A short talk summarizing Jim Collins’ Good to Great: great companies focus on a Hedgehog Concept — the intersection of three circles: what you can be best in the world at; what drives your economic engine; and what you are deeply passionate about. The speaker applies this to freelancers and agency owners, noting many focus only on short-term revenue and shares a brief personal example from founding Super Friendly.
Management researcher Jim Collins and his team studied 28 different companies over five years to determine what made some of them great and others not so much. Now their findings became the book Good to Great. And in this book, Collins identifies that all great companies have a relentless focus on one simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of three circles. Number one, what you can be the best in the world at. Number two, what drives your economic engine. Number three, what you are deeply passionate about. When most freelancers and agency owners start, they're almost exclusively focused on number two, what drives their economic engine. When I first started Super Friendly, I took on any work that paid any amount of money. And you know, that's a decent survival strategy, but it doesn't make for a good business in the mind of your prospects.
