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
What If Sellers Behaved as Leaders?
By Deb Calvert
"It is time we start making a shift. Research shows you can make more sales by abandoning sales-y behaviors buyers resist and replacing them with leadership behaviors buyers desire. Sellers do extraordinary things when they stop pushing people to buy before they're ready, and start guiding buyers by transforming values into actions, visions into realities, obstacles into innovations, separateness into solidarity, and risks into rewards."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Don't Suck Up, Manage Up: How to Work Well with the Boss You Have, Not Wish You Had
By Mary Abbajay
"As much as we would love to believe that the workplace is (or should be) a meritocracy, where just being great at our job is all we need to succeed, reality tells a different story. The real (and inconvenient) truth is that the workplace is a social system—meaning we have to work with, among, through (and sometimes around) other people. And in a social system, relationships matter—a lot. Our ability to cultivate and manage effective workplace relationships is essential for career success. Positive, respectful, and collaborative relationships create positive workplace experiences and results. Poor relationships produce poor experiences and results. And at the end of the day, just being good at our job is not enough. We must deliver great work while simultaneously being good at relationships—up, down, and across the organization. Developing effective relationships with our colleagues is important for career success, but developing a positive and productive relationship with our boss is absolutely critical to our success.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Speed Trap: When Taking Your Time (Really) Matters
By Tom Peters
"Speed-for-speed's-sake is about the most counterproductive* approach imaginable. (*I use counterproductive because it's impolite to use "stupid"—which is what I really believe.) While we must indeed evolve and experiment rapidly, the process of getting things done (especially radical-ish things that upset apple carts) is all about people. And working with people to get those interesting things done effectively, well, takes time, in fact lots of time."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Finding the Magic in "Tiny" Business
By Porchlight
"Maybe you have an idea, either brewing or formed. Maybe you're tired of selling little bits of yourself in order to buy lattes and avocado toast, or maybe, what you're doing isn't quite enough to pay the rent. Maybe you want to use your voice to make an impact, to 'create the change you want to see in the world.' Whatever your motivation, if you are ready to start something new, bring a new idea to life in the open market or challenge an existing idea, you are starting your entrepreneurial journey. Maybe you've learned some things in school or picked them up on the street. Maybe you're totally green and all you have is your enthusiasm. This is the day when, as Seth Godin says, you decide to 'pick yourself' and put your eggs in your own basket to proceed. Most people will say you have to 'go big or go home,' but why not 'go tiny' and be able to go home when you want?"
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Six Headwinds Threatening the Global Economy
By Dambisa Moyo
"Yes, years of stimulus and ultra-low interest rates have finally brought the global economy to a point of rising employment and stronger economic growth. IMF and World Bank forecasts for global growth increased in January prompting a fresh wave of optimism. This revival in growth prospects is increasingly synchronized across advanced economies—notably in the US, EU, and Japan, and the leading developing countries, such as China, India, and Brazil. At a more granular level, many economies are seeing increases in capital investment and private consumption, as well as notable declines in unemployment. Yet, 10 years after the crisis, the global economy faces six structural headwinds that, left unchecked, promise to derail economic progress and damage living standards in the years ahead."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Start Imagining a Future of Human + Machine
By Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson
"In the first wave of transformation, businesses standardized processes. Think Henry Ford and the assembly line, where steps in the overall process were broken down, measured, and optimized to achieve gains in efficiency. The second wave of transformation brought automated processes. Think business process reengineering powered by advances in information technology like desktop computers, large databases, and software that automated various tasks. Now, the third wave is bringing adaptive processes. Think of mobile map apps that continuously use real-time data to create living, dynamic, optimized maps that get hundreds of thousands of individual users to their destinations as quickly as possible. And then imagine that principle of adaptability extended to business processes across all industries, organizations, and functions—that's the third wave that is transforming business as we know it."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Making 'Agile' Business as Usual
By Todd Warner
"There is more to Agility than putting lipstick on a pig. Organizations that attempt to migrate to Agile approaches need to take accountability for their 'inner pig.' Any sector can espouse Agile practices, such as SCRUMS, Sprints, and Stand-ups. That is the easy part. The challenge that most organizations face is that they layer Agile approaches on top of their existing social system, without addressing the intricate web of local practices and tribalism that have developed over time."
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Blog / ChangeThis
How Women Rise: Helping Women Change the Behaviors that Get in Their Way
By Sally Helgesen, Marshall Goldsmith
"It's not surprising that many of the behaviors that hold men and women back would be different. After all, women often have very different experiences at work. And experience shapes habits and responses. Familiar habits and responses may feel intrinsic, like part of who you are. But they are not you; they are you on autopilot. Bringing them to conscious awareness is the first step on the path to effective behavioral change. Why focus on behaviors instead on of the cultural and structural factors that hold women back? Isn't that just a way of blaming women? Not at all. We are acutely aware that cultural and structural restraints still keep many women stuck, despite decades of admittedly uneven progress. But our focus in this book is on what lies within women's control, what women themselves can change."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Paradox of Leadership
By Porchlight
"San Francisco Giants manager Bruce Bochy is as gifted as any CEO we've ever met. Intelligence, strategy, creativity, courage, heart, and leadership presence—he's got the whole package. This guy gets leadership. In a game that has enough data, statistics, and sabermetrics to tax a supercomputer, you can't adequately measure these character strengths, and you would certainly be hard-pressed to put a price tag on them. Like all great leaders, Boch is a blend of many attributes and actions that are paradoxical. His success is anchored in how he manages these paradoxes."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Beyond Business Results: Achieving Sustainable Success
By Julie Rosenberg
"For most of my career, I focused on my next professional opportunity rather than on my present situation. I was committed to serving patients and to helping my company meet its goals; I was always looking down the line to what was coming next. What I was not fully committed to was the process of my own development—the learning and growth that builds a career by helping you to become a better version of yourself. I was smart, poised, well-trained and committed, but I was also resistant to change, angry at my boss (thinking that, after all, I should have been chosen for his role), easily upset when encountering obstacles, and fearful of failure. Over the past 16 years, the practice of yoga has helped me to enhance my awareness of the present moment and to root my consciousness directly in it."
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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.