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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A Manifesto for Planet and Progeny
By Henry Mintzberg
"Marx and Engels wrote in their Communist Manifesto of 1848 that 'A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism,' which 'the Powers of old Europe' were determined to 'exorcise.' This dogma was exorcised in Eastern Europe in 1989, only to be replaced by another one. Today the world is haunted by the spectre of an 'economic man' and his form of capitalism, seen as the be all and end all of human existence. We shall have to stop the be all before it becomes the end all—of our planet and our progeny."
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Jars of Clay: Solving the Water Crisis in Guatemala
By Porchlight
"In the high country of Guatemala, you'll find a self-proclaimed 'Social-preneur' CEO with degrees from Notre Dame and Wharton Business School who is on a mission to solve perhaps the biggest problem Guatemalans face in their everyday lives: unsafe drinking water. And, to accomplish that goal, this modern thinking business leader is using technology used by the ancient Romans, Egyptians, and Mayans, who laboriously used large clay water receptacles that were used to store fresh drinking water. These early versions of the modern filter took a terribly long time to manufacture and it was virtually impossible (and certainly impractical) to replicate on a large enough scale to solve a countrywide water filtration problem. But, after a Guatemalan professor discovered how to efficiently build a modern version of those receptacles and turn them into effective and culturally accepted water filters in a fraction of the time, opportunity came knocking for Ecofiltro CEO Philip Wilson and his company.
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Transforming Business—Successfully
By Porchlight
"Enterprises everywhere are experiencing the 'business outcome gap. ' The business outcome gap can be defined as the difference between desired business outcomes and realized business outcomes. Desired outcomes are changing in response to rapidly evolving stakeholder needs, whether the stakeholders are employees, customers, or shareholders. Globalization, disruptive technologies, smart devices, and social media have all had a profound effect on how we approach work and get important programs done. While realized outcomes may be improving, for most enterprises the increase in desired outcomes is far outstripping the realized. Not only do enterprises see a business outcome gap, but also the lack of innovation to stay relevant to the dynamic needs of the customer and market. In order to close the business outcome gap, constantly innovate, and get more customer centric, enterprises are increasingly embarking on business transformation programs or large-scale strategic projects. However, according to a recent study, organizations lose an average of a staggering $109 million for every $1 billion spent on projects.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Genius of Teams
By Rich Karlgaard, Michael S. Malone
"More than ever, business success now comes down to teams. Of course, teams have always been vitally important. One hundred thousand years ago, hunting teams were vital to the survival of early man. With the rise of agricultural civilization, teams were the basic operating unit of social hierarchies and communities. But for the last few millennia, while remaining a crucial building block, teams have been largely made subordinate to larger social organizations: armies, governments, bureaucracies, corporations, etc. But the rise of the digital age, the Internet, and the global economy has changed all of that. As with many other cultural institutions, technology is beginning to turn organizations upside down. "
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Local Networks, Global Change: Working Locally through the UN Global Compact
By Porchlight
"The United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) is the world's largest corporate responsibility movement with some 8,000 businesses employing over 50 million people in around 150 countries. [...] Encouraging as it is, 8,000 companies represents only about ten percent of truly international companies in the world and only a tiny fraction of the small and medium enterprises which provide most employment. If we are to achieve real change we need to engage a much wider range of companies."
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The Customer Room: Grow Your Business by Improving Customers' Lives
By Jeanne Bliss
"The Customer Room is the glue that unites a leadership team to focus and improve customers' lives to earn the right to growth. Building a customer room to step leaders and the organization through your customers' lives and walk in their shoes monthly, quarterly, and annually is one of the most robust actions you can take to align leaders and drive customer-driven action. It engages leaders personally in customers' lives and unites them to make decisions. It establishes an accountability forum that transcends most governance meetings on the subject, where projects are reported but engaging in understanding and improving customers' lives is not always built-in."
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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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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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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."
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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."
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.