ChangeThis
ChangeThis is our weekly series of essays from today's thought leaders that are meant to evoke conversation by bringing forth new and unique ideas.
ChangeThis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Presenting to Small Audiences: Turn Off the Projector!
By Andrew Abela
"The typical presentation to a small group today is designed just as if it were being made to a large group in a big auditorium. We follow the same advice in creating our slides, and then we turn on the portable projector and inflict slide after deadening slide on our audience—vintage Death by PowerPoint. Too much of this effort is wasted. There is ample research evidence that projecting lots of text and speaking at the same time is so distracting to your audience that it is less effective than projecting your slides and asking your audience to read them while you remain silent, or speaking with no slides at all!"
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Necessary Revolution: Creating a Sustainable Future
By Peter Senge, Bryan Smith
"The Industrial Era is ending. Its extraordinary successes—advances in literacy, life expectancy, human rights, and technology—have propelled us headlong into a myriad of side effects: food and water shortages, cyclonic destruction, prolonged drought and rising sea levels. To delay acknowledging the need for lifestyle and business changes—'The Necessary Revolution'—risks our very survival. What only a couple of decades ago was still a vigorous scientific debate has become as close to a consensus as scientific communities ever achieve: human-induced climate change from greenhouse gases concentrating in the atmosphere has reached a threshold of significant social and economic impact—and we are only now at the start of experiencing the effects. Stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide will require a profound reversal: a 60–80% reduction in growing worldwide emissions in the next twenty years. This is the '80–20 Challenge,' and this manifesto presents inspiring, real-life examples of how this is starting to happen.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Gridlock Economy: The Tragedy of the Anticommons
By Michael Heller
"Private ownership usually creates wealth. But too much ownership has the opposite effect—it creates gridlock. When too many people own pieces of one thing, cooperation breaks down, wealth disappears . . . everybody loses. Gridlock is a free market paradox."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Mini Sagas: Bite Sized Lessons For Life and Business
By Rajesh Setty
50 words is not a lot. Sometimes, though, you can say a lot in 50 words. Add a good picture to the background and you have a story in 50 words. In this photographic manifesto (the first in ChangeThis history) Rajesh Setty has compiled 15 mini sagas from his collection. Each 50 word story is packed with a lesson on life and/or business. Our hope is that you will enjoy these stories and it will inspire you to write your own mini saga on a topic of your interest. From Mini Sagas: "A mini saga is a story told in exactly 50 words—not 49 or 51 but in exactly 50 words. Benefit #1: Writing a mini saga expands your creativity. Constraints typically expand creativity or induce flight. When you have to put everything in 50 words, you have to 'leave behind' a lot. That's where the creative juices start flowing. Benefit #2: Writing a mini saga stretches your thinking. What will you write about. You have to think about topics that will fit in 50 words or squeeze them to fit in 50 words. That puts thinking on overdrive mode.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Uncovering Business Breakthroughs: Are you Tuned In or Tuned Out?
By David Meerman Scott
"We've developed the Tuned In Process to allow companies to create success again and again. We see these same principles at work in a wide range of successful product experiences, such as business-to-business technology products, fast food chains, and professional services firms. Anyone can use Tuned In to replicate the model for success. It works for well-known companies like Ford, Apple, and GE and those not-so-famous like GoPro and Zipcar. It works for realtors, doctors, ministers and even rock stars. With a Tuned In approach, your everyday activities can be transformed into those which create the kind of culture that builds market leaders."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Avoid Corporate Death: Nine Essential Elements Will Keep the Reaper From Your Company's Door
By Porchlight
"No company is created to fail. Yet the odds are stacked against corporations surviving more than a few decades. Many once-greats are dying a slow death, losing much of what made them superior. Others have expired quickly. And new research shows that many more are starting to atrophy as their leaders turn their focus to managing complexity—and away from leading for the future. A new, nine-element framework can help you diagnose your organization's health, and address the factors that increase corporate life expectancy."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
14 Ways to Get Breakthrough Ideas
By Mitch Ditkoff
"There's a lot of talk these days—especially in business circles—about the importance of innovation. All CEOs worth their low salt lunch want it. And they want it, of course, now. Innovation, they reason, is the competitive edge. What sparks innovation? People. What sparks people? Inspired ideas that meet a need—whether expressed or unexpressed—ideas with enough mojo to rally sustained support. Is there anything a person can do—beyond caffeine, corporate pep talks, or astrology readings—to quicken the appearance of breakthrough ideas? Yes, there is. And it begins with the awareness of where ideas come from in the first place."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
People Don't Hate Change, They Hate How You're Trying to Change Them
By Porchlight
According to a summary of over 40 research studies on change, the success rate of strategy execution and corporate change programs is 33%. At the same time, a Conference Board survey of over 600 global CEOs revealed that the top two challenges they see are: 1) generating consistent revenue growth and 2) strategy execution. This translates to weak performance on the top executive priority, a situation that needs to change. [...] Because so many of these programs fail, some executives and managers start to believe the old saying that "people hate change" must be true. That is not true. In fact, employment surveys reveal that the top reason good employees leave companies is over a lack of new opportunities and boredom with stagnant, never-changing, dead-end jobs. People don't hate change; they hate corporate change programs. How can we fix that?
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Tell the Whole Truth
By Porchlight
"How can you tap the transformational power of the truth? How can you use it to turn ordinary relationships into extraordinary ones? The answer is to grasp the truth in its fullest sense, and then practice using it skillfully, with discretion and wisdom. [...] Before developing our truth telling skills, we must first explore why we lie. Understanding the causes of our temptations will help us overcome them."
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Chindia Rising: Why the Rise of China and India is Inevitable
By Jagdish N. Sheth
"Rudyard Kipling, who proclaimed that 'East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet' has already been proven wrong with respect to Westernization of heritage-rich and tradition-based China and India. He will be proven wrong again as we witness what I refer to as the Easternization of the world. [...] In short, it will be less a clash of cultures and more a fusion of cultures across arts, architecture, science, law, engineering, medicine and management traditions and perspectives. [...] The rise of Chindia is not only inevitable, but it will be beneficial to the world economy. It will be, of course, beneficial to businesses and entrepreneurs, but also to the masses at the bottom of the pyramid (people who earn less than two dollars a day)."
Categories: 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.