Recently, the Harlem Children’s Zone has gotten a lot of attention as the result of Paul Tough’s book, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America. The Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) is the manifestation of Geoffrey Canada’s vision to provide a comprehensive education program that touches parents, infants, preschoolers, elementary and high-school and children. The ultimate goal being to increase the chance of success later in life for poor children in Harlem.

Canada’s results are stunning. In an area of extreme poverty, his programs have produced children who outperform their peers throughout the state of New York. At the end of the 2008-09 school year, 65% of the HCZ’s prekindergarten students (the Harlem Gems) had reached an “advanced” school-readiness classification, up from 33.5% being at that level upon program entry. Additionally, 100% of the program’s third graders (which comprise the Promise Academy) tested at or above grade level on the state’s math exam.

In many ways, Canada embodies the spirit of the “human capital” thesis, which looks at education more from an economic perspective. Economist James Heckman has spent years studying this topic and has concluded that, “the rate of return to a dollar investment made while a person is young is higher than the rate of return to the same dollar at a later age.” Geoffrey Canada’s basic goal upon founding the HCZ was to change the lives of poor children in sizable numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide. The net result is that the children who come out of this program, and programs like it, will be likelier to graduate college, enter the workforce, and stay out of the judicial system, all of which will have positive societal and economic impacts.

As the strategy guy at The Grove School, I’m always trying to answer the question, “How can we best spend our limited resources to be as effective as possible?” One of my favorite books on this topic is Jim Collins’ Good to Great, which attempts to identify what separates companies that perform well from those who don’t. The “great” companies have what Collins calls a Hedgehog Concept: a single, unifying idea that defines what will be the focus of the organization. The Hedgehog Concept is formed by answering three questions:

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

The first two questions are critical to understanding what an organization’s mission and core competencies are. The third question, however, is perhaps the most important in terms of focus. The goal isn’t to identify a set of measurements that will tell you how your business is performing, it is to identify a single measurement that will be a leading indicator of all critical areas of focus.

For example, Wallgreens’ concept was, “the best, most convenient drugstores with high profit per customer visit.” Focusing on this simple statement allowed them to organize all their efforts, planning and investment efficiently, confident that everything else would fall into place as a result. In doing this, they managed to out-perform Intel, GE, Coca Cola and Merck over a 15-year period.

My point in all of this is that “high-quality, early education programs with high elementary-school readiness rates” seems to have a lot of potential as a Hedgehog Concept for a well-functioning, high-performing society. If we look at early educational success as a leading indicator for future graduation rates, job growth, health care costs, judicial costs and crime rates (which numerous studies have proven is the case), it becomes easy to understand why this is perhaps the single most important measure of our society’s well-being. It obviously requires long-term vision, but the rewards we gain years from now will be exponential.

And that’s why all of us here at The Grove School are doing what we do. If we do our job well, we can change the world.