Finding a “Hedgehog concept” provides a clear path to follow.

Imagine a cunning fox hunting a hedgehog, coming up with a plethora of tactics and surprise attacks each day to devour the tasty critter. The hedgehog’s response is always the same: curl up in a spiky, unbreachable ball. Its adherence to this simple strategy is the reason the hedgehog prevails day after day.

Good-to-great companies all found their own simple Hedgehog concept by asking themselves three key questions:

What can we be the best in the world at?

What can we be passionate about?

What is the key economic indicator we should concentrate on?

At the intersection of the questions, after an average of four years of debate, good-to-great companies eventually discovered their own Hedgehog concept. After that point, every decision in the company was made in line with it, and success followed.