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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
Effective Leaders Create Discomfort
By Marcia Reynolds
"The best leaders make us feel unsure of ourselves. They help us recognize that what we think is true, is not. Their reflections make us stop and think. Then their questions break down our frames. They create these disruptions with courage, care, respect, and a firm belief in our highest potential. Although we are uncomfortable, this moment of uncertainty allows us to formulate a broader view of what we can do and who we can be. These leaders strengthen people as well as organizations."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Driving Results Through An Organizational Constitution
By S Chris Edmonds
"Today, people spend more time at work than with their best friends or family members. When their workplace is an inspiring, respectful, creative place to be, people engage deeply, serve customers effectively, and produce quality goods and services consistently. The problem? Most leaders put greater thought into their organization's products and services than they do its culture. Yet culture drives everything that happens in an organization each day."
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Detecting and Surviving Seven Silent Growth Killers
By Porchlight
"Unlike dry spells in innovation, quality defects and mistakes made in entering new markets, many of the problems that midsized companies must deal with are not obvious. These problems grow out-of-sight in the dark recesses of the midsized organization, unrecognized by management in their daily routines until they emerge as full-blown crises that can threaten the present and future of the business. I refer to these special afflictions of midsized companies—seven in all—as silent growth killers. These silent growth killers sneak up on leaders at midsized companies just as high blood pressure and high cholesterol can creep up on us, often unnoticed, and later cause massive complications. Just as those medical conditions, untreated, can lead to an early demise, executives who fail to prevent or address these silent growth killers may see their businesses collapse in a dysfunctional heap."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Watch Your F#*k%^g Language!: Why the Analogies We Embrace Drive Success and Failure, and How to Choose Better Ones
By Porchlight
"The analogical instinct is the human urge to compare what we encounter to what we know and, based on that comparison, jump to conclusions. This rush to judgment is a good thing, most of the time. It's an evolutionary advantage that helped our ancestors perceive the difference between a floating log and a floating crocodile; those who failed to see the similarity tended to get eaten at higher rates, and reproduce less. ... Eons later, analogies still drive our decision-making as individuals, as organizations, as companies and even as nations. ... In fact, a survey of history's greatest innovators, from Copernicus to Gutenberg to Darwin to the Wright Brothers, all achieved their greatest breakthroughs in large part through the effective use of analogy. Leaders as diverse as Winston Churchill, Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King also used analogy to great effect, persuading millions that they could change the world, no matter what challenges might lie ahead."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Quest for True Value: An Investor's Manifesto to Turn On, Tune In, Get High.
By Guy Spier
"When I discovered Warren Buffett, a light went on in my head. It did not take me long to realize that I wanted a life that was more like his than mine. Determined to transform my life, I began a long journey of discovery. It lead to my having a charity lunch with Warren Buffett at Smith & Wollensky's in 2008, but it also came with many costly mistakes and hard earned, but valuable lessons. [...] Today, I might not quite tap dance to work as well as Warren Buffett does, but I've gotten a lot better. My suggestion to you: lighten up. Stop working so hard and focusing on the money and your next promotion all the time. Start having fun while you work instead. That joy will show in your eyes, and the promotion and that raise will take care of themselves, along with career and life success."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Humble Pulpit: Leadership Lessons from Pope Francis
By Porchlight
"As someone who has studied leaders and the topic of leadership for more than three decades, I have long since believed that humility is the most under-rated of all leadership qualities. As a member of the publishing community for the same length of time, I have been baffled that no (commercial) publisher has ever published a book that instructs managers, leaders, and aspiring leaders how to become more humble. However, this should not come as a big surprise. That's because there has not been an inspiring, humble figure that could be used as a shining example of this key leadership quality. Until now. Since Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis in March of 2012, he has shown the world a new way to lead. Not with bluster or bravado, but with humility and humanity. He has, without a doubt, emerged as the most humble leader on the world stage. There isn't even a close second."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Work As We Know It Is Dead
By Porchlight
This isn't a manifesto about following your passions or being happy, it's a call to action to change and evolve our organizations to reflect the world that they operate in.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Working Across Cultures and Knowing When to Shut Up
By Erin Meyer
"Today, whether we work with colleagues in Dusseldorf or Dubai, Braslia or Beijing, New York or New Delhi, we are all part of a global network (real or virtual, physical or electronic) where success requires navigating through wildly different cultural realities. Unless we know how to decode other cultures and avoid easy-to-fall-into cultural traps, we are easy prey to misunderstanding, needless conflict, and deals that fall apart. Yet most managers have little understanding of how local culture impacts global interaction. Even those who are culturally informed, travel extensively, and have lived abroad often have few strategies for dealing with the cross-cultural complexity that affects their team's day-to-day effectiveness. Often the cross-cultural challenges that arise could be avoided by learning a few basic principles. For example, the answer to the simple question, 'When should I speak and when should I be quiet?' varies dramatically from one culture to another."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Creating a Coaching Culture: A Playbook to Build Winning Business Teams
By Nathan Jamail
"Growing up, most of us had to learn how to defend ourselves and think for ourselves. And, if you were anything like me, you had to learn the hard way—paying the consequences for bad decisions (and, for me, there were many). As parents, we try to remove every struggle we endured growing up, so they don't have to struggle the way we did, and yet those hard times and struggles are most likely exactly what made us who we are today. It is our responsibility just to help see them through those struggles and help them learn and grow from them. The same can be said for business today. And, in business, most of our employees are not as good as they could be—not because of our love for them or our desire to make their lives better than ours, but for the exact opposite reason. It is because most of the time we think they are not worth the effort to really coach them."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Harvesting the Low-Hanging Fruit: The Easy Road to Higher Earnings
By Jeremy Eden, Terri Long
"The blinding rate of innovation over the past few decades has turned yesterday's 'impossible' into today's 'of course.' But one area has experienced a near complete lack of innovation over that same time period: the ways executives manage and problem solve have barely changed. In fact, management innovation has done little to nothing to ease the burden of dealing with the growing complexity and decreasing resources that most large companies face. The key to innovating management practices lies with two old terms that frankly are now rather tired, due in no small part to the fact that so few companies do either of them well for extended periods of time. Those two terms, inextricably linked, are employee engagement, without which you will not succeed at the second, which is continuous improvement."
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.