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
A Consistent Personal Narrative is the Key to Leading in the Social Age
By Sudhanshu Palsule
"In the new world of deep interconnectivity, what we call the Social Age, leaders are confronted with challenges that constantly test 'who they are' while making each of these tests public with everyone able to comment. ... Social Age leadership challenges ... five areas of 'who we are' as leaders that most impact our leadership narrative. ... There is no one right way to lead in these five areas. Rather, they are aspects of who you are as a person. Thriving as a leader in the Social Age means taking a good look at your self and understanding how you are most productive in each of these five areas."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Welcome to the Conscience Economy
By Porchlight
"Something extraordinary is happening. Humankind's increasing interconnectedness is causing a global transformation of values and expectations, at both the individual and societal level. The shift is reaching a tipping point that will transform business forever. You don't have to be an economic detective or business futurist to see myriad signs of the unstoppable rise of a new set of economic prerogatives that prioritize proactive positive impact on people and planet. Consider this short list: the emergence of universally available virtual education, the mainstreaming of environmental consciousness on the political and business agenda, the accelerating growth of the organic and Fairtrade foods industry, the growth of impact investing as a sector, the innovation in biosensor-enabled mobile healthcare solutions—these phenomena and more herald a mass movement for good that's great for humanity. And for business."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Choose Your Impact, Change the World
By Mindy Hall
"Who do you want to be as a leader. What impact do you want to have. How do you want people to experience you. No matter where you fall in the organizational structure, your ability to shape both the organizational culture and how others perceive you is a direct result of the level of intention with which you operate. What does it mean to operate with intention. It is consciously deciding to lead by design rather than by default; being mindful of who it is you want to be and then living into that picture twenty-four hours a day. It is about seeing opportunities every day, in every interaction, to shape the tone, the experience, and the outcome of those interactions. It is being aware that everything you do sends a message: what you say and how you say it, what you do and how you do it, even what you choose not to say or do. It is realizing that the system you work in does not tell you who you get to be; you decide who you get to be. Seeing your 'self' as the primary tool for achieving high-level results is a concept that may seem like common sense, but it is far less commonly practiced and even less often developed in professionals as they grow in their careers.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Entrepreneur's Journey
By Kevin Kruse
"My call to entrepreneurship happened in an unusual manner, when I was just 12 years old. A mysterious one-armed man approached me and set me off on a journey that would eventually include the launch of several companies—some successful, some not. This manifesto both celebrates and encourages entrepreneurship because we need entrepreneurs to fight the dragons that roam the globe. Yes, dragons. They sit in plain sight: civil wars, extreme poverty, disease, water scarcity, domestic violence, illiteracy, and so many others. While the work of relief agencies and social welfare groups is vital—especially in response to acute crises—for lasting change we need modern-day heroes who courageously take personal risks as they build new companies."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Growth Hacker Wake Up Call: How Growth Hacking Rewrote Marketing's Best Practices
By Ryan Holiday
"The term 'growth hacker' has many different meanings for different people, here's my definition: A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are emails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like "branding" and "mind share," growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a startup from nothing to something."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Conquering the Seven Summits: High Achievement, From Mount Everest to Every Business
By Susan Ershler, John Waechter
"Perseverance is the singular quality that Everest summiteers and the business elite have in common. We don't believe that perseverance is an intrinsic quality possessed by the fortunate few. On the contrary, we're convinced that anyone can accomplish great feats if they summon the will required to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Successful individuals know how to motivate themselves to achieve peak performance. They know what internal levers to pull when their engines of determination start to flag."
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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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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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Blog / ChangeThis
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."
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.