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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Built to Reinvent: The Ten Commandments of Today's Sustainable Company
By Nadya Zhexembayeva
"Ask any manager on planet Earth, 'What is your key challenge. ' and among many different responses one will strike you with remarkable consistency: Staying afloat. The fast-moving roller-coaster economy we live in today makes this task increasingly difficult. Just as we handle one crisis, another looms around the corner. How can we sustain—and even thrive. The answer is the one you've heard before: We must consistently remake who we are, what we offer, and how we deliver our offerings to the world. Put it simply, we must reinvent. What you may not have heard before is this: Today, the frequency with which our reinvention must take place is staggering. Essentially, we must become a new company every three years. In fact, we must reinvent so frequently and so radically that the traditional roles and processes inside of an organization cannot keep up. It's time to make reinvention into its own profession. The Ten Commandments are here to help you with this task. Spoiler alert: all hail the Chief Reinvention Officer.
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Unlocking Failure's Grip On The "Static Quo" In Your Organization
By John Danner, Mark Coopersmith
"Ask yourself: why is it so few organizations ever achieve performance even remotely close to their potential, much less that of their aspirations. Why is it so few organizations succeed through their second or third generation of leadership. Why are so few workplaces truly "great places to work". Is it because their leaders are stupid, their people incompetent, or their strategies inept. Did all those executives running formerly dominant companies such as Blackberry, Nokia, RadioShack or Kodak never get the memo about The Innovator's Dilemma. Is it simply not possible for most organizations to do fundamentally better. Or is all this just a matter of bad luck or fate, or the natural consequence of business Darwinism. We don't think so. A big part of the answer is that most organizations and the executives who run them don't recognize, respect or leverage the reality and potential of the one resource every organization and management team create every day: failure—the other 'F' word.
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Blog / ChangeThis
We Must Regain Our Humanity at Work
By Rodd Wagner
"We've lost much of our humanity at work. No one saw it coming. No one intended it. It arrived in big changes to the economy, but also in small changes to the law, to technology, or to company policy, often with immediate benefits that masked their larger implications. The pension will be phased out in favor of a 401(k) match. The company will help pay for the latest digital device, so much the better to stay in touch with the office. One day a new electronic screening system helps HR take a first pass at incoming applications, and before long the software does most of the sifting. A modest change in workload leads to working through one weekend, which leads to another, which leads, before too long, to having a hard time remembering when one last took a weekend entirely uninterrupted by work. Having allowed these slight modifications to accumulate over a decade or so, we now find ourselves treating people much more like cogs in the machine, like widgets. We've lost much of the human touch for what we now call our 'human resources.
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Attacking Culture One Negotiation at a Time
By Deborah M. Kolb
"It has come like a thunderbolt. Some of our most esteemed companies in the new economy woke up and discovered that their workforce was overwhelmingly male (70% at Google, for example) and it was difficult to find more than a handful of women at the top. These companies recognize this is a big problem, and they plan to do something serious to change it, at least if we go by the amount of resources devoted to remedying the imbalance. [. . . ] These biases are not intentional, but instead arise from cultural assumptions and organizational practices that can inadvertently put women at a disadvantage. Since they are unintentional and often invisible, these biases can be hard to address. The first task is to identify them in your organization. There are certain places to look –unconscious bias in hiring and promotion, opportunity structures that channel women and men into different functions, conceptions that an ideal worker is available 24/7, among others. Once we've identified them, the next challenge how can we alter them.
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Six Kinds of Curiosity: And How You Can Use Them to Change Your Life
By Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman
"Curiosity is an incredible tool. But what I realized, what really inspired my desire to write A Curious Mind with Charles Fishman, is that most people don't use their curiosity with a sense of purpose and understanding—with insight about curiosity itself. Curiosity is the key to understanding people's personalities and motivations. Curiosity is a vital storytelling tool—and storytelling is the best way to engage and persuade other people, in your work life and your personal life. Curiosity is a fantastic source of courage. Curiosity is the best, most under-used management tool—a great way to create engagement in your fellow works, but also a great way to transmit values and priorities. Curiosity is the spark for creativity and innovation, the best long-term investment you can make. Curiosity is the best way to stay connected to those who are most important to you. Curiosity, in fact, turns out to be a quiet superpower that all of us have. You don't need an Ivy League education to use it, you don't need a high-speed Internet connection.
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From Macro to Uh-Oh: From Company Concept to Employee Culture... and Back Again
By Stan Slap
"Want your employees to buy a new management goal? You have to know how to sell it to them. This doesn't mean selling to your employees; it means selling to your employee culture, which is a whole different proposition. 'Culture' is the most overused yet least understood concept in business. The difference between understanding your employees and understanding your employee culture is the difference between whether your performance goals succeed or fail. When they form a relationship with a company, employees become a culture. A culture is a separate organism living within your company. It has its own purpose and the power to make or break any management plan – and any manager right along with it. Neither business logic nor management authority nor any compelling competitive urgency will convince an employee culture to adopt a corporate cause as if it were its own. In the killing field between company concept and employee commitment lay many a failed strategic plan."
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Being Heard in a Chaotic World
By Porchlight
"Today, we are connected in a multitude of ways and tethered to our devices 24x7. We have technology that allows instantaneous online delivery of content, including music, books and video. That same technology allows us to generate our own content and share it with the world. We have interactive social media tools that allow us to connect with communities we didn't even know existed a decade ago. And all of this is available from a mobile device that fits in the palm of your hand. New communication techniques and technologies are emerging at a rapid pace, continuously bombarding us with messages and reminders, with no end in sight. In a world where it's hard enough to cut through the noise to get the attention of friends and family members, it's even more difficult for businesses and other organizations to reach prospects and customers. Unfortunately, many organizations try to solve this situation by talking louder and LOUDER until they are shouting at us from across a crowded room. They add to the noise, make us tune out, and continue their way down an unsustainable path.
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Connectional Intelligence: How to Get Big Things Done
By Erica Dhawan, Saj-Nicole Joni
"We've been living with the internet now for twenty years and it's not news that we're all connected. Unless a totalitarian government swoops down and takes away our cell phones and our access to social media, that connectivity isn't going anywhere. The question is: How do you and I grab hold of this newfound connectivity to take us to the places we want to go. At a time when old-fashioned routes to power—the schools you went to, the contacts in your address book, the families you were born into—are not the only ways to get ahead, how do we connect intelligently, e. g. better, faster, more efficiently, and use all of our connections to make our ideas happen. Almost everyone has at least the capacity to link up with people, power, ideas, information and resources, but how do we synthesize it all to produce real change and influence people's lives for the better. The key is thinking differently about our connections. We need a shift in perception that empowers us to be the drivers of our digital tools and our new resources.
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BETTER and FASTER: How to Adapt & Change
By Jeremy Gutsche
"Your breakthrough opportunity, your big idea and your team's top tier are much closer than you think. The only problem is, for every opportunity you have hundreds of choices you could make with each one leading you to a slightly different version of your full potential. So, how do you know if you are making the right choices? What if you could make just a handful of better ones faster? You'd be more successful at almost anything."
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Reducing the Pressure We Feel Every Day
By Porchlight
"When you experience pressure anxiety—the feeling that you have to produce all the time—your emotional landscape changes for the worse. Small annoyances like picking up your dry-cleaning, for example, begin to interfere with your need to 'produce. ' Going to your daughter's play becomes an intrusion. Going on vacation can increase your anxiety, because it takes you away from what you should be doing: achieving results. Important conversations with your spouse may go south because of the subtle pressure of always being 'on. ' Worse, your decisions may become distorted by your need to produce. And if your focus shifts solely to winning, at any cost, you may find yourself compromising your ethics. Pressure anxiety may seem irrational—a mediocre presentation to a client is not akin to physical death—and probably, in and of itself, will not lead to the end of a professional relationship. Similarly, your daughter being turned down from her first choice college will not end her life, although she may feel that way at the time.
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.