Whether you’re writing an article, a blog post, or a feature story for your novel, good writing is crucial to making it stand out among the competition. A well-written piece will capture the attention of your readers and make them eager to learn more.

Achieving good writing requires practice and dedication. That’s why you need to be consistently producing and improving your work. Eventually, you’ll internalize the structure and form of a good article and it’ll be second nature.

The term good refers to something that is morally or perceptively correct in the eyes of others, as well as in your own. It also evokes a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of satisfaction that carries over to others who might be benefited by your actions or statements.

Good is an adverb that is most commonly used as a complement to do or be: He did good on the test. It is also often used as an adjective, after linking verbs such as taste, smell, look, feel, be, and seem: Everything tastes good today; you’re looking good.

In a business context, it’s usually used to refer to the company as a whole, not just its individual leaders or departments. It can be an objective measure of organizational performance that’s easier to use than traditional metrics such as profitability, productivity, and employee engagement.

The Hedgehog Concept

Leaders of good-to-great companies know that their organizations need a simple principle that unifies and organizes their decisions. They can’t have a dozen different ideas that all relate to different aspects of their business, because then every decision becomes more complex than it needs to be. But they can have one idea that’s simple but profound: The Hedgehog Concept.

The Hedgehog Concept helps managers make better decisions. It’s an organizing principle that helps them see where they need to focus their attention. It can also guide them in their thinking as they create a strategy and develop key initiatives that will help achieve that plan.

It’s the same idea that Adam Smith used to predict the future: He saw a flywheel with thousands of tiny pushes. Each small change added up to a big one that made the flywheel move.

Achieving a Good to Great transition takes years of hard work and a lot of patience. As Jim Collins explains in his new book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t, “The jump from good to great is a company-specific event. There must be a clear, specific transition point.”

A good-to-great company must show a pattern of good performance punctuated by a change in its fortunes that marked the moment when it began to perform on a different scale than what had been previously seen. This change isn’t just an uptick in the stock market, though it can be.