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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"Dangerous" Woman: Three Entrepreneurs Who Paved the Road of Women's Business Leadership
By Porchlight
"On 8 August 1959, the Saturday Evening Post published a sensationalized article about the female chief executive of Beech Aircraft titled 'Danger: Boss Lady at Work. ' In it, the 'Boss Lady,' Olive Ann Beech, was caricatured as autocratic and austere, insecure yet self-righteous, and the author warned readers—as the title suggested—to beware. Reportedly, more than one businessman had declared, 'I'm scared of that woman. ' But according to the article, Beech herself was undaunted. 'I never concerned myself with what people thought of me,' she stated. 'If I had, I'd have been pretty mousy. ' The idea that a 'boss lady' at work was dangerous tells us a great deal about the historical context in which female business executives led and the obstacles they faced in the mid-twentieth century. Alarms about a crisis in American masculinity were de rigueur in popular magazines in the 1950s, and social commentators were quick to connect the problem to women. One result was a pronounced current in American popular culture of the 1950s that endeavored to prop up men at the expense of women and to demonize women who in their success appeared to embody an assault on men.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Your Enterprise as Living System: Success Starts with Knowing the Kind of Business You're Really In
By Porchlight
"Profit and non-profit enterprises are living people systems. Embracing this belief (and its implications) will significantly change your leadership for the better. Customers, employees and leaders are not commodities and they are not separate from one another. They are different, but they are not separate. If you take away any one of the three—customers, employees, or leaders—you don't have an enterprise! Enterprises are started by people, led by people, operated by people, improved by people, perpetuated by people, dissolved by people. People create and provide value for people. People are the life of your enterprise. Customers, employees, and leaders are all that is alive in an enterprise and they are inextricably and vitally woven together. The promise that you make to your customer, your culture of employees, and your leadership approach are immutably intertwined."
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Blog / ChangeThis
AREA: A Research and Decision-Making Roadmap
By Cheryl Strauss Einhorn
"In developing AREA, I realized that the process does much more than provide a research and decision-making roadmap, it makes your work work for you. It heightens your awareness of the motivations and incentives of others. It helps you to avoid bias in your work and to engage with people and problems more mindfully. For while decision making is about ideas, ideas aren't enough; there is an important gap between having ideas and making good decisions about what to do with those ideas."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Say It Like You Mean It: And Other Ways to Inspire People Every Day
By Kristi Hedges
"The conversation is first. Then the spark. That's how it happens with all of us, and how it happened to me yet again. In this instance, it was actually hundreds of the same conversation, over and over. Until it hit me. We have some major misconceptions about what causes inspiration."
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The Thriving Artist Manifesto
By Jeff Goins
"For centuries, the myth of the starving artist has dominated our culture, seeping into the minds of creative people and stifling their pursuits. But the truth is that the world's most successful artists did not starve. In fact, they capitalized on the power of their creative strength. From graphic designers and writers to artists and business professionals, creatives already know that no one is born an artist. Business and art are not mutually exclusive pursuits. In fact, success in business and in life flow from a healthy exercise of creativity. Being creative isn't a disadvantage for success; rather, it is a powerful tool to be harnessed."
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Finding Certainty In An Uncertain World
By Jeff Boss
"Of the 200 plus missions I went on as a Navy SEAL, not one went according to plan. Not one. Each mission demanded new information faster than before. A pivot. A new direction. Each mission warranted the collective awareness from each team member as to what that new purpose was so we could make decisions that served: 1) The mission 2) The team 3) Each other 4) Ourselves In order to execute at each level—optimally—we needed three things. We needed to be able to perform as individuals and as a team; we needed to be able to adapt to new information and change on the fly; and we needed to be able to lead—ourselves and each other—through uncertain situations by making decisions and sharing them with the group. Sound familiar? It should, because business is no different."
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Are We There Yet?
By Kate Raworth
"Whether our economic airplane can keep on cruising or is about to stall mid-air, one thing is evident: it is currently heading for a destination that we do not want to reach, one that is degenerative and deeply divisive. If we reorient ourselves to the economic destination that we do want—an economy that is regenerative and distributive by design—then new questions about growth come to the fore. What might happen to GDP as we transition towards that destination? And what is GDP likely to do once we get there? It is not possible to predict definitively one way or the other whether GDP will go up or down in high-income countries as they create regenerative and distributive economies that engage the household, market, commons and state alike."
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Change is Hard: A true story of diversity and inclusion.
By Jennifer Brown
"The effort required to manage aspects of our identity, culture, and work styles, and in many cases filter them out of our professional personas to 'fit in,' can take precious energy and focus away from our confidence, our contributions, and our careers. When we can work as fully ourselves, we win, and the business wins."
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Learning to Recognize Your Leadership Gap
By Lolly Daskal
"It's the one problem that even some of the most successful CEOs I've worked with never see coming and have no idea how to resolve. The problem is that one day, suddenly, what once worked so well to propel their rise stops working. And the very same traits that had worked for them actually start working against them. Another stellar career comes to an abrupt end. Another high-flying executive is brought swiftly back down to earth. This is the moment when leaders confront a critical and very uncomfortable question: What if there's a gap in what I think I know?"
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The Operational Excellence Manifesto
By Porchlight
"When a company reaches a state of readiness, it attains a situational awareness and command of its capabilities—the ability to see and anticipate opportunities and threats. Along with it comes the ability to react in a meaningful and expeditious manner to any such challenges that may present themselves—keeping in mind this awareness will never be perfect and will need to be perpetually refined. As Mike Tyson famously said, 'Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.' That is to say, even though you are talented, trained, professional, and on the offensive pursuing your plan, the business that is better prepared to identify and engage an unforeseen challenge more quickly than its competition has a strategic and tactical advantage."
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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.