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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
Is Educating All Children Possible? (Based on the Status Quo, No.)
By Don Berg
"Linda Darling-Hammond, in the preface to her 1997 book The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools That Work, wrote: 'Rigid and bureaucratic, [our current education system] was never designed to teach all children effectively, to teach learners in all their varieties, to attend to each child's particular mix of aptitudes and barriers to learning. Educating all children effectively is the mission of schools today, yet great numbers of children still have no reasonable opportunity to acquire the knowledge and abilities that will help them thrive in and contribute to today's society. ' As Linda Darling-Hammond points out in the quote above history has rendered judgments about the outcomes of our school system that do not reflect well on our record of success, assuming that the goal is to educate all our future citizens. Historically there have been (and remain) large segments of the United States population that have been educationally neglected despite the mandate to attend school.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Fix: A How-to Guide for Breaking Bad Habits That May Well Wind Up Killing Your Business.
By Porchlight
"The drugs that businesses are addicted to are discounts, coupons, BOGOs, off-price flyers, free-with-purchase offers. . . the list of ways to get that short-term sales high goes on. Too many good marketers are engaging in bad, self-defeating, costly behavior, with an over-reliance on incentives, and all the accompanying mass advertising required to promote them. If you have to continuously discount your product or service, or scream to the largest possible audience in order to get people to notice you, and to care enough about you to buy—then your business isn't healthy. Either you're offering goods or services people don't really want, or your brand is failing to demonstrate a compelling value proposition that meets consumer expectations for your category. Brand leaders across North America have become overly fixated on dealing with the symptoms of their pain, rather than addressing the core issues that cause them to have to resort to bribery just to get people to buy. And the proliferation of incentives and advertising has become so bad that many businesses are now overdosing on these short-term stimulants.
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Blog / ChangeThis
How to Have it All: A Career, Kids, Free Time, and a Full Night's Sleep.
By Laura VanderKam
"I like to think I'm a good steward of my hours—I write and speak about time management for a living!—but in terms of having space for what matters to me, I'm far from the only one. The popular narrative about women, work, and life is full of what I call 'recitations of dark moments': these lamentations about missed soccer games, or waking up at 5:15 a.m. to do laundry. They imply that working motherhood requires becoming some maxed out mess. And yet the reality is that women with big careers have far more balanced lives than the popular narrative conveys. That's good news for anyone wondering if it's possible to have a career, kids, free time, and even a full night's sleep. It is possible to have it all, not just in theory, but in how we live our day-to-day lives."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
AIWATT and the Empty Boat
By Marshall Goldsmith
"I have a first principle for becoming the person you want to be. Follow it and it will dramatically shrink your daily volume of stress, conflict, unpleasant debate, and wasted time. It is phrased in the form of a question you should be asking yourself in any situation where you must choose to either engage or 'let it go.' Am I willing, at this time, to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic? It's a question that pops into my head so often each day that I've turned the first five words into an acronym, AIWATT (it rhymes with "say what"). Like the physician's principle, 'First, do no harm,' it doesn't require you to do anything, merely avoid doing something foolish."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Leadership Muscles For The New Multi-Polar World
By Porchlight
"Globalization until very recently meant Western companies exporting their products, leaders and ways of doing business around the world. That is now changing and today executives face a bewildering level of uncertainty in the multi-polar world that is fast emerging. If you are doing business in Africa, you are now likely to face significant competition from local players, as well as from Indian or Chinese companies that have emerged onto the global stage. The leadership teams of many multi-nationals were often literally a pale reflection of the international community, but slowly increasing diversity is evident in boardrooms and senior teams. But how do you deepen this diversity and make it work productively? ... A range of convergent evidence from neuroscience, behavioral genetics, values surveys, as well as our own research with thousands of leaders globally, identifies certain Cultural DNA themes for each of the world's main societies and their associated leadership implications."
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Blog / ChangeThis
#notarule: winning at business and life by breaking rules that don't exist
By Jason Kotecki
"Blessed are the rule breakers. They shalt inherit the Future. We have always admired the great renegades of business, brave souls who dared to deny the status quo, defy the odds, and pioneer a new normal. Nicolas Tesla. Richard Branson. Tony Stark. One thing all great titans of industry have in common is this: they were able to identify rules that don't exist and had the courage to break them. Of course, there are plenty of rules that DO exist. If you commit fraud or neglect to pay taxes, I hope you look good in an orange jumpsuit. But the rules that DON'T exist greatly outnumber the ones that do. History is filled with examples of those who profited greatly by dispensing with so-called 'rules.'"
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Blog / ChangeThis
Acceptable Loss: A Formula For How to Fail Quickly and Cheaply, and Ultimately Succeed
By Porchlight
"If you looked at the way entrepreneurs act, you would be tempted to conclude there is not a lot to be learned from studying them. You would have to be Bill Gates to start Microsoft and Oprah Winfrey to begin Harpo. But if you look at the way they think, you will discover amazing similarities. When successful entrepreneurs head off into the unknown—and there is nothing more unknown than starting a new company—they ... reduce it to a formula. They: Act. Learn. Build (off that learning.) And Repeat. But notice what is going on, because the steps are small, and so is what it puts at risk. It's a way of keep potential failures from being devastating."
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10 Lessons on Art and Strategy
By Jessica Hagy
"War is just a metaphor for every problem you've ever had in your life. Without problems, you've got no plot, and without a plot, your character can't develop. So don't just choose your battles. Embrace them. Here's how... "
Categories: changethis
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The New Leadership Paradigm—Everyone, Every time, No Exception!
By Lior Arussy
"Organizations and leaders are facing today the convergence of three mega trends that are reshaping their value proposition, their customer relationships, and their talent engagement. Alone, each of these mega trends is a significant challenge to face. Together they present either an existential threat to the business or an evolutionary opportunity. And, by and large, most leaders are neither ready nor equipped to address these changes."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Earth Shakers: The Art and Craft of the Global Change Agent
By Dean Williams
"Earth shakers figuratively shake the ground on which we work and live. They stir people to action to address tough problems. They mobilize people to fix what is flawed or broken. They generate movements to tackle complex issues. They transform teams, organizations, communities, and nations. They help us to think differently about the world, and to take actions to make it a better place. The earth shaker is a global change agent. They may operate at the local level or on the international stage but they appreciate how global forces and dynamics affect local forces and dynamics, and vice-versa. Given the interdependent nature of complex problems, they know they must cross borders and boundaries to get anything significant accomplished, as problems cannot be resolved in isolation. We need earth shakers because globalization presents a whole new set of challenges for which traditional forms of leadership cannot resolve. Globalization generates forces and dynamics that produce unintended and unexpected consequences—surprises—some that are delightful and some that are threatening and outright scary.
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.