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.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Leading Innovation From the New Middle
By George E. L. Barbee
"There is a new wave of innovation taking place inside many organizations that gives people an opportunity to make important, innovative contributions to business and to society. My beliefs about innovation have evolved and are now centered on three basic tenets: Most of us can be far more innovative in business than we give ourselves credit for—especially when we realize innovation is a lot broader than just invention. We can quickly learn to more innovatively observe and then transfer these innovations from one category to another. Being more innovative is, in fact, learnable and even self-teachable. [...] Innovation is more than an "I" thing... it's a "WE" thing. It is true that we must make a real, conscious effort to improve our own innovation skills. But there are also important changes that we can and should bring about in the organization. Together, this will allow us to begin leading innovation from the new middle."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Networks Are Eating the World
By Barry Libert, Megan Beck, Jerry Wind
"In the age of digital networks, businesses' abilities to create and share intangible assets, such as ideas, software, and relationships that are owned by each of us—the Network—has grown exponentially. Further, digital networks allow organizations to access assets that exist outside of their traditional boundaries. Uber is a transportation company without cars. Airbnb is a hotelier without properties. Amazon is retailer with stores. Network orchestrators—as we call them—are eating the world as we know it, changing the very nature of industries around the world. The key is their ability to reach and leverage each and every one of us and all our relationships, information and assets. This access to and relationship with us and what we have (cars and homes), do (labor) and know (relationships and expertise) are critical to their success—as are the digital platforms that they use to enable us to share what we have with others. In short, where Thomas Friedman wrote the book that laid the ground for this network revolution—The World is Flat—and Marc Andreessen followed on with his 2011 article—'Software is Eating the World'—it is now clear that those were the foundation for today's reality—networks are eating the world.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Becoming Principle
By Cathy Salit
"As adults—in the workplace and elsewhere—when we're asked to do something we've never done before, when we need to grow beyond our current capabilities, we can tap into what we naturally did as children, and perform our way to who we're becoming. For adults, though, play, performance, and pretending can feel anything but natural. We got the message in a myriad of ways as we left toddlerhood: Play is for kids, not for big people. We're supposed to color inside the lines; know the correct answer; understand how to behave and fit in. And there's no denying the importance of that learning—obviously we need to learn how to safely cross the street, say our ABCs and wake up an iPad. But this need to get it right eventually takes over. We learn what we need to in school and by the time we get into the job market, the support we got to learn developmentally as children is long gone. As an adult, it is embarrassing to not know. There are repercussions if we don't get it right. We feel stupid, and we make others feel stupid if they don't 'have it together.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
A New Territory of Maturity: Updating Our Stories To Enhance Our Lives
By Rosamund Stone Zander
"In those endless years it took you to grow out of childhood and stand on your own two feet, you learned about the world in doses. Some of what you learned (and thought you understood) has evolved over time with added experience, but some of the discoveries you made and the stories you constructed around them as a child, even as young as three, have stayed the same, child-like and unchanged, no matter how many years have passed. [...] That's living life in the past, seeing the world around you through a child's eyes in a child's story. You've been walking around in kid's sneakers and they're much too small for you. Here's how to fit yourself out with good pair of hiking boots to go the distance."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
STOP Branding and START Activating (Part II of "A Manifesto for Thinking Small")
By Craig Wilson
"Part 1 of this series explored the inefficacy of 'Big Idea' campaign marketing and noted the success of brands practicing the contrary, described as a process of nurturing the character of an organization. Part 2 is presented as a manifesto to marketers and brand strategists to STOP Branding, to stop trying to create demand, to adopt a different frame of mind, to think in terms of relationship activation by being true to a set of principles that will connect them to existing, latent demand. Marketers don't generate demand. Great companies spend their time understanding what and where latent demand exists and build the products, services, and user experiences that connect to that demand. They delve into their founding principles and develop, invent, or innovate goods and services specifically driven and defined by those principles. Don't misinterpret this effort. It's not a matter of chasing market opportunity. It's as much an inward journey as it is recognition of the current state of any given market.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
KNOW YOUR EVERYDATA: How To Avoid Being Misled By the "Little Data" You Consume Every Day
By John H. Johnson PhD, Mike Gluck
"Status reports. Emails. Weather reports. From the moment your alarm jolts you awake, you're bombarded with data. Here's an eye-opening fact for you: the amount of data you likely consume in a day—34 gigabytes—would fill dozens of pickup trucks if you printed it all out. So what's the problem with all this data? This: the majority of numbers you read in newspapers, hear on TV, and see at work are either wrong or misleading—or both."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Internet as Art
By Virginia Heffernan
"In the last thirty years, the Internet has come to be regarded two ways: As an unstoppable alien invasion, fast destroying our minds and hearts, and also as the air we breathe—transparent and somehow beneath our notice. [. . . ] In fact, the Internet, in my view, is a massive and collaborative work of art—something billions of us contribute to every millisecond, with every Instagram photo, every 'like,' every message-board post, every tweet, every eBay review, every streamed video or song. We make, consume, and review art—photography, design, poetry, prose, film, and music. Why do we do this so committedly—compulsively, even—while also disparaging as trivial or evil the whole enterprise. What if, just for an hour or so, we suspended the assumption that the Internet is nothing but a public health hazard or a tool of the surveillance state or a means to a venal end. What if we're right in the moment we post to Snapchat or Pinterest—that the Internet is play, is expression, is challenge, is a call to greater eloquence, grander originality, most expansive community, and shrewder gameplay.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
It's Time to Fix It!
By Roger Connors, Tom Smith, Craig Hickman, Tracy O. Skousen, Marcus Nicolls
"When you get accountability wrong, don't expect anything else to go right in your job, on your team, or in the organization as a whole. Treating only the symptoms of dysfunction that stem from poor accountability practices will cause you to lose time and miss opportunities to get real traction towards the results you want. When you get accountability right, everything else will go right as you execute, overcome obstacles, and work to get results."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Social Business Mandate
By Clara Shih
"As venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has said, 'Software is eating the world. ' We live in an age in which every aspect of our lives from physical devices to offline services is being digitized; the impact of social media on consumers and business alike today is as profound as the rise of Google 15 years ago. Yet, many business leaders and CEOs are thinking about what I call Social Business in exactly the WRONG ways. The mistake leaders make is over-delegating social and digital efforts to fairly entry-level marketing and customer service teams. Senior executives then confuse having a social media team with having a social business, and have a detrimental misconception that these efforts are far from the business's core initiatives. In reality, business leaders need to personally own and drive these digital and social initiatives. To fully become a Social Business, an organization must truly embrace digital opportunities on every platform; and this transformation must be led by C-Suite Executives.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Sweet Spot of Purpose: A Three-Legged Stool for Productivity and Success
By Dan Pontefract
"Far too many corporate social responsibility statements and annual reports claim, 'Our employees are our most important asset.' Is that what we are? Assets? No, we are not assets. We are not human capital. We are not headcount. You cannot count me. We are the individuals who make up our organizations. We are team members. We are co-workers. We are colleagues. We are individuals. We are both leaders and followers. We strive for purpose in our lives, and in the organizations that we work for. It matters not what level we reside on in the corporate hierarchy. We are all on the same team in defining and enacting that purpose. Team members are not an asset, but rather the key link to improving society. The importance of purpose on the lives of employees, and for the betterment of society, has become table stakes. Indeed, the individuals that make up the organization are its most important advantage."
Categories: changethis