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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
Challenging Beliefs that Erode Workplace Motivation
By Susan Fowler
"As a leader, you cannot motivate anyone. What you can do is cultivate a workplace where it is more likely for someone to experience optimal motivation. Optimal motivation means having the positive energy, vitality, and sense of well-being required to sustain the pursuit and achievement of meaningful goals while flourishing. Optimal motivation is the result of satisfying three basic psychological needs that lie at the heart of every human being's ability to thrive: autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Why care if people are optimally motivated? Optimal motivation fuels employee work passion. Actively engaged employees have positive intentions to stay and endorse your organization, use discretionary effort and organizational citizenship behaviors on behalf of the organization, and perform above expected standards."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Launching Billion-Dollar Products: How Extreme Entrepreneurs Bring Successful Ideas to Market
By Porchlight
"All businesses care about quality ideas: the new product they want to develop or the new market they want to exploit. Self-made billionaires are no different in their emphasis on ideas, but that is where the similarity ends. Traditional businesses often organize so that their individual functions specialize in one area of endeavor. The goal is to operate with optimum efficiency and to avoid conflict between groups and individuals who think differently from each other. As a result, people who are responsible for developing ideas work separately from the people who are responsible for bringing them to market. Product developers work separately from the manufacturing department; manufacturing is separate from marketing and sales, etc. There are logical reasons for this kind of separation, but the consequence so often is that even the best ideas are subject to compromise as they move from development to market. The qualities that make that idea new or great get watered down in the process of going live, and the original idea developer is rarely involved or influential enough to protect and optimize the qualities that make the idea good in the first place.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Stop Living Urgent; Start Living Significant
By Rory Vaden
"Everything you know about time-management is wrong. [...] Why? For two reasons... The first is that almost everything we read about time-management is logical. It's typically the same types of tired advice that we hear. 'Try this new app,' we say. Or 'follow this organization system.' And you've probably been told a hundred times, 'plan out your week on Sunday night and put some letters by your key tasks.' But time-management isn't just logical. Today especially, it's emotional."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Headfirst into My So-Called Life: Embracing Your Productivity Style to Work Simply
By Carson Tate
"If you're reading this article, your efforts to solve your busyness problem have probably not paid off. As a result, you're probably feeling frustrated. Or worse—you feel like a failure. Why can't you stop procrastinating? Why can't you get more done? Why isn't your inbox under control? The truth is that the problem is not you. It is how you are trying to overcome your busyness that is the problem."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Power of Apprenticeship
By Nicholas Wyman
"There is a huge shift happening in the United States right now: a return to the time-honored tradition of apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is the Western World's oldest form of occupational training, and with good reason. By learning first-hand from an experienced tradesperson, an apprentice acquires mastery of a trade, inside and out. It is a hands-on method that equips participants with exactly the right skills and experience to transition directly into a particular job. Modern apprenticeships have countless advantages for employers and the economy on the whole, as well as for anyone, at any stage of life, looking to launch a successful, well-paid, and fulfilling career."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Improvisational Innovation Two Words That Will Turn Employee Ideas Into Execution
By Deborah Perry Piscione
"New ideas and bold bets are essential for the livelihood and survival of any organization operating in today's competitive marketplace and era of exponential growth. On the minds of many leaders is the question, 'How do I know where the next big idea is, and what are the incremental or groundbreaking ideas that can be harvested from my employees?' The methodology behind Improvisational Innovation addresses the answer on how to identify, source, data-mine and execute upon new ideas from any employee, at anytime."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Everything We Know About Great Workplaces is Wrong
By Porchlight
"When we think about extraordinary workplaces, we tend to think of the billion dollar companies at the top of Fortune magazine's annual list. We picture a sprawling campus, rich with generous amenities; a utopian destination where success is constant, collaborations are seamless, and employee happiness abounds. But as it turns out, many of the assumptions these images promote mislead us about what it means to create an outstanding workplace. In recent years, scientists in a variety of fields have begun investigating the conditions that allow people to work more successfully. What they've discovered is that in an astonishing number of cases, not only are the factors that contribute to creating a great workplace not obvious—they are surprisingly counterintuitive. Here are five great workplace myths we routinely get wrong."
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Blog / ChangeThis
How To Create Eternal Life In Any Business
By Noah Fleming
"What if I told you that there is a gold mine of new business that you're probably missing out on? And what if I told you that these will be the easiest to find, most loyal, and highest grossing customers you will ever find? These are what I call, your evergreen customers. Your evergreen customers are the ones you already have. They are the ones who can provide eternal life, growth, and regeneration for your business. In this day and age, too many companies ignore their evergreen customers and are squandering this most precious resource in the endless pursuit of new customers. Of course the goal of every company is to grow. I'd be crazy to suggest otherwise. But in actuality, it's the loyal customers that are the beating heart of a great business, and it's the companies that ignore this, by placing greater emphasis on customer acquisition, will most likely to end up stalling their own growth."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Get Rid of the Jerks
By Porchlight
"What's the best way to have a better life? Just do this one thing: Get rid of the jerks. Yes, that's right, get rid of those people who are bothering you, the people who hold you back, the ones who don't appreciate you, the ones who complain all the time, the ones who are always criticizing you, the ones who drive you nuts, the ones who just tolerate you. In short, the jerks. I have had them in my life. Too many of them. Consulting clients who always pushed for a price cut and were never satisfied with the work I had done for them. Faculty colleagues who spent more time spreading rumors than doing research. Gossipers who would suck me in to conversations berating others. I often didn't know they were jerks because it was so comfortable being with them. I just figured everyone was like that. It took me a while to learn otherwise."
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Blog / ChangeThis
It's Your Turn: Make Something That Matters
By Porchlight
"We live in a world that's still filled with barriers and limits, a culture where too often people are judged, stripped of their dignity, and denied true freedoms. But at the same time, the economic and technological shifts around us have created an entirely new class of ruckus makers and have given people the freedom to stand up and acknowledge that it's their turn."
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.