From Hunting and Gathering to Strategic Management
The basis of business – whether it is called that or not – has existed for thousands of years. Fundamentally, businesses still function along principles that would have been recognisable to our earliest ancestors: hunting and gathering. The key difference is that the actual hunting and gathering have become less visible, but they are no less important. The fundamental reality has not changed: you will not succeed if you hunt or gather in an environment that lacks what you seek.
Historically, when a hunt or gathering expedition was successful, the village would process the harvest, resulting in a beneficial outcome for the whole group. In modern business, gathered resources undergo some form of process to satisfy customers’ actual wants and needs. With the advent of capitalism and the addition of a profit motive, however, the social village – with its emphasis on sharing and collective participation – has largely been replaced by an economic village.
Over millennia, hunters and gatherers became increasingly specialised, focusing only on the specific items required by their economic village. More recently, a processing function was added to develop and direct products and services toward identifying markets that business owners and boards believe will deliver the best results for the organisation. Identifying needs, developing optimal processes and products, and targeting the most appropriate markets for the best possible outcomes – this is what started the discipline now referred to as strategic management.
The Rise of Sophistication – and Its Complications
Over the years, new inventions, models, and theories have been developed to enhance the understanding of both the sourcing – the hunting and gathering – and the exchange processes of business. Businesses have become more “sophisticated” with the addition of processing, the segmentation of supply chains, and easier access to factor markets. There has also been a greater focus on protecting resources and markets. These markets have become more guarded through attempts such as monopolistic control of resources and the erection of barriers, such as patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
Contemporary strategic management frameworks such as VUCA – originally developed by the United States Army War College to describe the post-Cold War world¹ – remind us that the hunting-and-gathering metaphor is not merely quaint. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are the precise conditions under which the ancient hunter operated. The sophistication of modern business tools does not eliminate these conditions; it merely changes their texture. What has changed is the speed at which those conditions shift and the number of variables in play at any given moment.
The first known printing press was developed around 868 AD in China.² It was approximately 570 years later that Gutenberg developed his own printing press in 1440.³ Since then, literally millions of books and documents have been published across virtually every conceivable topic – including management, leadership, accounting, and how to start and run a business. This explosion of knowledge, while beneficial, brings with it its own complications.
As knowledge and the number of specialist businesses have grown, there has been a corresponding increase in specialised areas of study and the development of ever more comprehensive business models. At times, this growing specialisation seems to have the unfortunate effect of restricting the exchange of relevant knowledge across disciplines. Even within a broad qualification such as a Master of Business Administration (MBA) – a degree ostensibly focused on learning to administer a business – one frequently finds programmes focusing almost exclusively on specific business functions. Such a specialist focus is often at the expense of more generalist or integrated knowledge. The concepts of holism and simplicity in complexity become increasingly relevant in times of rapid change.
Knowing More About Less – The Specialist Trap
The scientist R.E. Swain from Stanford University is credited with saying that the scientist “knows a great deal about very little, and who keeps on knowing more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing.”⁴ He apparently continued that a philosopher “knows a little about very much, and he continues to know less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything”.
Add to this the Dunning-Kruger effect – first described in 1999 – which refers to a cognitive bias in which people with limited knowledge in a given domain tend to overestimate their own competence, while genuine experts often underestimate theirs.⁵ In organisational contexts, this has significant implications for decision-making quality and the value placed on specialist versus generalist input. One can sometimes wonder, considering both the Swain observation and the Dunning-Kruger effect, whether people in organisations truly know what they know, or merely think they do – and whether the difference matters as much as it should.
There has been a proliferation of new knowledge subjects and disciplines, all vying for recognition and legitimacy. It seems that more recently, the custodians of some disciplines have unfortunately begun to regard their areas of expertise as sacred, independent, or more important than any other. This increased specialisation in business led to a corresponding increase in effort by management to get ahead of – and stay ahead of – their competitors. This has translated into what is commonly called the rat race. It is becoming increasingly common for businesspeople to say they feel lost in a maze of theories sold to them as the ultimate solution to their problems. Perhaps the solution does not lie in knowing the theories but in understanding the principles and fundamentals that underpin them. (See also the reflection on Red or Blue)
The Enduring Relevance of Basics
All these point to a paradox that deserves more attention in business education than it typically receives. As the volume of specialist knowledge expands exponentially, the foundational principles of business remain remarkably stable. The hunt is still happening. The gathering is still happening. The village still needs to be fed. What changed is the environment in which the hunt occurs, the tools used to gather, and the composition of the village.
Understanding this continuity is not a call to ignore new knowledge or to resist the necessary specialisations that complex modern businesses require. Rather, it is a call for integration. for the ability to step back from the detail and ask the simple, fundamental questions: What are we seeking? Where is it to be found? And how do we best bring it back to those who need it? Strategic management, at its best, is nothing more and nothing less than an organised and disciplined answer to these ancient questions. Human resource development, in turn, has the potential – no, the responsibility – to aid people in thinking about, and understanding problems and available resources.
The challenge for leaders and organisations today is not to choose between specialisation and generalism, but to develop the capacity to operate fluently in both domains. This requires what might be called a systems literacy – an understanding of how the parts connect to the whole, and how changes in one part of the system create effects, often unexpected, elsewhere. This is, of course, the essence of what we explore throughout the vanrooyen.info Reflections series: the application of systems thinking to the practical challenges of organisational life.
The implications of Riley’s observation for business and organisational leadership are profound. It suggests that the most valuable capability an organisation can develop is not any specific body of knowledge, but rather the capacity to learn, to adapt, and to integrate new information into coherent strategic action. This is, ultimately, the difference between organisations that merely survive and those that genuinely thrive – regardless of what the next wave of change may bring.
References
¹ Bennett, N., & Lemoine, G. J. (2014). What a difference a word makes: Understanding threats to performance in a VUCA world. Business Horizons, 57(3), 311–317. (Original VUCA concept attributed to the United States Army War College, ca. 1987.)
² Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2024). History of printing. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/printing-publishing
³ Man, J. (2002). The Gutenberg Revolution: The story of a genius and an invention that changed the world. Headline Book Publishing.
⁴ Swain, R. E. (attributed). Characterisation of specialist vs generalist knowledge. Commonly cited in management literature; original attribution disputed.
⁵ Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognising one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134.
The author acknowledges the use of Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, for language editing and improving the readability of this text. Responsibility for the concept, research, content and final blog remains with the author.
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