As I was reading out of "Good to Great" by Jim Collins, I came across the Hedgehog principle and it reminded me of a work experience I had last February.

Collins says that great companies fall in the intersection of 3 circles:

1) What are you passionate about?
2) What can you be the best in the world at?
3) What drives your economic engine

I was working as an intern for a small business consulting firm.  We had a project that allowed me to do things for the company that were both very creative and very analytic/numbers driven.  I soon came to realize that I didn't enjoy the data compiling and analyzing nearly as much as I liked getting to be creative through marketing and developing business strategies for the company.  I realized that for my career, I wanted to be able to use my creative side at least every now and then in my job.

I have also realized that I much more a "big picture", "visionary", "or idea-maker" type of person.  I have realized that may be the greatest skill that I have and is probably the thing I can truly be best at.

Lastly, I began taking classes in entrepreneurship.  This is a way that I can take my creativity and ideas and build real economic value.  I have recently begun building my own company and loving the direction my career has taken.

Now that I have applied the Hedgehog model to myself, I can apply it to my start-up as well.  I am passionate about what we are doing.  The idea is a blue-ocean idea and so we can be the best at it because no one else is doing what we are doing.  As I have thought about our economic engine, we should probably take a "per customer" approach because we will be selling a physical product and we can likely augment our core product with complimentary products that are cheap for us and high margin, in order to gain more profit per customer.

Overall, Jim Collins' Hedgehog Model is an interesting model that can be used to describe both success in find a career that works for you and in building a great company!