Too many hedgehogs and not enough foxes is bad for companies

Although a quarterly journal will inevitably miss the breaking news and thankfully doesn't have to acknowledge the trivial, transitory and temporarily topical, it has the advantage of being able to capture the ideas that are having an impact at a deeper, more strategic level.

This issue of Market Leader seems to have captured several themes that can be looked at as a piece. The public’s feelings about trust have been the subject to research for many years. And the findings tend to be consistent. People are in general less willing to tell interviewers on these many surveys that they trust much beyond their own family and friends, whether it's doctors, the police, politicians, advertising company’s, journalists or estate agents, we are becoming less trusting.

My own private theory is that a certain amount of this scepticism is deeply rooted in the impact that social media, especially Facebook has had. Whether conscious or subconscious, regular Facebook users lie: about their wonderful friends, sexy new boyfriends/girlfriends, exciting social life. Lives are in one way or another fabricated and at some deep level lurks the suspicion that everyone is doing it. And from this subtle loss of innocence comes a pervasive wariness. The media’s obsession with transgression of pop stars to politicians falls on fertile ground.

So this is the background music to the stories of the fragmenting of trust at a civic as well as corporate level.  But as marketers it is the corporate failures that should concern us - and these failures range from the widespread practice of multi-nationals like Starbucks and Amazon and others to hide their earnings to avoid tax, to the back room accountancy fiddles of Tesco to the active acts of deception of VW. (I am personally disappointed at the failure of consumers to wield their power. For example, I wonder how much it would cost Cadburys - a recently exposed tax evader- if everyone who regularly bought a Cadbury brand just stopped for a day. There are, after all plenty of alternatives sitting side by side on the shelf.)

Our lead article by ex-PR man, Robert Phillips concentrates on the bubble that top managements of large corporates operate in, detached from the real world.  His theme is the failure to recognise that the modern world has changed dramatically and that the lack of transparency and accountability cannot be patched up by PR communication skills. That game is over.

But there are other themes that are contributing to this declension of trust and these other themes are structural and in many ways more subtle. One of the most significant, the increasing fragmentation of skills that the digital age has produced, has had serious consequences. The philosopher, Isaiah Berlin divided the world of the intellect into foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes understand the world is complicated and bring ideas from different sources and hedgehogs see the world through one lens only. An intellectual ecosystem should have a balance of the two types. In ordinary language a judicious balance of generalists and specialists.

We clearly have too many hedgehogs and not nearly enough foxes in companies these days. Without generalists with a broad overview of how various parts fit together an overload of specialists produce fragmentary knowledge.

We see this in companies, particularly in the marketing function. But it is worse than this and here I return to the issue of trust. Gillian Tett, the financial journalist has just published a book in which she describes via case histories what she calls The Silo Effect in which some companies have become so large that far from being engaged in integrated activities, are closeted in silos, of specialists who fail to communicate with each other and at worse can result in catastrophe. The paranoid amongst us may point the finger at devilish conspiracies to cheat the public but in many cases it's just as likely to be cock-up.

All of these ideas are explored in more detail in the latest issue of Market Leader, available early January 2016.

Read more from Judie Lannon here.