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
The Customer Room: Grow Your Business by Improving Customers' Lives
By Jeanne Bliss
"The Customer Room is the glue that unites a leadership team to focus and improve customers' lives to earn the right to growth. Building a customer room to step leaders and the organization through your customers' lives and walk in their shoes monthly, quarterly, and annually is one of the most robust actions you can take to align leaders and drive customer-driven action. It engages leaders personally in customers' lives and unites them to make decisions. It establishes an accountability forum that transcends most governance meetings on the subject, where projects are reported but engaging in understanding and improving customers' lives is not always built-in."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Genius of Teams
By Rich Karlgaard, Michael S. Malone
"More than ever, business success now comes down to teams. Of course, teams have always been vitally important. One hundred thousand years ago, hunting teams were vital to the survival of early man. With the rise of agricultural civilization, teams were the basic operating unit of social hierarchies and communities. But for the last few millennia, while remaining a crucial building block, teams have been largely made subordinate to larger social organizations: armies, governments, bureaucracies, corporations, etc. But the rise of the digital age, the Internet, and the global economy has changed all of that. As with many other cultural institutions, technology is beginning to turn organizations upside down. "
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Fix: A How-to Guide for Breaking Bad Habits That May Well Wind Up Killing Your Business.
By Chris Kneeland
"The drugs that businesses are addicted to are discounts, coupons, BOGOs, off-price flyers, free-with-purchase offers. . . the list of ways to get that short-term sales high goes on. Too many good marketers are engaging in bad, self-defeating, costly behavior, with an over-reliance on incentives, and all the accompanying mass advertising required to promote them. If you have to continuously discount your product or service, or scream to the largest possible audience in order to get people to notice you, and to care enough about you to buy—then your business isn't healthy. Either you're offering goods or services people don't really want, or your brand is failing to demonstrate a compelling value proposition that meets consumer expectations for your category. Brand leaders across North America have become overly fixated on dealing with the symptoms of their pain, rather than addressing the core issues that cause them to have to resort to bribery just to get people to buy. And the proliferation of incentives and advertising has become so bad that many businesses are now overdosing on these short-term stimulants.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
#notarule: winning at business and life by breaking rules that don't exist
By Jason Kotecki
"Blessed are the rule breakers. They shalt inherit the Future. We have always admired the great renegades of business, brave souls who dared to deny the status quo, defy the odds, and pioneer a new normal. Nicolas Tesla. Richard Branson. Tony Stark. One thing all great titans of industry have in common is this: they were able to identify rules that don't exist and had the courage to break them. Of course, there are plenty of rules that DO exist. If you commit fraud or neglect to pay taxes, I hope you look good in an orange jumpsuit. But the rules that DON'T exist greatly outnumber the ones that do. History is filled with examples of those who profited greatly by dispensing with so-called 'rules.'"
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Blog / ChangeThis
How to Have it All: A Career, Kids, Free Time, and a Full Night's Sleep.
By Laura VanderKam
"I like to think I'm a good steward of my hours—I write and speak about time management for a living!—but in terms of having space for what matters to me, I'm far from the only one. The popular narrative about women, work, and life is full of what I call 'recitations of dark moments': these lamentations about missed soccer games, or waking up at 5:15 a.m. to do laundry. They imply that working motherhood requires becoming some maxed out mess. And yet the reality is that women with big careers have far more balanced lives than the popular narrative conveys. That's good news for anyone wondering if it's possible to have a career, kids, free time, and even a full night's sleep. It is possible to have it all, not just in theory, but in how we live our day-to-day lives."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
AIWATT and the Empty Boat
By Marshall Goldsmith
"I have a first principle for becoming the person you want to be. Follow it and it will dramatically shrink your daily volume of stress, conflict, unpleasant debate, and wasted time. It is phrased in the form of a question you should be asking yourself in any situation where you must choose to either engage or 'let it go.' Am I willing, at this time, to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic? It's a question that pops into my head so often each day that I've turned the first five words into an acronym, AIWATT (it rhymes with "say what"). Like the physician's principle, 'First, do no harm,' it doesn't require you to do anything, merely avoid doing something foolish."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Acceptable Loss: A Formula For How to Fail Quickly and Cheaply, and Ultimately Succeed
By Paul B. Brown
"If you looked at the way entrepreneurs act, you would be tempted to conclude there is not a lot to be learned from studying them. You would have to be Bill Gates to start Microsoft and Oprah Winfrey to begin Harpo. But if you look at the way they think, you will discover amazing similarities. When successful entrepreneurs head off into the unknown—and there is nothing more unknown than starting a new company—they ... reduce it to a formula. They: Act. Learn. Build (off that learning.) And Repeat. But notice what is going on, because the steps are small, and so is what it puts at risk. It's a way of keep potential failures from being devastating."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Leadership Muscles For The New Multi-Polar World
By Gurnek Bains
"Globalization until very recently meant Western companies exporting their products, leaders and ways of doing business around the world. That is now changing and today executives face a bewildering level of uncertainty in the multi-polar world that is fast emerging. If you are doing business in Africa, you are now likely to face significant competition from local players, as well as from Indian or Chinese companies that have emerged onto the global stage. The leadership teams of many multi-nationals were often literally a pale reflection of the international community, but slowly increasing diversity is evident in boardrooms and senior teams. But how do you deepen this diversity and make it work productively? ... A range of convergent evidence from neuroscience, behavioral genetics, values surveys, as well as our own research with thousands of leaders globally, identifies certain Cultural DNA themes for each of the world's main societies and their associated leadership implications."
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Blog / ChangeThis
THE PENGUINS ATE YOUR CHEESE!
By BJ Gallagher
"The penguins were in trouble and they knew it. For many years they had ruled the Land of Penguins with unquestioned authority. They had built a great enterprise that grew and thrived in the Sea of Organizations. Penguins were seen as models of success, and for a long time their world was orderly, predictable, and safe. But there came a time when things began to change In the Land of Penguins..."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The New Leadership Paradigm—Everyone, Every time, No Exception!
By Lior Arussy
"Organizations and leaders are facing today the convergence of three mega trends that are reshaping their value proposition, their customer relationships, and their talent engagement. Alone, each of these mega trends is a significant challenge to face. Together they present either an existential threat to the business or an evolutionary opportunity. And, by and large, most leaders are neither ready nor equipped to address these changes."
Categories: changethis