, when he introduced the general theory of relativity, it contained the entirely new concepts of space being curved and light rays being bent in a gravitational field. These were subsequently confirmed in 1919 by observations of how starlight curved around an eclipsed sun. In brief, his two famous quotes sum up his philosophy of life: “God may be