Lessons from a Hedgehog: Narrow Your Scope to Expand Your Impact
March 6, 2025 | By David M. Wagner
Hedgehogs can teach you a lot about organizational success.
Especially if you lead a nonprofit or mission-driven company.
Their lesson: if you want to have more impact on the community you serve, take on less.
Organizations that focus their mission on a single concept:
Provide better services (because their resources and skills are concentrated on what they do best)
Attract more funding (because their message and impact are clearer)
Have more impact (because they are focused on doing better work, more of it, or both)
Skeptical? Let me explain.
The Hedgehog Concept
In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins uses the analogy of the humble hedgehog to explain one factor that makes companies great.
Hedgehogs, he explains, have exactly one form of self-defense: curling into a ball with spikes pointed outward to deter predators.
In contrast, their nemesis – the clever fox – has a whole bag of tricks, each more elaborate than the next, to try to attack the hedgehog.
And yet, the hedgehog always wins. Its simple technique works every time.
The great companies that Jim Collins and his team studied were all built around a “hedgehog concept:” the one thing they did better than everyone else that made them successful.
One example: Kimberly-Clark’s hedgehog concept is creating paper goods whose brands become synonymous with their market (like “Kleenex.”)
Where Nonprofits Struggle
In contrast, I have seen many nonprofits and mission-driven companies struggle to identify their core, singular mission.
Their clients’ needs are great. Funding opportunities are available in adjacent concepts. Their mission is defined so broadly that every stakeholder has a different idea of what work they could do.
So the scope of their services expands.
They try to be foxes.
Their message (what they do, and for what impact) gets muddled. Funders get confused. Programs and staff pull in competing directions.
And their impact gets diluted.
Embrace Your Hedgehog Concept
If you worry your team might be taking on too many different things, embrace your inner hedgehog:
Identify your core competency – Clearly specify what role your organization uniquely fills better than anyone else. Is yours delivering a specific service, or maybe connecting people in need with other service providers?
Organize around that concept – Align your programs, your messaging (like your purpose, mission, and impact statements), and your operations to support your core competency. That includes fundraising for what you do best and not chasing loosely-aligned grants.
Eschew everything else – Some of your programs, messaging, and operations will need to change. You may need to stop doing others all together.
Why stop work that doesn’t fit your hedgehog concept?
First, because that work is siphoning money, time, and leadership energy from where you can have the most impact.
And second, because if it isn’t your core competency, then someone else can do it better. Let them.
Don’t be a fox. Be a hedgehog. Stuck? Talk with me about how I can help you realign around your one, clear competency.