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
Mission Impossible: How to Avoid Procrastination
By Helene Segura
"According to psychologists, procrastination is the act of wanting to feel good now. Basically, procrastination is the adult version of a three-year-old's 'I don't wanna!" tantrum. Procrastination can make life miserable. If we put off projects, phone calls, emails, or whatever the task may be, we end up working at breakneck pace in order to complete it at the eleventh hour. It's unnecessary stress that we bring upon ourselves. ... The research shows that overcoming procrastination comes down to thought control and self-regulation. It's all about mind management. Realizing that you're dragging your feet is the first key. Once this realization occurs, you're ready to play some strategic mind games with yourself."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Getting China Right
By Arthur R. Kroeber
"China's spectacular economic growth has been one of the most significant events of the past two decades. In a single generation the nation has vaulted from impoverished backwater to the world's second-biggest economy and biggest trading nation. Its growth has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, transformed global supply chains, and created great wealth. But the introduction of China's enormous working population into the world labor force has also helped depress wages in developed countries, and its huge capital flows have brought a new and potentially destabilizing force into the world's financial markets. For all these reasons and more, it's crucial to get China right. We need to understand how China works (and how it doesn't), why it works the way it does, where it might be headed in the coming years, and what this means for the rest of the world."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Fast Coaching for Busy People: How to Coach in 10 Minutes or Less
By Michael Bungay Stanier
"As things have gotten faster and more complex, coaching's importance has only continued to rise. With Millennials now more than 50% of the workforce, every organization talks about the importance of managers and leaders being able to coach. But who has the time? Honestly. Sure, we'd all love to sit down for a nice 45 minute chat with everyone on the team if we could, but most of us don't even get to do that with the people we love in our life. At work, people are over-busy and overwhelmed. Meetings fill the day, and emails clog our inbox. And there's work to do as well. Don't despair. Coaching's something everyone can do, do quickly, and do in a way that will have a significant impact on performance and satisfaction. But to make it work for the time-crunched manager, you need to follow three principles"
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Closing the Decision Quality Gap
By Carl Spetzler, Hannah Winter, Jennifer Meyer
"One of the virtues of DQ is that it allows us to know if we've made a good decision at the time we are making it. If we've correctly followed the process, we can confidently state that 'We made the best possible choice given our alternatives, the available information, future uncertainties, and the things we can control. ' That's contrary to conventional thinking, which confuses a good decision with a good outcome. Most will say, 'We cannot know how good a decision is until we've seen the results. " That makes no sense in a world of uncertainty and unforeseeable events that decision makers cannot control. A good decision, for example, might be undermined by poor implementation. Or events on the far side of the world may foil a decision maker's best-made plans. The reverse is also true: a poor-quality decision may have a good outcome thanks to good luck. Imagine someone driving home after too many drinks. Does the fact that he arrived home without causing an accident make his decision to get behind the wheel a good one.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Ending Pay Secrecy: Why Keeping Salaries a Secret Leads to Disengagement and Decreased Performance, and How Revealing Pay Information Can Actually Increase Performance
By David Burkus
"Do you know how your pay compares to your peers? Probably not. You probably don't talk about it much. Most Americans are more comfortable talking about their sex lives than their salary lives. And most employers are happy to keep that secrecy going. According to a 2011 report from the Institute for Women's Policy Research, about half of American workers said that discussing salary information is either discouraged or outright prohibited. The assumed reason behind these prohibitions is that if everybody knew what everybody got paid, then all hell would break loose. There would be complaints. There would be arguments. There might even be a few people who quit. But what if secrecy is actually the reason for the strife, and what would happen if we removed that secrecy?"
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Reading Books Won't Future-Proof You. Here's What Will.
By Erika Andersen
"I know way too many senior people who think they're great leaders because they read lots of leadership books, or who think they're staying abreast of the changes in their industry because they're reading about those changes. Real learning is almost always at least somewhat uncomfortable. It's challenging. It's figuring out how to operate in new ways; questioning your assumptions; putting new ideas into practice. Real learning takes you out of the tried-and-true, and into that murky, disturbing land of I'm-not-very-good-at-this. And, I submit to you, that kind of learning is central to our success today."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Am I Authentic Yet?
By Karissa Thacker
"We humans love some words because we don't really know what they mean. Therefore, we can throw them around and project whatever we feel is important onto them. Two such ambiguous words that possess an aura of gravitas and perceived importance are authentic and leadership. I am hard-pressed to say one is thrown around more frequently or with more fervor than the other. Put the two words together and you have the term authentic leadership, which is then vague to the second power. If you listen carefully to the election chatter and everyday conversations, the only thing we know for sure about authentic leadership is that it is a good thing. This presidential election cycle we even have a new vague diagnosis: he or she has an authenticity problem. This lack of clarity does not serve aspiring authentic leaders. We need a pragmatic definition of authentic leadership that we can work with. That is my goal with this manifesto."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The New Way to Get Noticed
By Barbara Cave Henricks, Rusty Shelton
"In a sense, the new media environment feels like the Wild West. On television, many of today's highest rated programs are reality-based and feature families who do things like procreate excessively or become famous when their patriarch represents OJ Simpson in court. Twitter helped Paris Hilton become a household name after a sex tape first put her in the public eye. And what about the concept of going viral. Few of us can forget the moment in 2015 when frenzy erupted over whether a particular dress was blue and black or white and gold, a "story" that temporarily pushed aside substantive news. It's easy to be cynical, we get it. On the flip side, this new environment has given us access we wouldn't otherwise have to many of the world's most influential minds. From Reddit's 'Ask Me Anything' to the TED talks featured on YouTube, new media tools have helped create and given us access to an unprecedented number of experts. Further, they have whetted our collective appetite for more. Not only is there opportunity to create content and display it on the virtual billboard that exists online, but there is a chance to create a strategy for capturing even more value from your messages.
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Blog / ChangeThis
There is Nothing Wrong with You: The Entrepreneurial Personality Type (EPT) and the Future of Everything
By Alex Charfen
"From the very beginning of human society, a part of the population has consistently driven our positive evolution. They were the first to discover new territories. The first to explore tools and language. The first to form culture and government and technologies. The have made enormous contributions to the world, and yet today they are often the first to be medicated, jailed, or put in rehab. They are the Entrepreneurial Personality Type (EPT), and until now this subpopulation has been overlooked by society. In order for us to maximize their potential—and that of humanity—we have to better understand these unique individuals, learn how best to protect and support them, and even come to the realization that we may be looking at them in the mirror."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Culturally Intelligent Innovation: Diversity CQ = Better Solutions
By David Livermore
"Everyone seems to be talking about diversity these days. Tech companies have pulled back the curtain to reveal how white and male they are. Indian firms are scrambling to appoint female board members in order to abide by new laws. European and North American multinationals are hiring executives from emerging markets. And even Hollywood is admitting that you're more likely to see an alien on screen than an Asian or Latina female. Diversity has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have. And innovation is one of the benefits most consistently lauded to sell people on diversity. It sounds promising. Rather than approaching a problem from one perspective, you gain the opportunity to see things more broadly. The problem is, diversity rarely works out that way. [. . . ] Diversity is undoubtedly one of the best sources of innovation. But it's not automatic. Diversity by itself does not lead to better solutions. Cultural intelligence, or CQ, is the differentiating factor. CQ is a research-based way of measuring and improving effectiveness for working across cultures.
Categories: changethis