Lakhasly

To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence...On the basis of the ancient Greek parable about the fox and the hedgehog, philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided all people into two groups.But every time the fox tries to use them, it fails - because every time, sensing danger, the hedgehog rolls up in a ball covered with sharp spikes.The good-to-great companies understood that doing what you're good at will only make you good; focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.The fox is a cunning creature who can devise a million strategies on how to attack the hedgehog.The hedgehog has one strategy - but that strategy always works.

To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence… The good-to-great companies understood that doing what you’re good at will only make you good; focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.
The fox is a cunning creature who can devise a million strategies on how to attack the hedgehog. But every time the fox tries to use them, it fails – because every time, sensing danger, the hedgehog rolls up in a ball covered with sharp spikes. The hedgehog has one strategy – but that strategy always works.

On the basis of the ancient Greek parable about the fox and the hedgehog, philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided all people into two groups. The foxes see the world in its complexity, while the hedgehogs “simplify a complex world into a single organizing idea.”

Does it mean hedgehogs are stupid? Not at all. Freud and the unconscious, Marx and the class struggle, Einstein and relativity – these are simplified organizing ideas of the world. E=MC2 is so simple to understand, isn’t it?

Hedgehogs have the ability to see the underlying patterns, and to see them through complexity. And according to Collins, this has everything to do with good-to-greatness.

Collins provides this example: by 2000, Walgreens, an American pharmacy company, exceeded the market by over 15 times. When Collins asked Cork Walgreen how they did it, the answer was simple: once we understood the concept, it all became clear. The concept was the convenient drugstores with high profit per customer visit.

Walgreens replaced all inconvenient locations with convenient ones, and clustered their stores tighter together so that people didn’t have to walk too far away from store to store. More convenience led to more visits and more profit per visit