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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
Grow Up and Lead: A Manifesto
By Porchlight
"Let's get a few things straight right from the start: Leadership is not about coming to work on time, dressing professionally or having a firm handshake. Leadership is not about 200 carefully worded phrases or five shortcuts to credibility. Leadership is not about calling people out or gloating. The moment you think, 'I've got this' is the very same moment you've lost it. Leadership is one of the hardest things you will ever do. And make no mistake about this. . . you are on your own. This leadership discussion is not about correcting something that is wrong in a performance review kind of way. I walk in the shoes of a leader every day and don't always come out on top. It's what we as leaders choose to do when we are at the bottom that defines us. There are leadership voids to fill in our workgroups, organizations, groups, clubs and communities and you are perfectly positioned with interest and intent to fill. You are selling yourself and your leadership short if you are listening to that voice in your head that is telling you that you can't do this and that this call is meant for someone else.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Leading from Above the Line
By Steve Satterwhite
"In the wake of the great recession, in businesses and organizations around the world, we have a crisis on our hands. But it's not the crisis we all think it is and talk about. It's worse. ... We don't have an Employee Engagement crisis. We have a Leadership Engagement crisis. It should be no surprise that only 13% of employees are engaged when you discover that only 19% of managers and executives are engaged! Engaged Leaders are outnumbered 4 to 1 by those who are not. Bradford D. Smart (Topgrading) reports that the top Human Resources executives of the largest 100 companies in the world admit that only 20% of managers they hired turned out to be the high performers they expected. 'That's an 80% mis-hire rate!' Smart, says. And yet, these are the same leaders that we are expecting to raise levels of Employee Engagement in our organizations. Maybe the old saying is still true—people join organizations but they leave managers."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Trust Trends 2014: An Executive Brief on How to Gain the Ultimate Competitive Advantage from Key Opportunities Embedded in the Year's Trends
By David Horsager
"From the Cyprus bank fiasco and Edward Snowden's intelligence leaks to the European horsemeat scandals and chemical weapons attack in Syria, stories of distrust are overflowing from the news. These trust breaches are combining with trends of increasingly rapid change to leave the world in a volatile state. Worse yet, leaders are leaving our world vulnerable. According to the Interaction Associates, one of the biggest questions of the year is whether leadership is consistent, predictable, and transparent in decision and action. Leaders who once exhibited these trustworthy characteristics, such as Silvio Berlusconi, Lance Armstrong, Bo Xilai, Anthony Weiner, and Joe Paterno, have fallen in the last year. Edelman Public Relations is aptly calling 2013 the year of the "Crisis of Leadership," and we are feeling the consequences in 2014, just like we did after the AIG, Enron, and Lehman Brothers disasters. The trust crisis appears to be an inescapable cycle, but we at Horsager Leadership, Inc.
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Blog / ChangeThis
How to Build Meaning, Impact, and Opportunity with Your Body of Work
By Pamela Slim
"No one is looking out for your career anymore. You must find meaning, locate opportunities, sell yourself, and plan for failure, calamity, and unexpected disasters. You must develop a set of skills that makes you able to earn an income in as many ways as possible.") The new world of work requires a new lens and skill set to ensure career success. You must create your own body of work as you operate in different organizational systems and structures."
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Blog / ChangeThis
What? Your Organization Doesn't Have a Constitution?
By S Chris Edmonds
"Most senior leaders put greater thought into their organization's products than they do its culture. Yet culture drives everything that happens in an organization each day, including what leaders pay attention to, whether problems are ignored or resolved, and how employees and customers are treated. Of course, understanding the need for an effective culture is one thing. Creating and managing that culture is another. How does one go about creating something that, on one hand, is so important, but, on the other hand, seems so amorphous? Through the creation of an organizational constitution."
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Customer Experience, Big Data, and Competitive Advantage
By Larry Freed
"To compete and win in today's ultracompetitive environment, where consumers are in control and switching costs are very low, the customer experience is more important than ever before. Businesses cannot stand still; they must continue to push the envelope and evolve—not only products, services, and marketing, but also analytics. [...] Companies with insightful and actionable analytics can respond to the market and their customers quicker than their competitors. Tomorrow's winners will be defined by the innovative strength of the customer experience analytics they use and implement. The key to measuring this new world of customer experience analytics is to understand the rise of big data. In 2000, only one-quarter of all the stored information in the world was digital; paper, film, and other analog media ruled. No more. With the amount of digital data doubling every three years, as of 2013 less than 2 percent of all stored information is nondigital."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Business in Blue Jeans: A Manifesto on How to Have a Successful Business on Your Own Terms, in Your Own Style
By Susan Baroncini-Moe
"Comparing yourself to other people is always a losing game, because there'll always be someone who's more successful than you are. There'll always be someone who does something better than you do. Where you stand relative to other people isn't nearly as important as where you stand relative to where you could be standing if you realized your full potential."
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Blog / ChangeThis
DON'T QUIT YOUR JOB. FIRE YOUR BOSS. (An Invitation to Unravel What the World Has Taught You About Your Work, Your Career and Your Future)
By Aaron McHugh
"Do you have what it takes to make a difference in your nine-to-five job. What if you could restructure your work to do what you love. And, what if it all starts with firing your boss. Don't Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss is a manifesto, a change in trajectory for your future. You own the opportunity to be the best at what you're already doing. Asking permission to pursue your dreams and do meaningful work doesn't start with hitting the eject button. Maybe it starts with staying right where you are, but there's a catch: your boss, well, you need to fire him. Blogger, writer, and career liberator Aaron McHugh shares from his own experience what it took to fire his boss. Creativity, inspiration, and fulfillment mixed with struggle and uncertainty form this type of journey. Only the brave are willing to make this disruptive shift in their career. Yet for every convert there is a guarantee of the most fulfilling, challenging, and liberating work you've always wanted. Make the change. Read this book, and then go fire your boss.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The HUMAN Brand: How We Relate to People, Products and Companies
By Chris Malone
"Social psychologists have determined that primitive humans, in their struggle for existence, developed the ability to judge other people almost instantly along two categories of perception, which are known as warmth and competence. In fact, all humans have a primal, unconscious ability to make these two crucial judgments with a high degree of speed and accuracy: What are the intentions of this person toward me. And how capable are they of carrying out those intentions. [. . . ] We apply these warmth and competence judgments in all our relationships, including those involving commercial transactions. Companies and brands have the same capacity to stir up these hard-wired primal passions as people do, and we engage with them on the same basis. We experience feelings of affection and admiration for companies and brands that treat us well, and we feel insult or even rage when we believe that one of those companies has given us poor service or cheated us. [. . . ] Unfortunately, our studies show that most companies and brands fall well short of customer expectations on both warmth and competence.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Community of Leaders
By Vince Molinaro
"Leaders today are yearning for something more meaningful. The reason is for many of us, the experience of leadership has been mediocre at best. … Whatever the experience, you may end up questioning why you ever became a leader in the first place. You also know deep down that there has to be a better way. I'm here to tell you that there is."
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.