Most Recent Articles
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Blog / New Releases
How to Be a Person in The World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life
By 800-CEO-READ
Advice columnist Heather Havrilesky has a new collection of her wildly entertaining and much-celebrated letters of advice.
Categories: new-releases
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Blog / Editor's Choice
Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?: A Story of Women and Economics
Book Review by Dylan Schleicher
Katrine Marçal gives us a better understanding of economics by doing something that seems obvious, including the historical perspective and labor of women.
Categories: editors-choice
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Blog / ChangeThis
Keeping On the Blade: How Successful Startup Founders Persist To Discover Hockey Stick Growth
By Bobby Martin
"Coverage of the supposedly meteoric revenue growth of a number of Silicon Valley startups—most recently Uber, Snapchat, and Instagram—whose hugely ambitious and driven founders had genius ideas and attracted massive amounts of venture funding, has fueled unrealistic notions: what a good idea looks like; how fast a founder should expect to be able to attract investment capital; and how quickly, even with a really great idea, growth will take off. If we use unicorns as a guide for our own startups, it appears that success springs up fast and out of the middle of nowhere. This mythology can lead founders to abandon their efforts too soon because they're not seeing rapid revenue growth and can't get funding. They haven't planned in a realistic way for the first three or often more years of false starts, missteps, and market resistance which are generally required before growth takes off."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
How to Start When You're Stuck
By Jason W. Womack, Jodi Womack
"Maybe it's a career change, a health and fitness transformation or a personal project or side business you want to start, but for some reason—whatever it is—you haven't started yet. 'Not enough time.' 'Not enough resources.' 'Not enough support.' Statements like these not only limit your potential but hinder your productivity. In order to find the time, the resources and the support you need, you first need to GET MOMENTUM. You need more than a little motivation, but a true forward movement. Momentum means you're moving, and things are happening. It means you're making progress, and it feels good! Momentum is as personal in nature as it is different for everyone and for every project. What works for someone else may not work for you. The key is to practice thinking bigger and more creatively to put yourself in a position to move beyond the inertia that is holding you back from you dreams."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Leading Innovation From the New Middle
By George E. L. Barbee
"There is a new wave of innovation taking place inside many organizations that gives people an opportunity to make important, innovative contributions to business and to society. My beliefs about innovation have evolved and are now centered on three basic tenets: Most of us can be far more innovative in business than we give ourselves credit for—especially when we realize innovation is a lot broader than just invention. We can quickly learn to more innovatively observe and then transfer these innovations from one category to another. Being more innovative is, in fact, learnable and even self-teachable. [...] Innovation is more than an "I" thing... it's a "WE" thing. It is true that we must make a real, conscious effort to improve our own innovation skills. But there are also important changes that we can and should bring about in the organization. Together, this will allow us to begin leading innovation from the new middle."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Networks Are Eating the World
By Barry Libert, Megan Beck, Jerry Wind
"In the age of digital networks, businesses' abilities to create and share intangible assets, such as ideas, software, and relationships that are owned by each of us—the Network—has grown exponentially. Further, digital networks allow organizations to access assets that exist outside of their traditional boundaries. Uber is a transportation company without cars. Airbnb is a hotelier without properties. Amazon is retailer with stores. Network orchestrators—as we call them—are eating the world as we know it, changing the very nature of industries around the world. The key is their ability to reach and leverage each and every one of us and all our relationships, information and assets. This access to and relationship with us and what we have (cars and homes), do (labor) and know (relationships and expertise) are critical to their success—as are the digital platforms that they use to enable us to share what we have with others. In short, where Thomas Friedman wrote the book that laid the ground for this network revolution—The World is Flat—and Marc Andreessen followed on with his 2011 article—'Software is Eating the World'—it is now clear that those were the foundation for today's reality—networks are eating the world.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Becoming Principle
By Cathy Salit
"As adults—in the workplace and elsewhere—when we're asked to do something we've never done before, when we need to grow beyond our current capabilities, we can tap into what we naturally did as children, and perform our way to who we're becoming. For adults, though, play, performance, and pretending can feel anything but natural. We got the message in a myriad of ways as we left toddlerhood: Play is for kids, not for big people. We're supposed to color inside the lines; know the correct answer; understand how to behave and fit in. And there's no denying the importance of that learning—obviously we need to learn how to safely cross the street, say our ABCs and wake up an iPad. But this need to get it right eventually takes over. We learn what we need to in school and by the time we get into the job market, the support we got to learn developmentally as children is long gone. As an adult, it is embarrassing to not know. There are repercussions if we don't get it right. We feel stupid, and we make others feel stupid if they don't 'have it together.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
A New Territory of Maturity: Updating Our Stories To Enhance Our Lives
By Rosamund Stone Zander
"In those endless years it took you to grow out of childhood and stand on your own two feet, you learned about the world in doses. Some of what you learned (and thought you understood) has evolved over time with added experience, but some of the discoveries you made and the stories you constructed around them as a child, even as young as three, have stayed the same, child-like and unchanged, no matter how many years have passed. [...] That's living life in the past, seeing the world around you through a child's eyes in a child's story. You've been walking around in kid's sneakers and they're much too small for you. Here's how to fit yourself out with good pair of hiking boots to go the distance."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / Book Giveaways
The Greats on Leadership: Classic Wisdom for Modern Managers
By Porchlight
Jocelyn Davis gives us leadership tools to apply today by pulling stories from the long arch of human history.
Categories: giveaways
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Blog / Editor's Choice
Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses
Book Review by Dylan Schleicher
Amy Whitaker takes us on a journey through art and business that is both technical and profound.
Categories: editors-choice
