Good To Great

Good To Great examines what it takes for ordinary companies to become great and outperform their competitors by analyzing 28 companies over 30 years, who managed to make the transition or fell prey to their bad habits.

If the lion is the king of the jungle, then the hedgehog is the king of the forest. Yup, you read right, the hedgehog.

Why?

Because he’s got the simplest defense strategy of them all and in any attack situation, he knows what to do: curl up and become an untouchable, spiky, rock-like, unbreakable fortress.

Clever foxes and snakes can come up with as many cunning strategies as they want – the hedgehog will always react the same, and he’ll always come out on top.

Jim Collins says companies that go from good-to-great always figure out their very own “Hedgehog concept” – a strategy they can keep pushing for ages, which will eventually take them to number 1. To find your Hedgehog concept, you must answer 3 questions:

What can we be the best in the world at? Which things can we be passionate about? What is the key economic indicator we should concentrate on?

But no rush – it takes most good-to-great companies 4 years to figure it out, so chances are, it’ll take a while to find yours. Two examples are Zappos, who want to create the best customer experience for people buying shoes online, and Walgreens, who shoot to be the best, most convenient drugstore with a high per-visit profit.

Anchor, Musical.ly, Vine, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter – all of these are less than 10 years old, and there are dozens more – and these are just social networks. We’re flooded with an incredible amount of new technology every single year. The question is how much of it really benefits us? I’m trying to build the best book summary website in the world, and I’m relying on blogging to achieve it, a technology that is considered old by any means at this point. Of course I experiment with the new stuff – but I don’t jump right in and bet all of my money on it. If you’re jumping on a new technology, just to be a pioneer, or because you’re afraid you might miss out, you’ll have a very hard time aligning it with your actual mission. For example, Walgreens took a 40% share price drop by completely ignoring e-commerce at first. But while competitors rose quickly, and disappeared again a year later, they carefully mapped out their online strategy and used it to boost their actual goal of being the best pharmacy store, for example by offering online prescriptions for pick-up in store. Always be wary of new innovations.…