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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
Friends, Lies and Network Marketing
By Porchlight
An expert in Multi-Level Marketing, Kim Klaver delivers a manifesto defying the bad advice most of these companies offer to their sales force. This rote advice, Klaver warns, results in alienated friends, limited potential, and insures failure even for experienced salespeople. Here are 12 tips to avoid losing friends (and your personal savings) by searching out referrals, not sales, and learning to tell your story.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Just 1%: The Power of Microtrends
By Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne
Just 1% of people can create a new market for business, spark a social movement, or effect a political change. Here, Penn (one of the world's most highly regarded pollster) and Zalesne (social-change expert) introduce you to this compelling idea of microtrends, and their assertion that the culture is formed by the push and pull of small trends that are often invisible or ignored. Just think "Soccer Mom"...and you'll know the power wielded by these small, but strong groups.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Turnover Dilemma: A Question to Keep Employees
By Matthew Kelly
In this manifesto, Matthew Kelly warns of the high price of turnover. Sure, we all know that losing employees costs money, but lost opportunity is often an incalculable cost. Many pundits and business owners blame employees, thinking they are uncommitted. But, Kelly argues, people leave their jobs because there is a disconnect between the work that they are doing and the dreams for their future. And it is up to managers to help reconnect their employees to their dreams.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Creation of Conscious Culture through Educational Innovation
By Porchlight
Michael Strong has a vision of schools which will promote authentic learning for our youth. He has a vision of creating institutions that model positive behavior. He believes that our society doesn't provide this guidance early enough to help form the futures of children who are starved for meaning and inspiration. In this expansive manifesto, he calls for a diverse educational market in terms that any business person will appreciate.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Social Media and Social Outcasts
By Porchlight
Here, Dave Platter warns of the dangers of the constant connectivity that social media demands. He presents a subtle argument that whatever self-image we create for ourselves as a result of our web popularity is ephemeral. He encourages us to not rely too heavily on how many emails we receive to determine our self-worth. Instead, to disconnect is to remind ourselves that we are present, human, of the physical world. It is a lesson worth remembering.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Secrets of Market-Driven Leaders: A Pragmatic Approach
By David Meerman Scott
Why does one product succeed while others crash? And why do the second and third products from a successful company almost always fail? The crew at Pragmatic Marketing determined that there are more reasons than features and price when determining the success (or failure) of a product, including "inside-out thinking" and the distractions of running a successful company. Here, they present 7 Secrets to dramatically increase the likelihood of becoming a market-driven success.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Mind of the Innovator: Taming the Traps of Traditional Thinking
By Matthew E. May
Matthew May, author of "Elegant Solutions: Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way" and a popular ChangeThis manifesto on the subject, now brings our attention to the 'Seven Sins of Solutions', the traditional ways of thinking that prevent us from divining the most accurate—and elegant—of solutions to any problem solving situation. Using accessible examples, you'll find yourself saying "Yes! That happens to me!" as you read. Lucky for us, May also provides methods to avoid those deadly sins and train our brains to think differently, allowing our inner innovator to flourish.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Making the Most of Your Time: Going Beyond To-Do Lists
By Rajesh Setty
The author of one of ChangeThis' most popular manifesto, 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself, Rajesh Setty returns with a new set of suggestions for optimizing your abilities. He asserts that even though everyone is given only 24 hours in a day, the most successful people are those who make every minute count. Here, he tells you how project management, understanding your abilities, investing in relationships and making a difference are just some of the ways you can make the most of your time.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Gobbledygook Manifesto
By David Meerman Scott
David M. Scott, the author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, says it best in introducing his manifesto: "Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I'm gonna puke!" In every company description, on websites, in press releases, in corporate pamphlets, the same adjectives get used over and over until they are meaningless. Scott analyzed thousands of these offerings and presents a collection of the most over-used and under-meaningful phrases...and strategies for making the most of these communication opportunities.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Eighth Self-Destructive Habit: When Companies Plateau Their People
By Jagdish Sheth
In writing his book, Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies...and How to Break Them, Sheth found seven reasons behind why successful companies have such a short life span. After publishing, he felt that companies often committed yet another 8th offense: not enabling their people to rise to the top level of their talent. Instead, either companies employ too many people and don't have challenging work for all of them, or these companies bring in outsiders who fail to connect with the existing culture such as Fiorina and Fisher and Nardelli.
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.