ChangeThis
ChangeThis is our weekly series of essays from today's thought leaders that are meant to evoke conversation by bringing forth new and unique ideas.
ChangeThis
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Talent: Raid It, Own It, Set It Free!
By Orly Lobel
"In a prophetic speech at a 1943 assembly, Winston Churchill predicted that 'the empires of the future will be empires of the mind. ' The future is now: The knowledge economy is here. Gone are the days when competitive advantage came from 'real' assets. It's human assets that give companies an edge. Skill, creativity, and smarts are the modern ingredients of success. Talent has become the most valuable asset for a company and talent is scarce. There is a scientist drought. There is an engineer drought. A recent McKinsey Global Institute report finds that despite unemployment rates being high, a third of American companies have positions that remain open for extended periods because the right people are hard to find. The best and the brightest are in fierce demand, and we fight over them like we fight over no other asset. This fight, the talent war, is only projected to become more intense. An American Society for Training and Development report predicts that by 2015, 76% of U. S. jobs will require highly-skilled workers.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Impact Manifesto: You Make A Difference Whether You Want To Or Not
By Porchlight
"You impact the people around you. From the very day you are born, you make a difference. Your parents took one look at you and realized their lives would never be the same. People feel your influence countless times, in amazing ways you never notice. Just as the butterfly's wings can change the weather, your tiny movements may create storms that shake the entire earth. Your impact is incredible, and today is the day you can take charge of it. Today you can amplify everything good. Call it the Impact Factor."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Brother John
By August Turak
"Uncertainty as to life's purpose is much in vogue today. So too are the relativistic notions that would consign life's purpose to a matter of taste. The agony of life is uncertainty and the rationalization is that uncertainty is certain. However, the plain truth is that for all our anguish we treasure uncertainty. Doubt forestalls action. The problem with life's purpose is that we know damn well what it is but are unwilling to face the changes in our lives that a commitment to self-transcendence, to being the best human being we could possibly be, would entail. It wearies us just thinking about it. So we rationalize that it's all "relative," or that we're already doing enough and don't have time. Worst of all we rationalize that those who do accept the challenges inherent in self-transcendence are uniquely gifted and specially graced."
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Blog / ChangeThis
How To Be a Disruptive Hero
By Bill Jensen
"Disruptive heroes are the people who either completely change the rules or teach us that the status quo needs to be pushed, challenged or broken. They have a major impact on what we believe is possible, what we do and who we become. If that sounds daunting for you to take on...don't freak out! You get to pick the scale and scope of your efforts. Focus on something that's mostly within your control and becoming a hero will be easier than you first thought. But if you would like to change the world as a disruptive hero, could you? Yep. Most of the biggest names in arts, government, business, social movements and more got there by being disruptive. Go for it!"
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Art Is Freedom
By Erik Wahl
"My name is Erik Wahl and Art has saved me from a life of slavery. I've been a member of A. A. (Artists Anonymous) for over twelve years. I am a recovering suit and tie. I am recuperating from years as a gear in a wheel that barely touched the ground. And now, after rediscovering my Art by freeing my mind and digging to find my inner creative genius, I am a proud survivor of 'standardized education. ' I found a new path. I learned to UNthink. I learned how to unleash and unlock my mind to find freedom. In my search for freedom, I was unaware that 'art' (actual paintbrushes and paints) would serve as my personal rehab as I began to rebuild from rock bottom. But during this deep search for real answers, I realized the term art had been misused for centuries. What originally began as a term defining the interaction between geniuses and muses eventually was morphed into a hierarchical description of taste and masterpieces. 'Art' became a product and 'artist' became a career where, like any other job, you could succeed or fail.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Biology of the Bottom Line
By Porchlight
"Can we succeed without the body. On the face of it, this seems like a ridiculous question, but when we step back and take a closer look at modern organizational culture, we might be inclined to wonder. After all, most discussions of management and strategy take place in the disembodied, abstract world of the mind. The body is considered a minor player at best and health becomes a concern only in its absence, when skyrocketing medical costs, absenteeism, and presenteeism reach unacceptable levels. In practice, today's organization is almost completely blind to the body and its contribution to performance. We are, in the language of therapy, 'vertically disintegrated' or to put it more bluntly, 'dead from the neck down. ' As Sir Ken Robinson put it in his legendary TED talk, most of us now consider the body to be little more than 'a locomotor device for the head,' a transport mechanism whose only purpose is to move the brain from one computer terminal or meeting to the next. And so it comes as no surprise to discover that we are suffering catastrophic consequences.
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Blog / ChangeThis
FundRazor: How Collective Sourcing Can Fix Public Education
By Porchlight
"What if everybody with a child in public school decided, collectively, to stop buying one thing in favor of another? How much would a company pay to have their product be the new thing bought? We are talking about leveraging an emotional tie to a business decision. We are talking about bringing small businesses and education together. But we have a few hurdles to get over first. When it comes to changing the way we fund public education, we have to stop looking at ourselves as just voters and taxpayers. We must also identify ourselves as consumers and business owners, and use that as a way to see what funds are available and really get what we need."
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The 8 Blind Spots Between Men and Women at Work
By Barbara Annis
"When driving a car, our side and rear view mirrors don't often reveal everything we need to see. We find we have blind spots and have to turn our head so as not hit something. We don't resist the fact that we have blind spots or deny that they exist; we accept their presence and make every effort to improve our vision. We do it to be less of a hazard to others and to ourselves. Quite similar are the obstructions that prevent men and women from seeing the other gender in the clearest possible light—misperceptions we call Gender Blind Spots. [. . . ] Considering the implications in our personal lives, at our workplace, and for society as a whole, it's time for a shift in our thinking. We need to step up to a new level of conversation and begin to include each other and participate with each other more successfully. We need a better understanding of why men and women think and act as they do. We need to see the strength in the complement of those differences. We need to be more gender-intelligent.
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If It's Good Enough for Cars... How Lean Manufacturing Principles Can Help Heal What Ails Us In the Healthcare Business
By Porchlight
"In healthcare, understanding value to the patient customer is too often limited to reviewing patient satisfaction survey scores. . . . Not that we think such scores have no value. However, patient satisfaction surveys are only one tool for defining customer value. Another tool we'd like to see doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators use on a regular basis is following a typical patient's journey end to end. " [. . . ] What we are talking about here is an end to end focus on healthcare delivery processes, which we call value streams, from the patient arrival at an Emergency Department (ED) to discharge or admission to the hospital, from the doctor's decision to schedule a patient for surgery to hospital discharge of the patient to a rehabilitation facility, from application of a patient for admission to a skilled nursing facility to discharge home, from receipt of an appointment reminder to completion of a routine physician office visit. It can also include a focus on the processes supporting delivery of care such as purchasing, replenishment of medication and supplies, and hiring staff.
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Qualities of a High Value Player(or, How to Rise Above the Suffering in Your Work Life)
By Cy Wakeman
"People have come to believe that suffering is now part of working life, and are suffering more than ever. Tough economic times have left fewer people to do the same amount of work. Jobs people used to love have become overwhelming; jobs they never loved have become intolerable. Success seems like an impossible dream as people strive to do more with less. They've seen good people get laid off and good jobs outsourced to cheaper workers. This is madness. It is not an imagination. But there is hope. In some of the worst circumstances, it is still possible to find people who are performing well and are happy. This article will provide you with some tips for how you too can be a happy, high performer—a high value player."
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The original idea behind ChangeThis came from Seth Godin, and was built in the summer of 2004 by Amit Gupta, Catherine Hickey, Noah Weiss, Phoebe Espiritu, and Michelle Sriwongtong. In the summer of 2005, ChangeThis was turned over to 800-CEO-READ. In addition to selling and writing about books, they kept ChangeThis up and running as a standalone website for 14 years. In 2019, 800-CEO-READ became Porchlight, and we pulled ChangeThis together with the rest of our editorial content under the website you see now. We remain committed to the high-design quality and independent spirit of the original team that brought ChangeThis into the world.