[Chose your own adventure listen👆🏻 or read 👇🏻]
I love audiobooks. This morning while I was scrubbing my favourite frying pan (yes I have a favourite😂) I was listening to the classic business book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins for the third time.
In the 90’s Jim Collins conducted some of the most interesting research the business world has ever known. He and his team studied the causal factors that moved organisations from being good to truly great.
This rigorous study had excellent controls and evaluation criteria, but one of the findings made me uncomfortable.
They discovered that each great company had what is known as a hedgehog concept. That is they had a single thing that they did better than anyone else in the world at the core of their business.
In hearing this the first time I found it challenging as my company Blue Vineyard is so diverse there was no way I could point to our singular hedgehog concept. This made me wonder if the vision we hold was doomed to fail.
We started out doing web development, then accidentally built a software product, then tried to get into hosting, podcasting and more. There was more than one time a concerned onlooker asked me if I was sure we were on the right path.
But there was always something deep inside, something that I intuitively knew was right about what we were trying to do.
Fast forward to today scrubbing that pan and listening to Jim extol the virtues of hedgehogs I heard an addendum he added in the audio book that was not in the original publication.
He pointed out that there are two ways to define your hedgehog concept.
His example was General Electric: Whilst being incredibly diverse, their hedgehog concept is finding, training and retaining the worlds, best executive talent. That is what has allowed them to diversify into so many industries, yet retain what is uniquely powerful about GE.
While I don’t claim to have founded the next General Electric, this is the same category we fall under.
The unique process we are betting our business on entails the following:
That process may not be complicated but it is hard work.
Building the initial relationship requires trust,
Trust comes from repeatedly demonstrating integrity and competence,
Competence comes from building a talented team with aligned values,
Finding those team members and generating alignment depends on a vision.
For us that vision is to build up the Adventist digital ecosystem so the people sharing the most important message the world has ever known are equipped with the best tools to accomplish the work.
If you share this vision, reach out.