Jim Collins is a management guru. It's his job to tell other people how to do their jobs and how to run their organizations. And, in fact, he's quite good at what he does. Pretty much everyone loves his books Good to Great and Built to Last. He even has his own website that thousands and thousands of people read. In his books and on that website, he often talks about two concepts. The first draws its inspiration from hedgehogs (and philosopher Isiah Berlin). When those little critters get in trouble they always do the same thing, without fail: curl up in a ball. To Collins' mind, great organizations are a lot like hedgehogs; they've learned to do one thing really well, and they do it over and over and over again. Exceptional organizations are not "very good" at a lot of things; rather they are "great" at one thing.

Collins' second concept is called the flywheel. He says that if organizations take small, conscious steps to regularly reinforce their "hedgehog" competency, they start to build positive momentum. Once the momentum starts to generate results, it will reinforce the value of the hedgehog competency, thereby generating more positive results and more momentum and so on.

I've been thinking about these ideas a lot recently, as the organization I work for continues to refine and reshape its identity. And as Collins presents them, they are a compelling tandem (I know I've explained them pretty simplistically here, but take my word for it). Something that we are starting to learn, though, is that in the nonprofit sector there isn't a mechanism in place to really help that flywheel build its momentum. Simply put, as a nonprofit organization starts to achieve results, it does not generate, on its own, the concurrent resources (ie, money) to support the expansion of those results.

To a certain extent, Collins himself has noted this in subsequent work. This realization leaves us with two options: to build an organization capable of generating its own resources or to be content with doing things on a small scale. Among the social enterprise set, many people have started to focus their attention on pursuing option one and to understand the challenges associated with that route. First, it is difficult to run a profitable, socially focused organization because doing so requires organizations to focus on more things than their hedgehog competency. Almost by definition. And second, generating those financial resources forces the organization to make tradeoffs that can start to compromise the pursuit of its mission.

Not as many organization - or at least not as many outwardly vocal organizations - have chosen the second road. I mean, how many people ever told you to "dream small?" Not many. And on some level, that makes sense: we've got some big problems. Problems that need more than small solutions. But on another level, every neighborhood is different, every community has its own challenges. And so maybe we shouldn't aim for anything other than the small, local solution if we are to be effective.

Bo Burlingham recently wrote a book called Small Giants: Companies that choose to be great instead of big. He also managed to get Jim Collins to write some very flattering things on the back of it. In any case, that book (not surprisingly) concerns itself with organizations that have chosen option two. They have stayed small. He identifies several commonalities that these organizations possess, but the most striking are 1) their deeply intimate knowledge of their communities or customers, and 2) the deep love of subject matter that the employees of these organizations bring to their jobs - be that subject matter fashion, beer, safety lighting, or constant torque hinges.

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Ultimately, work is art. Or, at least it should be if it is to inspire a true sense of accomplishment and self-worth. If it is to be truly valuable. Toward the end of the first chapter in Walden, Thoreau says, "There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged."

As Burlingham points out, small organizations are correlated with passionate employees - employees who treat their work like art, who build their own nests and develop their poetic faculty. This passion is also correlated with deep, intimate knowledge of a place, neighborhood, market, or customer. Many thinkers have noted that the great accomplishment of civilization is that it has enabled the rise of the artist, the musician and the painter - in short, it has provided fertile ground for the development of the poetic faculty. What makes small organizations so beautiful is that they don't simply enable others to be artists, musicians and painters; they are made up of them.

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