Southwest Airlines: “Put Your Employees First”

My favorite, and perhaps the most famous concept from Jim Collins‘ Good To Great is the Hedgehog Concept:

Are you a hedgehog or a fox? In his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, based upon an ancient Greek parable: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

The gist of this parable is that the fox, with all of his cleverness, speed, and agility, has no tactical advantage over the dowdy hedgehog, whose “one big thing” is knowing how to curl up into a needlish ball when the craftier fox tries to eat him for lunch.The hedgehog’s advantage is that he knows his one big thing, and stays true to this innate gift rather than trying to outfox a fox.
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