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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The Art of Not Knowing
By Porchlight
"In education the starting point is what you don't know. Before you can begin your research or frame your experiments you'd better make sure that you are asking the right questions about what you don't know. Trying to understand the universe through science can only come from a place of not knowing. Innovation and creativity can only exist with the wonder of not knowing. I wonder what will happen if I mix this thing here with this thing over here. I don't know but would love to find out. Curiosity is born from not knowing. Not knowing therefore can help us change and grow."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Failure to Engage: Understanding the Mechanism that Determines Employee Engagement and Micro-Innovation
By John Bernard
"Micro-innovation is the Holy Grail of modern management. Micro-innovation (incremental improvement) that is driven by employees is the secret to transforming the customer experience, accelerating revenue growth, and reducing costs. Yet, the level of employee engagement required for micro-innovation remains one of the most elusive outcomes in modern organizational life. Research shows in aggregate that employee engagement continues a 25-year decline. In our real-time economy, the most powerful value proposition is the ability to say "yes" to customer's unique needs, and to say it now. Only the people who work on the frontline of a business can take meaningful action in real time. Because of that, the full engagement of people is simply a competitive necessity."
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Blog / ChangeThis
How to Get Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level
By Porchlight
"The reality you face at work is that talent, results, and competence alone simply will not allow you to attain the success you deserve. It's time to stop being surprised by this, and instead take control of your professional future by applying the PVI model. The three steps in the PVI model are perception, visibility and influence. When used together, these three powerful principles will catapult you to the next level in your career and ensure future success. Through the PVI model, you will learn how to: Create the right image Increase your profile across the organization Exert influence by driving change and inspiring people Identify and recruit advocates who will speak up on your behalf Become a known, valued and desired commodity at your company
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Collaborative Organization
By Porchlight
The use of these new social and collaborative technologies and strategies are being deployed and implemented to solve many of these problems within the enterprise today. But, collaboration doesn't just benefit employees while they are at work, it also benefits them in their personal lives as well.
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Blog / ChangeThis
How to Spread Ideas: Think Like an Entrepreneur, Not Like a Crusader
By Porchlight
"While crusaders waste their time trying to impose their views on other people, entrepreneurs prefer to avoid conflict. Their goal is simply to make exchanges that are beneficial to all the parties involved. Individuals who want to improve the world and their own situation should definitely avoid the ways of the crusader. Hostility and conflicts tend to make collaboration impossible, and aggressiveness never leads to happiness. Anyone who wants to attain happiness and effectiveness must start by adopting an entrepreneurial attitude."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Can You Call It a Business If It Isn't Making Sales? Why So Many Business Owners Find Selling Difficult and What To Do About It.
By Porchlight
"Sales are only one ingredient in the marketing cake. Here's why I like this analogy: In a good cake, can you pinpoint the spot where flour ends and sugar starts? Is there any reason why your business shouldn't use this approach in marketing and sales? For the best brands, selling is not an isolated activity. It's beautifully integrated into all customer touch points. Your customer touch points can and should be mapped out, designed to be enjoyable, productive and attractive, and actively managed to maximize customer value. There are two simple questions you can ask yourself to accomplish this."
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The Secret to Self-Discipline
By Rory Vaden
"Today's work environment has been dubbed everything from the Age of Distraction and the Age of Inattention to The Multitasking Generation. The bottom line is this: regardless of your job title, we are all trying to accomplish increasingly more with increasingly less resources—whether those resources are money, time, focus, or energy. How can we achieve success—however you define it—given these constraints? I study successful people for a living, and I believe the answer can be boiled down to one word: self-discipline. It's not a breakthrough idea, and it's certainly not popular. But it's an old-school way of thinking that has unfortunately fallen out of vogue—and one that can yield measurable results when applied to the challenges of working in modern business."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Way of Identity
By Porchlight
"The myth of personal freedom—the idea that you are at liberty to pick whatever path in life you want—is the unspoken agony of the modern person. It ignores the fact that life has order, and that order bears heavily upon your choices—on what makes sense to do with the time you have. The good news is that although you can't be anything you want to be, you have more potential than you know. The order in life that affects us all is contained in a code, the identity code. Much like our biological genetic code, our identity code is born into each of us, providing a complete map of how we, as human beings, are designed to function—of how we are supposed to live—when we are living according to who we are. Within the framework your identity provides, life's seeming boundaries melt away. Genuine freedom is yours. Crack your identity code and the contours of your life will shift. You will not only come out stronger, you will come out larger. Larger in heart, larger in influence, larger in your capacity to love and be loved.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The ROE Manifesto: How to Maximize Your Return On Energy
By Porchlight
"Return on investment is the investment of time, money and energy. There is only so much time and money and just like time and money, energy can be exhausted too. It's easy to measure how much time we have and how much money we have left, but energy is something that is hard to explain, much less tie to business results. Until now."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Struggle
By Porchlight
"Just about everyone you come across today is going through some kind of struggle in their lives. Most people bear such a heavy burden, quietly and alone, so focused on making sure it looks like they have everything under control that they forget they don't have to have it all under control, and they certainly don't have to walk their road alone. That there is hope and help, if they would only look for it. You're probably going through a struggle right now, even as you read this."
Categories: changethis
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.