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
Data Capitalism: Counting and Communications Technologies and How They Have Altered the Structure and Management Of Business
By Steve Lohr
"Since the Industrial Revolution, new counting and communications technologies have altered the structure and management of business. ... Yet the guiding metric of management for decades has remained the same: finance. With improvements in communications and computing, financial performance can be measured faster and in greater detail than before. But it is still a fairly blunt, crude measurement—counting money, one factor of production and output of the enterprise. It is still financial capitalism. But big data promises to usher in a new phase in the practice of management."
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Change the Game or Go Home: A Manifesto for Innovation
By Joseph Jaffe
"How is it that the likes of MapMyFitness or Mint end up being purchased by the likes of Under Armor or Intuit for hundreds of millions of dollars instead of being created by these same companies? Isn't it time companies asked the same questions as these entrepreneurs, but instead of articulating this in a creative brief and being satisfied with a jingle, tagline or even real-time tweet as the output, fast tracked and super sized this expectation in the form of a disruptive technology-led solution? Isn't it time to look towards the tens of thousands of viable startups out there for collaboration opportunities? And if the solution doesn't already exist, why wouldn't you start it yourselves?"
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Is Your Brand Missing the Mark with 60% of U.S. Consumers?
By Paul Jankowski
"There's one part of the country where, I think, many brands are completely missing the mark: it's what I call the New Heartland. It's made up of the Southwest, Midwest, and parts of the Southeast and is home to 60% of all U.S. consumers. It's a massive and influential cultural segment that is largely misunderstood and underserved by advertisers—and a huge opportunity for brands willing to make the effort. So how do brands effectively reach the New Heartland?"
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Why Technologists Should Work For Themselves
By Mark Beckner
"There are freedoms and opportunities in the technical industry that are not as readily available in other trades and professions. These freedoms and opportunities are left largely untapped by the millions employed in this industry. What are these freedoms? What are these opportunities? [...] Programmers, developers, solution architects, and technical consultants—all of you have the basic skills necessary to become highly successful outside the confines of traditional employment. You have to take on the activities of a businessperson. This is easier than it may seem; it is a natural progression from where you are today, and one which will pay immense dividends."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Sprinkles: An Antidote To The Demise of Customer Surprise
By Chip R. Bell
"What has made customer surprise in such a scarcity? At least three culprits have robbed the glee of service. First, many organizations have been forced to apply austere expense cutting in the face of ever-diminishing profit margins; value-added amazement has gotten pricey. Second, rising customer expectations have elevated what it takes to be judged as enchanting. Customers live in a highly stimulated daily lives. Stores have become sensory theater; TV and the Internet as vibrant as Broadway after dark. To paraphrase an old song, "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Zappos." There is a third reason...one subtler and far more challenging."
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Out for Brains! (Why Customer Service Will Drive the Economy of the Next Fifty Years and Beyond)
By Peter Shankman
"The age of 'buy from us because we say we're awesome' is over, and has been replaced by an age of 'I'll buy from them because someone I trust says they're awesome.' We commissioned a survey on customer service, and the results will shock you. ... 25% of customers report an instance of poor customer service in the past two months alone! Each instance is estimated at resulting in over $700 in lost sales from that customer—and then spreading the word to an estimated 700 additional people on social media! However, the overwhelming majority of businesses think that their customer service is superior. There is a huge disconnect."
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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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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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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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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.