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
Design for the Other 90%
By Paul Polak
"Ninety percent of the world's designers spend all their time working on solutions to the problems of the richest 10 percent of the world's customers. A revolution in design is needed to reverse this silly ratio and reach the other 90 percent. In my book, Out of Poverty, I talk about how this can be done. I pull stories from some of the 17 million people I've help lift from poverty with the organization I founded 25 years ago, International Development Enterprises. More recently, we have incorporated an organization called D-Rev: Design for the Other Ninety Percent, whose mission is to create the design revolution."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
A Good Food Manifesto for America
By Will Allen
"It is time and past time for this nation, this government, to react to the dangers inherent in its flawed farm and food policies and to reverse course from subsidizing wealth to subsidizing health. We have to stop paying the largest farm subsidies to large growers of unsustainable and inedible crops like cotton. We have to stop paying huge subsidies to Big Corn, Big Soy and Big Chem to use prime farmland to grow fuel, plastics and fructose. We have to stop using federal and state agencies and institutions as taxpayer-funded research arms for the very practices that got us into this mess. We have to start subsidizing health and well-being by rewarding sustainable practices in agriculture and assuring a safe, adequate and wholesome food supply to all our citizens. And we need to start this reform process now, as part of the national stimulus toward economic recovery."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Hub Mentality: Shifting From Business Transactions To Community Interaction
By Stephen Palmer, Carl Woolston
"It's becoming increasingly difficult to catch the eyes of the consumer. Once you have them you have to keep them. Technology has transformed relationships between businesses and customers. Now, your job isn't just to transact sales. Your job is to cultivate trust, build community, and interact with your customers on an ongoing basis. Your job is to become a hub, a center of influence that creates value for your customers on their terms. Sales and profit are the result of fulfilling customer desires through educational, valuable content and remarkable products and services. Do this and your loyal community members become your advocates and evangelists."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
10 Lessons Learned in Igniting Word of Mouth Movements
By Brains on Fire
"It's official: the word 'campaign' is becoming more and more scarce as it relates to the new world of marketing. And rightly so. People want to be engaged with a company, organization or cause beyond a short-term gimmick. So we're starting to see the emergence of the term 'movement,' which makes a lot more sense. Let's compare the two."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Cracking the Genetic Code: A New Way Forward For Corporations
By Anne McCrossan
"Synapses are natural, visceral, reactions connecting the soft organs of the body to the central nervous system. They can be trusted to be "on the money," and most corporate bodies—human or otherwise—are lost without them. Not being in tune with one's own ecosystem leads to unrewarded, misplaced effort and operational dysfunction. Enabled by technology, we now have knowledge of how to make human connections work best in corporations connected by a common purpose. This is a document that'll show you how to make that happen."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Flow, Flee or Fight: Declare Yourself For Change In Your Organization
By Nevin Danielson
"It's time for a shake-up. This one won't happen because your boss decides it's time. It will happen because you and your peers decide it's time. Rather than relying on organizations to see what's in their long-term best interest, individuals are in a better position to instigate change. It will feel uncomfortable. You'll be labeled a heretic. As solace, you'll have the knowledge that you're right."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Deliver the "Wow!" to Make More Money
By Glory Borgeson
"In this day and age, it is not enough to have a system in place for dealing with customers' issues promptly and smoothly. Now, you need a strategy with built-in extras, benefits that are above and beyond what the public expects from you and your business. These extras have to be planned into your regular, day-to-day commerce because you can be sure that your competitors are hanging out their own honeycomb trying to attract the same bees as you. I call these built-in extras the 'Wow!' These are the actions you (and anyone representing your business) do for customers and, as a result, your customers actually say 'Wow!'"
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Too Big to Live: Why Letting Banks Fail Is Actually Good For Real People
By Douglas Rushkoff
"As the financial institutions we have come to rely on appear to topple under their own weight, it's only natural that we rush to support them. These are the banks, investment groups, and insurance firms to which we have outsourced our savings, financing, and investing. They fund our businesses and lend most of our currency into existence. Were we just a bit more aware of how this dependency developed, however, as well as what it costs us in the long run, we might choose instead to exploit their temporary vulnerability toward very different ends. Indeed, if we had our wits about us, we would seek to put our biggest banks out of our misery, for good."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Being Strategic: The Antidote to Fear
By Erika Andersen
"The antidote to fear? Pull people out of their panic and self-protective impulses by first acknowledging the difficulties, then raising their eyes and hearts to a possibility of success. At that point you can take advantage of their newly available and hopeful energy to make that possibility a reality. This is the essence of what I call being strategic: doing a clear and accurate assessment of the current situation, then articulating the possibility of a successful future. And at that point, when you see clearly where you are and where you hope to go, staying strategic means making core directional choices ... about how to achieve that future you've envisioned."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
A Mind for Selling: Brain Science Is Turning Management On Its Head
By Charles Jacobs
"We don't have direct knowledge of the physical world; we only have knowledge of our ideas of it. This may seem like just an interesting curiosity until we realize that the world we know is not an objective record of the one that exists outside of us, but the version of it we create according to whatever else is going on in our minds at the time. We don't live in the world of atoms; we live in the world of ideas."
Categories: changethis