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 End of the Roundabout Way: Why Quality of Life Will Finally Take Center Stage
By Porchlight
"The next quantum leap will occur when a critical mass of people realizes that one of the major purposes of life is JOY. Until then, most people will accept an ersatz, an imitation, or a roundabout way of creating joy. Is JOY a BMW? (That's the advertising campaign the company has been running). Not really. Sorry, but no. With all due respect to BMW, joy has nothing to do with a (great!) metal box on wheels. That's transportation. And if you do not feel joy unless you have money to buy this car, you're really screwed. Because next year, joy is going to be your own private Boeing. Or a trip to Mars. Or watching shooting stars on Jupiter."
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Right Fights: Making Conflict Productive
By Saj-Nicole Joni
"Your job as a leader isn't to eliminate dissonance–your job is to make conflict productive. Right Fights enable you and your team to stop fighting about everything that doesn't matter and start fighting, in a high-minded manner, about what really matters. I promise you this: Master the competencies of Right Fights and you will achieve sustainable breakthroughs and effect real organizational change. The fuel of human invention is found in dissonance, diversity, competition, and even conflict. That's how you win in the marketplace. Start by asking yourself: Is this the right fight to fight?"
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It's All About Them: Marketing to the Digitally Empowered Buyer
By Porchlight
"Thanks to the digital age, today's buyers can research, select and purchase their products without getting you involved in the decision. You won't even know they were buying. Everything shifted. Your choices: shift, too—or get left in the past. We all know that people buy because of their perceptions. Today's perceptions are created through the Internet and word of mouth. You no longer have tight control over the way your market sees your business, the information that is available about you or the buzz about your brand. Marketing, the way we've always done it, doesn't work anymore."
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Your CQ: Why It Might Be the Most Important Number You Don't Know!
By David Livermore
"Everything has gone global. Communication. Work. Politics. Relationships. Faith. We get it. In fact, by this point, the statement almost sounds a bit trite. Any organization knows that the word "global" better find its way into its messaging and strategy. But how do we move beyond mantras about cultural sensitivity and global awareness to successfully adapting to various cultures while simultaneously remaining true to ourselves? Both sides of the equation are essential—being true to ourselves and adapting to different cultures. And being true to our organizational identity and brand while also responding to an onslaught of culturally diverse markets."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Brains, Bones, and Nerves: The Only Three Things an Enterprise Leader Should Focus On
By Rajeev Peshawaria
"The key is to control and shape the three most important levers of sustainable business growth—the Brains, the Bones, and the Nerves. The brains of a business are its vision and strategy, and here the enterprise leader must shape and set direction. The bones are the organizational architecture, and here the enterprise leader must design the organization in order to execute the strategy. The nerves refer to the culture and climate of the organization, and here the enterprise leader must foster a culture of longlasting excellence. Just as the human body needs all three systems—the brain, bones, and nerves—functioning in perfect harmony to maximize longevity and performance, a business needs its strategy, architecture, and culture to work in harmony in order to maximize results. As an enterprise leader, you should focus on these three as your most important focus areas; everything else must be delegated."
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We First: How Consumers and Brands Can Partner to Build a Better World
By Simon Mainwaring
"We First capitalism posits that we can no longer accept the myopic, short-term, profit-for-profit's sake practice of capitalism we invite corporations and consumers to engage in today. Allowing every individual, every investor, every corporation, and every nation to think solely about its own self-interests and its own profits is not the solution to creating a more peaceful, prosperous, and equitable world. The transformation from Me First to We First is no longer an option, because we now live in an interconnected, complex, globalized world of 7 billion people, all of whom need a portion of the resources and the prosperity that the Earth provides. Capitalism can no longer be an elite economic system whose results fund a limited group of people, leaving billions of others living without opportunity or hope. Our connections to each other are growing ever tighter, such that the actions of a single individual, bank, corporation, or nation can have an immediate and deleterious impact on millions of other people.
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What If They Listened to Entrepreneurs?
By Henry R. Nothhaft
"Before any significant and sustained increase in the creation of good middle-class jobs can take place, the voice of the entrepreneur who is the source of all breakthrough innovation and job growth must be heard. Sadly, however, entrepreneurs are just about the only Americans without a voice in Washington. Big Business certainly has a voice. So does labor, as do teachers, retailers, insurers, doctors, environmentalists and just about every interest group you can think of. Only entrepreneurs lack an effective organized voice. This despite the fact that, as the distinguished economist Jonathan Hughes once put it, entrepreneurs are 'the vital few' upon whom all of society depends for economic progress."
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TouchPoints: Why the Interruptions That Drive Us Crazy Just Might Be the Most Productive Opportunities We Have Every Day
By Douglas Conant, Mette Norgaard
"Some days it feels like the information age has morphed into the interruption age. But what if those interruptions turned out to be our best opportunity to make a difference in our workplaces. As leaders, we make choices all day, every day. The "knock on the door" happens over and over again in some form – phone calls, meetings, emails, and text messages with questions to answer, concerns to address, problems to solve, and fires to put out. There are big issues and small issues, planned sessions and surprises, and they come at us endlessly and from every direction. We have to make decisions without having all the available information, and we need to make them right now. The workload is expanding, and the time we have to deal with each issue is shrinking. But what if we could step back and look at all those interactions with a fresh perspective. What if, instead of seeing them as interfering with our work, we were to look at them as latent leadership moments. What if these moments were the answer to transformational leadership in today's busy world.
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Put Your Mindset to Work: The Secret Weapon in Winning, Keeping, and Flourishing in the Best Jobs
By Paul Stoltz, James Reed
"What does it really take to win, keep, and flourish in the best jobs? Let's begin by shattering a sacred assumption. If you want a good job, it's all about qualifications. Put another way, the best way to increase your chances of getting a great job is by upgrading your skills. Right? Wrong! That is, at least according to the thousands of the world's top employers we formally surveyed. Their answers to these four questions can and should have profound implications on your entire career. [...] Mindset utterly trumps Skillset. Not by a little, but by a landslide. That's why trying to win the best jobs by doing yet-more skills training is like training for a marathon by doing sprints and hurdles. It may help, but it's not going to win the race."
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CLEARED HOT!
By Vernice Armour, Vernice Armour
"You HAVE permission to Engage! Notice, the emphasis is on the word 'have.' That's because you already possess your own permission to engage. I'm not giving it to you. In fact, I can't. You've always had it; you just have to release it. It's up to YOU to make the decision to engage. Once you have given yourself permission, you are Cleared Hot to create realities from possibilities beyond your expectations. What does Cleared Hot mean? Well, in military terms, it means you have permission to fire your weapons on your target. During training that means you're shooting at wooden tanks or old worn out tires. In real combat, you're firing on the enemy. An enemy that in my case was trying to shoot my attack helicopter out of the sky. In civilian life, Cleared Hot the process of acting on a Breakthrough Mentality (BTM)."
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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.