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
Effective Leaders Create Discomfort
By Marcia Reynolds
"The best leaders make us feel unsure of ourselves. They help us recognize that what we think is true, is not. Their reflections make us stop and think. Then their questions break down our frames. They create these disruptions with courage, care, respect, and a firm belief in our highest potential. Although we are uncomfortable, this moment of uncertainty allows us to formulate a broader view of what we can do and who we can be. These leaders strengthen people as well as organizations."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Growth Hacker Wake Up Call: How Growth Hacking Rewrote Marketing's Best Practices
By Ryan Holiday
"The term 'growth hacker' has many different meanings for different people, here's my definition: A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are emails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like "branding" and "mind share," growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a startup from nothing to something."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Entrepreneur's Journey
By Kevin Kruse
"My call to entrepreneurship happened in an unusual manner, when I was just 12 years old. A mysterious one-armed man approached me and set me off on a journey that would eventually include the launch of several companies—some successful, some not. This manifesto both celebrates and encourages entrepreneurship because we need entrepreneurs to fight the dragons that roam the globe. Yes, dragons. They sit in plain sight: civil wars, extreme poverty, disease, water scarcity, domestic violence, illiteracy, and so many others. While the work of relief agencies and social welfare groups is vital—especially in response to acute crises—for lasting change we need modern-day heroes who courageously take personal risks as they build new companies."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Driving Results Through An Organizational Constitution
By S Chris Edmonds
"Today, people spend more time at work than with their best friends or family members. When their workplace is an inspiring, respectful, creative place to be, people engage deeply, serve customers effectively, and produce quality goods and services consistently. The problem? Most leaders put greater thought into their organization's products and services than they do its culture. Yet culture drives everything that happens in an organization each day."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Working Across Cultures and Knowing When to Shut Up
By Erin Meyer
"Today, whether we work with colleagues in Dusseldorf or Dubai, Braslia or Beijing, New York or New Delhi, we are all part of a global network (real or virtual, physical or electronic) where success requires navigating through wildly different cultural realities. Unless we know how to decode other cultures and avoid easy-to-fall-into cultural traps, we are easy prey to misunderstanding, needless conflict, and deals that fall apart. Yet most managers have little understanding of how local culture impacts global interaction. Even those who are culturally informed, travel extensively, and have lived abroad often have few strategies for dealing with the cross-cultural complexity that affects their team's day-to-day effectiveness. Often the cross-cultural challenges that arise could be avoided by learning a few basic principles. For example, the answer to the simple question, 'When should I speak and when should I be quiet?' varies dramatically from one culture to another."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Humble Pulpit: Leadership Lessons from Pope Francis
By Jeffrey A. Krames
"As someone who has studied leaders and the topic of leadership for more than three decades, I have long since believed that humility is the most under-rated of all leadership qualities. As a member of the publishing community for the same length of time, I have been baffled that no (commercial) publisher has ever published a book that instructs managers, leaders, and aspiring leaders how to become more humble. However, this should not come as a big surprise. That's because there has not been an inspiring, humble figure that could be used as a shining example of this key leadership quality. Until now. Since Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis in March of 2012, he has shown the world a new way to lead. Not with bluster or bravado, but with humility and humanity. He has, without a doubt, emerged as the most humble leader on the world stage. There isn't even a close second."
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The Quest for True Value: An Investor's Manifesto to Turn On, Tune In, Get High.
By Guy Spier
"When I discovered Warren Buffett, a light went on in my head. It did not take me long to realize that I wanted a life that was more like his than mine. Determined to transform my life, I began a long journey of discovery. It lead to my having a charity lunch with Warren Buffett at Smith & Wollensky's in 2008, but it also came with many costly mistakes and hard earned, but valuable lessons. [...] Today, I might not quite tap dance to work as well as Warren Buffett does, but I've gotten a lot better. My suggestion to you: lighten up. Stop working so hard and focusing on the money and your next promotion all the time. Start having fun while you work instead. That joy will show in your eyes, and the promotion and that raise will take care of themselves, along with career and life success."
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Watch Your F#*k%^g Language!: Why the Analogies We Embrace Drive Success and Failure, and How to Choose Better Ones
By John Pollack
"The analogical instinct is the human urge to compare what we encounter to what we know and, based on that comparison, jump to conclusions. This rush to judgment is a good thing, most of the time. It's an evolutionary advantage that helped our ancestors perceive the difference between a floating log and a floating crocodile; those who failed to see the similarity tended to get eaten at higher rates, and reproduce less. ... Eons later, analogies still drive our decision-making as individuals, as organizations, as companies and even as nations. ... In fact, a survey of history's greatest innovators, from Copernicus to Gutenberg to Darwin to the Wright Brothers, all achieved their greatest breakthroughs in large part through the effective use of analogy. Leaders as diverse as Winston Churchill, Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King also used analogy to great effect, persuading millions that they could change the world, no matter what challenges might lie ahead."
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Work As We Know It Is Dead
By Jacob Morgan
"If you look up the word 'manager' in the dictionary you will find synonyms such as: 'slave-driver, boss, or zookeeper.' If you look up 'employee' in the dictionary you get back: 'cog, servant, and slave.' If you look up 'work' in the dictionary you get: 'drudgery, struggle, or daily-grind.' So, we are all cogs working for a slave-driver as we go about our daily drudgery. That's just lovely isn't it? This is how we have literally built our organizations over the past hundred or so years and this is exactly what I mean when I say 'work as we know it is dead.' The idea that 'work sucks' is engrained in almost every aspect of our professional lives. Employees are no longer cogs, work should not be drudgery, and managers can no longer be slave-drivers. This isn't a manifesto about following your passions or being happy, it's a call to action to change and evolve our organizations to reflect the world that they operate in."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Improvise Your Way to Success
By Steve Yastrow
"Consider the last time a hard sell worked on you—or when you were last 'convinced' to do something. Having a hard time coming up with an instance? While a common sales practice, an overt sales pitch is more likely to cause a customer to run rather than to buy. [...] The bottom line is that no one wants to be assaulted by one-way communication (a sales pitch). Rather, customers need to be invited into two-way conversations where we can be heard and understood. Whether you're selling a product, your services, or yourself—you must learn to persuade differently in order to close more deals. You must learn to ditch the pitch."
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