Peter Pre­vos, 22 August 2011.

The Hypo­thet­icorp philo­sophy is art­fully expressed by the ban­ner shown on each page. It is cre­ated by Dutch visual artist, musi­cian, film maker and cul­tural sci­ent­ist Karin Merx. This piece of art con­tains a great deal of sym­bol­ism related to what Hypo­thet­icorp aims to achieve.

We have chosen the pig as our mas­cot because this animal is intrins­ic­ally linked with man­age­ment the­ory. Pigs are also used as a busi­ness meta­phor: In some firms man­age­ment has its snout in the trough, the bosses are cap­it­al­ist pigs and much of man­age­ment the­ory is like Pig Latin. Bad man­agers can be pig-headed and only focus on get­ting money in the piggy-bank. At Hypo­thet­icorp we hope to provide a pos­it­ive influ­ence on this, but we sure can’t make pigs fly.

We lov­ingly call our mas­cot Freddy, after Fre­d­er­ick Winslow Taylor who was one of the first to meth­od­ic­ally study manual labour by ana­lys­ing how work­ers hauled lumps of pig-iron onto trucks. The loads of pig-iron are visu­al­ised in the ban­ner and Freddy is hold­ing a clothes iron to cryptic­ally sym­bol­ise his con­nec­tion to Taylor.

Read­ing from left to right the ban­ner expresses a jour­ney from rational goal ori­ented think­ing espoused by Taylor to a man­age­ment approach that embraces the non-rational human dimen­sion. The ban­ner is sprinkled with the math­em­at­ical sym­bols and bulls-eyes to sym­bol­ise the goal ori­ented nature of management.