We love gamification, and we’re not embarrassed to admit it.
One of my favorite books is Good to Great by Jim Collins, and one of my favorite chapters in that book is Chapter 5: The Hedgehog Concept. It discusses an essay by Isiah Berlin called “The Hedgehog and the Fox” based on an ancient Greek parable:
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
The idea is that day in and day out, the fox devises a myriad of complex strategies to try to attack the hedgehog. And each time the fox attacks, thinking “Aha! I’ve got you now!”, the hedgehog thinks “Here we go again. Will he ever learn?” and rolls up into a ball of sharp spikes. Upon seeing the hedgehog’s defense, the fox calls off his attack and slinks back to his forest to calculate a new approach. Each day the fox tries something different, and each day the hedgehog does what he does best. And always wins.
Berlin divides the world into two groups of people: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes pursue many ends at the same time and see the world in all of its complexity. They are scattered and diffused, never integrating their ideas into one overall concept or unifying vision.
Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single organizing idea that unifies and guides everything they do. It turns out hedgehogs are the ones who make the biggest impact on the world. Darwin, Marx, Adam Smith, Einstein, Steve Jobs were all hedgehogs.
And the most successful companies - those who make the leap from Good to Great - have Hedgehog Concepts that dictate everything they do. They have a singular focus and a clear sense of what they do better than anyone else, and that’s all they think about, day in and day out. Collins writes:
Those who built the good-to-great companies were, to one degree or another, hedgehogs. They used their hedgehog nature to drive towards what we came to call a Hedgehog Concept for their companies. Those who led the comparison companies tended to be foxes, never gaining the clarifying advantage of a Hedgehog Concept, being instead scattered, diffused, and inconsistent.
At Bunchball, our Hedgehog Concept is gamification. We love gamification, and we’re not embarrassed nor ashamed to admit it. We’d eat it for breakfast if we could. We don’t feel the need to hide behind fancy-sounding, trendy phrases or come up with a different concept of what we do every month. We’ll leave that to the foxes in our industry. We’re gamification hedgehogs.
That’s not to say that we’ll stand still - we’re constantly innovating on our platform and in our strategies to better serve the changing needs of our customers and their markets - but we’re born and bred gamification, and we want to be gamification when we grow up. We’ve been bringing gamification to consumer experiences for years, and now we’re bringing gamification to the enterprise to help motivate and engage employees. Gamification, gamification, gamification.
(by the way, now that Deloitte predicts that gamification will be a Top 10 Trend in 2012, I fully expect the companies who just last month were saying they were social-checkin-loyalty-enterprise-engagement-behavior-anythingbutgamification will be back on the gamification wagon again, until next month when TechCrunch identifies a new trend.)
I share this for two reasons:
1) If you want to work for a great company, look for companies who have a very clear sense of who they are and what they’re great at doing, and be dubious of companies who switch up their strategies every month. The most successful companies in history all had - and still have - a Hedgehog Concept.
2) For businesses looking for serious, reliable and sustainable business partners, look for a partner who absolutely loves what they do and watch out for the ones who are constantly revising their focus. The former will undoubtedly provide you with the absolute best products and services because they’re fanatically obsessed about their Hedgehog Concept. The latter, the foxes…well, they’re likely far more interested in chasing trends, pandering to press and trying to get acquired, leaving you on the sidelines in the process.
