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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Blog / ChangeThis
Success or Suckcess: It's Up to Senior Management to Decide
By Dan Hill
"Ever since the Enlightenment, Western civilization has been on the wrong track. Eager to put the superstitions of the Dark Ages behind him, the French philosopher Rene Descartes famously declared, "I think, therefore I am. " But the truth is that over the past 25 years, the breakthroughs in brain science have systematically documented the greater reality that thought and emotion can't be artificially separated and that, in fact, the capacity for emotion proceeded thought in evolutionary terms and continues to do so with every deliberation and act an employee makes. There is no such thing as objectivity. . . . Trust is a feeling. Hope is a feeling. Loyalty is a feeling. As companies struggle to emerge from the Great Recession, now is not the time for half-measures like polite (but empty) focus groups, or for the fear that executives may have regarding exposure to the honest feelings of their employees that serves as justification for not pursuing progress. Executives who exhort employees to accept change and sacrifice their own comfort zones must surely be ready to do so themselves.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Crime and (the Lack of) Punishment
By Porchlight
"I am passionate about great crimes and the criminals who commit them. But, I often wonder if the long arm of our law, the finest justice system in the world, is at times deeply corrupt, especially with regard to the most recent financial meltdown of 2008. ... [S]everal fistfuls of ... corrupt, devious, deceptive, crooked, manipulative titans of the financial industry have somehow completely avoided any liability, responsibility or accountability for the crimes they committed—as have their accomplices in Washington, D.C. It seems that bad behavior has become an acceptable business practice. If you get caught, you only pay a fine. If you get away with it, you win. What kind of system is that?"
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Innovation You: Creating Growth
By Jeff DeGraff
"There are four fundamental forces that pursue competing values and pull us and all the constituents in our situations in different directions: Collaborate, Create, Compete and Control. These forces drive or thwart growth in dyadic oppositions: Collaborate vs. Compete and Create vs. Control. The paradox of growth is that it is born from the tension and constructive conflict of these opposing forces and their agents."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The 5,000 Year History of How We Lost Half Our Mind (Or How Blah-Blah-Blah Has Gradually Taken Over Our Lives)
By Dan Roam
"32,000 years ago, our most ancient ancestor drew a beautiful bull on the wall of a cave in a place we now call France. That bull is the oldest known human sketch ever found. In the sweep of recorded human history, it is the beginning of the "whoosh." 27,000 years later, another ancient ancestor created Hieroglyphics by drawing a similar bull on a muddy brick, and written language was born. From that moment on, pictures were doomed. Yes, humanity's five-thousand-year love affair with words has given us so much—but at what hidden cost? Over the millenia, we have gradually purged our visual mind from our understanding of language, communications, and intelligence. Just when we need pictures the most, we no longer have the ability to think visually. It's time to bring our visual mind back."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Responding Effectively to Workplace Bullying: Managing Behavior at the Time of an Attack
By Aryanne Oade
"By the end of the manifesto I hope that you will be equipped with sufficient knowledge and practical actions that you know what to do and how to do it should you become subject to workplace bullying in the future. And I also hope that reading this manifesto will assist those of you who have already been targeted by a workplace bully to be able to process your experience and find relief from the nagging self-doubts that often form part of the aftermath of an experience of workplace bullying."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Reinventing the Wheel: Creating Lifetime Customers
By Chris Zane
"These types of relationships are not easily formed nor are they formed overnight. They require exceptional care, attention, and a focus on continuously exceeding expectations. At Zane's, where we have chosen to compete on service rather than on price alone, it means providing unparalleled customer service. We can never accept an unhappy customer, nor look at unsatisfied customer as an inevitable part of doing business. This method goes beyond the mindset of making an unhappy customer happy or simply matching the offers of our competitors. Creating lifetime customers requires that you offer every customer or potential customer more service than they consider reasonable. Further, it means that you actively solicit customer feedback about what you could be doing better and use that information to expand and tweak your offerings to best service the customer."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
How Unplanning Your Business Can Make It Happen Faster
By Ian Sanders, David Sloly
"We gave a talk at South By South West Interactive in 2010 and asked a room full of entrepreneurs who had written a business plan if they had actually looked at it since launch. A resounding 'no' came back. So we asked if the business they now owned and ran looked anything like the one they had written about in the business plan. Another 'no. ' They all admitted that they had written the plan simply because they thought that is what you're supposed to do. They had exerted great effort on a document that they would not look at again. How does this make sense. And this is from entrepreneurs that made their business idea happen, these were the successful ones. So what of the thousands that started to write a plan, got a little stuck and gave up. What ideas have the world been deprived of because they believed they needed a fully detailed plan to make that thing real. [. . . ] The problem with writing a fixed plan is that you can get stuck in amber mode. You get so bogged down with hypotheticals, financial modeling and revenue projections that your cool business idea gets stuck in a spreadsheet and the light never goes green.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Power of Trust and Mistrust
By Porchlight
"When trust levels are high, so is the quality and performance of business—and the reverse is also true. These facts are demonstrated dramatically when we look at the financial outcomes of companies that are among the best to work for and their peer companies that aren't. Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For have roughly double the rates of return, income, return on assets, profits, stock market returns and employee and customer retention rates compared to peer companies."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Go Do: How Hard Can It Be?
By Porchlight
"It's important to realize that the only true barrier in life is you. Sure, there can be obstacles that you face every day and people who are impediments to achieving your goals, but ultimately, you will be the reason that you achieve or fail. I quite often tell folks that they have to "Go Do." Frequently, on social media, you will see that two-word charge from me because I hope it will click with folks in need of motivation. There are so many people out there with the "woe is me" attitude; what they must realize is that they are causing the woe and they are the only conduit for change."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Guarding the Guards: Crushing the Bureaucratic Rules that Limit Success
By Tom Rieger
"Fear is destroying companies. Or more specifically, fear of loss is causing companies to destroy themselves. As managers are forced to do more with less, contend with limited resources, or battle for headcount and budget, many will begin to build walls to help protect their ability to meet their own local goals. Unfortunately, sometimes those walls become so high that those inside lose sight of the ultimate outcome. Their world becomes defined by the piece, and not the puzzle. With the best of intentions, barriers are born, particularly if the rules that are created make it difficult for others outside of the silo to succeed."
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.