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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
Getting China Right
By Arthur R. Kroeber
"China's spectacular economic growth has been one of the most significant events of the past two decades. In a single generation the nation has vaulted from impoverished backwater to the world's second-biggest economy and biggest trading nation. Its growth has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, transformed global supply chains, and created great wealth. But the introduction of China's enormous working population into the world labor force has also helped depress wages in developed countries, and its huge capital flows have brought a new and potentially destabilizing force into the world's financial markets. For all these reasons and more, it's crucial to get China right. We need to understand how China works (and how it doesn't), why it works the way it does, where it might be headed in the coming years, and what this means for the rest of the world."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Am I Authentic Yet?
By Karissa Thacker
"We humans love some words because we don't really know what they mean. Therefore, we can throw them around and project whatever we feel is important onto them. Two such ambiguous words that possess an aura of gravitas and perceived importance are authentic and leadership. I am hard-pressed to say one is thrown around more frequently or with more fervor than the other. Put the two words together and you have the term authentic leadership, which is then vague to the second power. If you listen carefully to the election chatter and everyday conversations, the only thing we know for sure about authentic leadership is that it is a good thing. This presidential election cycle we even have a new vague diagnosis: he or she has an authenticity problem. This lack of clarity does not serve aspiring authentic leaders. We need a pragmatic definition of authentic leadership that we can work with. That is my goal with this manifesto."
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Reading Books Won't Future-Proof You. Here's What Will.
By Erika Andersen
"I know way too many senior people who think they're great leaders because they read lots of leadership books, or who think they're staying abreast of the changes in their industry because they're reading about those changes. Real learning is almost always at least somewhat uncomfortable. It's challenging. It's figuring out how to operate in new ways; questioning your assumptions; putting new ideas into practice. Real learning takes you out of the tried-and-true, and into that murky, disturbing land of I'm-not-very-good-at-this. And, I submit to you, that kind of learning is central to our success today."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Fast Coaching for Busy People: How to Coach in 10 Minutes or Less
By Porchlight
Sure, we'd all love to sit down for a nice 45 minute chat with everyone on the team if we could, but most of us don't even get to do that with the people we love in our life. At work, people are over-busy and overwhelmed. Meetings fill the day, and emails clog our inbox. And there's work to do as well. Don't despair. Coaching's something everyone can do, do quickly, and do in a way that will have a significant impact on performance and satisfaction. But to make it work for the time-crunched manager, you need to follow three principles.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Closing the Decision Quality Gap
By Carl Spetzler, Hannah Winter, Jennifer Meyer
"One of the virtues of DQ is that it allows us to know if we've made a good decision at the time we are making it. If we've correctly followed the process, we can confidently state that 'We made the best possible choice given our alternatives, the available information, future uncertainties, and the things we can control. ' That's contrary to conventional thinking, which confuses a good decision with a good outcome. Most will say, 'We cannot know how good a decision is until we've seen the results. " That makes no sense in a world of uncertainty and unforeseeable events that decision makers cannot control. A good decision, for example, might be undermined by poor implementation. Or events on the far side of the world may foil a decision maker's best-made plans. The reverse is also true: a poor-quality decision may have a good outcome thanks to good luck. Imagine someone driving home after too many drinks. Does the fact that he arrived home without causing an accident make his decision to get behind the wheel a good one.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Ending Pay Secrecy: Why Keeping Salaries a Secret Leads to Disengagement and Decreased Performance, and How Revealing Pay Information Can Actually Increase Performance
By David Burkus
"Do you know how your pay compares to your peers? Probably not. You probably don't talk about it much. Most Americans are more comfortable talking about their sex lives than their salary lives. And most employers are happy to keep that secrecy going. According to a 2011 report from the Institute for Women's Policy Research, about half of American workers said that discussing salary information is either discouraged or outright prohibited. The assumed reason behind these prohibitions is that if everybody knew what everybody got paid, then all hell would break loose. There would be complaints. There would be arguments. There might even be a few people who quit. But what if secrecy is actually the reason for the strife, and what would happen if we removed that secrecy?"
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The New Way to Get Noticed
By Barbara Cave Henricks, Rusty Shelton
"In a sense, the new media environment feels like the Wild West. On television, many of today's highest rated programs are reality-based and feature families who do things like procreate excessively or become famous when their patriarch represents OJ Simpson in court. Twitter helped Paris Hilton become a household name after a sex tape first put her in the public eye. And what about the concept of going viral. Few of us can forget the moment in 2015 when frenzy erupted over whether a particular dress was blue and black or white and gold, a "story" that temporarily pushed aside substantive news. It's easy to be cynical, we get it. On the flip side, this new environment has given us access we wouldn't otherwise have to many of the world's most influential minds. From Reddit's 'Ask Me Anything' to the TED talks featured on YouTube, new media tools have helped create and given us access to an unprecedented number of experts. Further, they have whetted our collective appetite for more. Not only is there opportunity to create content and display it on the virtual billboard that exists online, but there is a chance to create a strategy for capturing even more value from your messages.
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Ignite Change: How Empathetic Communication Helps You Illuminate a Path that People Will Want to Follow
By Nancy Duarte, Patti Sanchez
"Change is inevitable. Whether we're talking about business, society, politics, or life, we all know that trying to stay still is a recipe for stagnation. Since Duarte, Inc. , was founded twenty-five years ago as a small design firm in Silicon Valley, the company has undergone numerous transformations. But none has been more challenging than the internal reinvention we began three years ago. As we worked to motivate our employees and align our organization around a new vision for our collective future, we were simultaneously studying how other leaders—in business and society, at companies large and small and different as Apple and Starbucks, IBM, and Market Basket—have successfully helped others embrace change and sparked movements. This is our manifesto for change communications and, more specifically, for leaders who want to inspire others to understand and follow their vision for change, over and over again. It's a tricky road to navigate. Most people are more comfortable with what they know than with the unknown future.
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Culturally Intelligent Innovation: Diversity CQ = Better Solutions
By David Livermore
"Everyone seems to be talking about diversity these days. Tech companies have pulled back the curtain to reveal how white and male they are. Indian firms are scrambling to appoint female board members in order to abide by new laws. European and North American multinationals are hiring executives from emerging markets. And even Hollywood is admitting that you're more likely to see an alien on screen than an Asian or Latina female. Diversity has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have. And innovation is one of the benefits most consistently lauded to sell people on diversity. It sounds promising. Rather than approaching a problem from one perspective, you gain the opportunity to see things more broadly. The problem is, diversity rarely works out that way. [. . . ] Diversity is undoubtedly one of the best sources of innovation. But it's not automatic. Diversity by itself does not lead to better solutions. Cultural intelligence, or CQ, is the differentiating factor. CQ is a research-based way of measuring and improving effectiveness for working across cultures.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Make People Love Your Brand Instantly: The Powerful Attraction of Love-At-First-Sight Names
By Alexandra Watkins
"Most ... fear that if their name is unconventional, they won't be taken seriously. Listen scaredy cats, you need to let go of that old school way of thinking. Why should you believe me? I run a B2B firm with a playful name, Eat My Words. For more than a decade, our name has been a magnet for attracting clients, employees, and reporters. A clever business name is your welcome mat. It suggests, 'We're lots of fun and you're going to love working with us!'"
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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.