You might be wondering why Value Hedgehog? Aren’t there many other animals out there have much more elegance, power or drive (symbolically).
From physical appearance, beauty is in the eye of the beholder but one can hardly argue that hedgehog is setting the standard of beauty out there in the forest. So why hedgehog?
The idea of hedgehog (and therefore Value Hedgehog as a combination of value investing and hedgehog concept) came from Jim Collins in his Good To Great book. Here’s a transcript of one of his videos that explains the concept in more detail:
There’s this wonderful essay called “The Hedgehog and the Fox” that was written by Isaiah Berlin, a philosopher-thinker; and he basically said there are two types of thinkers. There are hedgehogs and there are foxes. Now, the hedgehog and the fox are different in the following way. The foxes, they love complexity.
What hedgehogs tend to do is get one big idea and focus on that, simplifying a complex world down to a fundamental, simple idea is essentially right…
They love all the moving parts. They love basically showing how smart they are by making things so complex that other people can’t understand them. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, are a different breed.
Hedgehogs tend to take the approach of saying, “You know, I know the world is complex, but we can’t function if we don’t simplify it.” What hedgehogs tend to do is get one big idea and focus on that, simplifying a complex world down to a fundamental, simple idea that is essentially right. Now, it turns out that in different walks of life, some walks of life favor foxes; some walks of life favor hedgehogs. So, I don’t want to say that hedgehog is always better than fox. In the world of leadership, the hedgehogs win.
A simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of three circles: 1) what you are deeply passionate about, 2) what you can be the best in the world at, and 3) what best drives your economic or resource engine. Transformations from good to great come about by a series of good decisions made consistently with a Hedgehog Concept, supremely well executed, accumulating one upon another, over a long period of time.