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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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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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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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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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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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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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."
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Improvise Your Way to Success
By Porchlight
"Consider the last time a hard sell worked on you—or when you were last 'convinced' to do something. Having a hard time coming up with an instance? While a common sales practice, an overt sales pitch is more likely to cause a customer to run rather than to buy. [...] The bottom line is that no one wants to be assaulted by one-way communication (a sales pitch). Rather, customers need to be invited into two-way conversations where we can be heard and understood. Whether you're selling a product, your services, or yourself—you must learn to persuade differently in order to close more deals. You must learn to ditch the pitch."
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Beyond Keeping Afloat: How Established Business Can Get Breakthroughs
By Marc J. Epstein
"There is a common myth, told and retold, from the boardrooms of industry-dominating behemoths to the opinion columns and business pages of newspapers and magazines. It's a myth that litters the internet, and strikes fear in the heart of many an established executive. While it may seem like reality to many, this myth is actually more like a distortion of reality, often caused by a kind of inadvertent, self-imposed blindness—a willful, if unintentional, shoe gaze of sorts. The myth goes like this: large, established organizations can't get breakthrough innovations on their own. Breakthrough innovations, it says, are the domain of feisty, scrappy, nimble startups. Companies that once graced headlines as models of homegrown innovation, once they reach a certain point, it seems, often believe themselves incapable of developing the types of innovations that disrupt markets or even create entire new ones—the kinds of innovations that can radically change the outlook of a company, or even the world, when successful.
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Sell Yourself First
By Tom Hopkins
"People buy you first. It doesn't matter if you're meeting people for the first time in a social or business situation, you won't get far unless you sell yourself first. This comes as a surprise to many people who just show up without thinking about the impression they make on others. In the case of sales professionals, they may prepare their presentations well, but not pay as much attention to preparing themselves as to how they, personally, come across to potential clients. The basic premise of this article is that 'it matters. ' It matters if you show up 20 minutes early (awkward in social situations), 10 minutes early (usually appropriate for business), on time (okay in social situations, maybe not for business) or 10 minutes late (never acceptable). It matters if you're dressed and groomed appropriately—including whether or not you're wearing the right shoes (and that they're in good condition). When you want to capture the attention of others and have them view you as a competent individual, dress and act like one—appropriately for the situation in which you're meeting them.
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Generation We: Why Me Doesn't Work for One and Everyone, and What We Can Do to Change It
By Steven Smith
"Why does society tend to work in opposition to we if we is clearly a superior strategy? Why don't human beings make stronger moves to get past me ... ? Because psychologically and historically, me is a durable way to survive and succeed. Politics and business are competitive and capitalistic. Head-to-head, me appears to be the most viable strategy. But perception isn't reality. Social science and history expose me as a less steady way to survive, and a fragile way to thrive. And when me leaves work and goes home, stakes can get even higher. Emotions are closer to the surface. Love is deeper. Commitments are stronger. Me collapses entirely as a carryover strategy from boardrooms to living rooms."
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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.