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.
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Life Is Negotiation: Field-Tested Techniques in Emotional Intelligence and Tactical Empathy from an FBI Negotiator
By Chris Voss
"Erase everything you've been taught about negotiation. You are not rational; there is no such thing as 'fair'; compromise is the worst thing you can do; the real art of negotiation lies in mastering the intricacies of No, not Yes. I guarantee if erase everything you think you know about negotiation and apply these methods in your next conversation, you'll walk away surprised at what you achieved."
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Executive Presence: Getting to the Bottom of What Takes Leaders to the Top
By Suzanne Bates
"Executive presence has long been a catch-all phrase. When you ask people to define it, they often answer, "I'm not sure, but I know it when I see it." When pressed they might say it's body language, gravitas, charisma, or presentation skill. Countless books, articles, and TED talks reinforce this idea. All you need to do is walk on stage like you belong there, open up your gestures, and command the room. Yet it seems like there's more. And there is."
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Sharing Power: Why It Requires Deep Personal Change
By Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams
"Sharing power always means that someone has to let go of control, and someone has to accept more responsibility. Power is a major variable around which our self-world relationship is formed. Some people maintain a sense of personal safety and worth by having power; others establish their identity by giving their power in exchange for protection and belonging. Our relationship with power is a big part of how we create our sense of identity. Our approaches to change are far too casual about both asking managers to let go of control and assuming that others will want increased responsibility. When we redistribute power, we ask people to reconstruct themselves—and that requires deep personal change."
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Mission Impossible: How to Avoid Procrastination
By Porchlight
"According to psychologists, procrastination is the act of wanting to feel good now. Basically, procrastination is the adult version of a three-year-old's 'I don't wanna!" tantrum. Procrastination can make life miserable. If we put off projects, phone calls, emails, or whatever the task may be, we end up working at breakneck pace in order to complete it at the eleventh hour. It's unnecessary stress that we bring upon ourselves. ... The research shows that overcoming procrastination comes down to thought control and self-regulation. It's all about mind management. Realizing that you're dragging your feet is the first key. Once this realization occurs, you're ready to play some strategic mind games with yourself."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Door to Door Manifesto: How to Fix Traffic. Now.
By Edward Humes
"Traffic. If you're a commuter, it's your daily torture. If you run a business, it represents hair-pulling risk and cost. The U.S. economy suffers a $160 billion annual hit in lost productivity from traffic jams, while drivers in some major cities spend up to two work weeks stuck bumper to bumper. Long and congested commutes even correlate with higher rates of divorce, stress, obesity and chronic pain. But all of this pales in comparison to the one, big, dirty secret of traffic: We know how to fix it."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Profit with Purpose: The New Guiding Conscience of Global Capitalism
By Porchlight
"In today's We-Conomy, profit is not enough. For a brand to be truly successful over the long-term, as benchmarked against the world's leading companies, it must innovate and create for the we and not the me, and also aim to profit in ways that provide collective purpose beyond a self-interested, fattened bottom-line. An age of brands as republics aimed at both serving and protecting the world at large is upon us."
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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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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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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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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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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.