Most Recent Articles
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Blog / News & Opinion
It's Not About You
By 800-CEO-READ
In many situations, problems arise because we consider ourselves too much. We focus more on what we did or didn't get as opposed to what we contributed. The philosophy that one gets more by giving, was compellingly illustrated in Bob Burg and John David Mann's two books, The Go-Giver, and Go-Givers Sell More.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
Poor Economics, Winner of The FT/Goldman Sachs Award
By 800-CEO-READ
Congratulations are in order for Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, authors of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (and their publishers PublicAffairs), for winning this year's Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. Both professors of economics at MIT, the authors based the book on their more than fifteen years of careful research and analysis of the economics of poverty—and their attempt to find solutions to it.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
What are your six words?
By Sally Haldorson
I was driving the other day and turned on the radio to The Ben Merens Show, a call-in program airing on a local NPR station. He and his guest were taking calls for listeners' Six Word Memoirs. I'd never heard of such a thing, and as I listened, I learned there are a number of books and a well-developed website all based on this concept of summing up your life in six words.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
ChangeThis: Issue 88
By 800-CEO-READ
The 5,000 Year History of How We Lost Half Our Mind (Or How Blah-Blah-Blah Has Gradually Taken Over Our Lives) by Dan Roam “Over the millenia, we have gradually purged our visual mind from our understanding of language, communications, and intelligence. Just when we need pictures the most, we no longer have the ability to think visually. It's time to bring our visual mind back.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / ChangeThis
Clickability: A Skill for Life
By Dr. Rick Kirschner
"Most of what you need to know about success in life is personal in nature. I've learned, through my own experience and that of the people I've worked with, that people need each other to have fulfilling work, successful careers and meaningful lives. Regardless of your cultural background, your age group, or your social status, your need to get along with people is fundamental to your happiness. No matter how much technical skill you have in your particular field of expertise, no matter how smart you are, how capable you are, how gifted you are, if you don't know how to connect, relate and communicate with people, there's little hope for you. Whether the times are great, or the economy is in the tank, the people who do the best, who prosper and advance, are the people who know how to connect with other people and have it matter. Whether you are a homemaker, a parent, a business owner, a manager, a waiter or a postal worker, your skill with other people determines everything. And when you have the skill to build relationships and networks of relationships, the world is your oyster, and all options are open for you.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Innovate or Perish! What's Your Strategy?
By Kevin, Jackie Freiberg and Dain Dunston
"It doesn't matter what industry you are in, someone, somewhere right now is building a product, process or business model designed to kick your butt. If it's you, then you define the rules by which others must play the game. If it's NOT you, then you had better get comfortable playing by someone else's rules. Someone is going to start a revolution that will change your world. How? By producing change that matters—change that disrupts the competition and amazes your customers. Why can't it be you? ... In a world where everyone and everything around you is getting better, where technology waits for no one, and where smarter, more sophisticated customers who are "wired and dangerous" demand more, people are constantly in search of the next big thing. Want to find what's next? Make these 10 rules part of your cultural DNA."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The 5,000 Year History of How We Lost Half Our Mind (Or How Blah-Blah-Blah Has Gradually Taken Over Our Lives)
By Dan Roam
"32,000 years ago, our most ancient ancestor drew a beautiful bull on the wall of a cave in a place we now call France. That bull is the oldest known human sketch ever found. In the sweep of recorded human history, it is the beginning of the "whoosh." 27,000 years later, another ancient ancestor created Hieroglyphics by drawing a similar bull on a muddy brick, and written language was born. From that moment on, pictures were doomed. Yes, humanity's five-thousand-year love affair with words has given us so much—but at what hidden cost? Over the millenia, we have gradually purged our visual mind from our understanding of language, communications, and intelligence. Just when we need pictures the most, we no longer have the ability to think visually. It's time to bring our visual mind back."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Success or Suckcess: It's Up to Senior Management to Decide
By Dan Hill
"Ever since the Enlightenment, Western civilization has been on the wrong track. Eager to put the superstitions of the Dark Ages behind him, the French philosopher Rene Descartes famously declared, "I think, therefore I am. " But the truth is that over the past 25 years, the breakthroughs in brain science have systematically documented the greater reality that thought and emotion can't be artificially separated and that, in fact, the capacity for emotion proceeded thought in evolutionary terms and continues to do so with every deliberation and act an employee makes. There is no such thing as objectivity. . . . Trust is a feeling. Hope is a feeling. Loyalty is a feeling. As companies struggle to emerge from the Great Recession, now is not the time for half-measures like polite (but empty) focus groups, or for the fear that executives may have regarding exposure to the honest feelings of their employees that serves as justification for not pursuing progress. Executives who exhort employees to accept change and sacrifice their own comfort zones must surely be ready to do so themselves.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Crime and (the Lack of) Punishment
By Neil Senturia
"I am passionate about great crimes and the criminals who commit them. But, I often wonder if the long arm of our law, the finest justice system in the world, is at times deeply corrupt, especially with regard to the most recent financial meltdown of 2008. ... [S]everal fistfuls of ... corrupt, devious, deceptive, crooked, manipulative titans of the financial industry have somehow completely avoided any liability, responsibility or accountability for the crimes they committed—as have their accomplices in Washington, D.C. It seems that bad behavior has become an acceptable business practice. If you get caught, you only pay a fine. If you get away with it, you win. What kind of system is that?"
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Innovation You: Creating Growth
By Jeff DeGraff
"There are four fundamental forces that pursue competing values and pull us and all the constituents in our situations in different directions: Collaborate, Create, Compete and Control. These forces drive or thwart growth in dyadic oppositions: Collaborate vs. Compete and Create vs. Control. The paradox of growth is that it is born from the tension and constructive conflict of these opposing forces and their agents."
Categories: changethis
