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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
Art Is Freedom
By Erik Wahl
"My name is Erik Wahl and Art has saved me from a life of slavery. I've been a member of A. A. (Artists Anonymous) for over twelve years. I am a recovering suit and tie. I am recuperating from years as a gear in a wheel that barely touched the ground. And now, after rediscovering my Art by freeing my mind and digging to find my inner creative genius, I am a proud survivor of 'standardized education. ' I found a new path. I learned to UNthink. I learned how to unleash and unlock my mind to find freedom. In my search for freedom, I was unaware that 'art' (actual paintbrushes and paints) would serve as my personal rehab as I began to rebuild from rock bottom. But during this deep search for real answers, I realized the term art had been misused for centuries. What originally began as a term defining the interaction between geniuses and muses eventually was morphed into a hierarchical description of taste and masterpieces. 'Art' became a product and 'artist' became a career where, like any other job, you could succeed or fail.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Biology of the Bottom Line
By Porchlight
"Can we succeed without the body. On the face of it, this seems like a ridiculous question, but when we step back and take a closer look at modern organizational culture, we might be inclined to wonder. After all, most discussions of management and strategy take place in the disembodied, abstract world of the mind. The body is considered a minor player at best and health becomes a concern only in its absence, when skyrocketing medical costs, absenteeism, and presenteeism reach unacceptable levels. In practice, today's organization is almost completely blind to the body and its contribution to performance. We are, in the language of therapy, 'vertically disintegrated' or to put it more bluntly, 'dead from the neck down. ' As Sir Ken Robinson put it in his legendary TED talk, most of us now consider the body to be little more than 'a locomotor device for the head,' a transport mechanism whose only purpose is to move the brain from one computer terminal or meeting to the next. And so it comes as no surprise to discover that we are suffering catastrophic consequences.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
FundRazor: How Collective Sourcing Can Fix Public Education
By Porchlight
"What if everybody with a child in public school decided, collectively, to stop buying one thing in favor of another? How much would a company pay to have their product be the new thing bought? We are talking about leveraging an emotional tie to a business decision. We are talking about bringing small businesses and education together. But we have a few hurdles to get over first. When it comes to changing the way we fund public education, we have to stop looking at ourselves as just voters and taxpayers. We must also identify ourselves as consumers and business owners, and use that as a way to see what funds are available and really get what we need."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The 8 Blind Spots Between Men and Women at Work
By Barbara Annis
"When driving a car, our side and rear view mirrors don't often reveal everything we need to see. We find we have blind spots and have to turn our head so as not hit something. We don't resist the fact that we have blind spots or deny that they exist; we accept their presence and make every effort to improve our vision. We do it to be less of a hazard to others and to ourselves. Quite similar are the obstructions that prevent men and women from seeing the other gender in the clearest possible light—misperceptions we call Gender Blind Spots. [. . . ] Considering the implications in our personal lives, at our workplace, and for society as a whole, it's time for a shift in our thinking. We need to step up to a new level of conversation and begin to include each other and participate with each other more successfully. We need a better understanding of why men and women think and act as they do. We need to see the strength in the complement of those differences. We need to be more gender-intelligent.
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Blog / ChangeThis
If It's Good Enough for Cars... How Lean Manufacturing Principles Can Help Heal What Ails Us In the Healthcare Business
By Porchlight
"In healthcare, understanding value to the patient customer is too often limited to reviewing patient satisfaction survey scores. . . . Not that we think such scores have no value. However, patient satisfaction surveys are only one tool for defining customer value. Another tool we'd like to see doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators use on a regular basis is following a typical patient's journey end to end. " [. . . ] What we are talking about here is an end to end focus on healthcare delivery processes, which we call value streams, from the patient arrival at an Emergency Department (ED) to discharge or admission to the hospital, from the doctor's decision to schedule a patient for surgery to hospital discharge of the patient to a rehabilitation facility, from application of a patient for admission to a skilled nursing facility to discharge home, from receipt of an appointment reminder to completion of a routine physician office visit. It can also include a focus on the processes supporting delivery of care such as purchasing, replenishment of medication and supplies, and hiring staff.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Qualities of a High Value Player(or, How to Rise Above the Suffering in Your Work Life)
By Cy Wakeman
"People have come to believe that suffering is now part of working life, and are suffering more than ever. Tough economic times have left fewer people to do the same amount of work. Jobs people used to love have become overwhelming; jobs they never loved have become intolerable. Success seems like an impossible dream as people strive to do more with less. They've seen good people get laid off and good jobs outsourced to cheaper workers. This is madness. It is not an imagination. But there is hope. In some of the worst circumstances, it is still possible to find people who are performing well and are happy. This article will provide you with some tips for how you too can be a happy, high performer—a high value player."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Art of Significance: Achieving The Level Beyond Success
By Dan Clark
"We achieve success by doing what is necessary to get what we want, but often end up in a completely different physical and emotional place than we thought we would be. It's like the pilot who took off at the equator to circumnavigate the globe. Because his course was off by just one degree, by the time he returned to the same longitude, he was lost. An error of only one degree had taken him 500 miles off course, where he ran out of gas and crashed. No one wants his life to end in a place he didn't intend—a destination of meaningless selfishness, or in a crash caused by regrets. But all too often we don't realize that an error of a few degrees has set us on a course for disaster, and as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, 'We die with our music still in us. ' As I've traveled the world and interviewed the most famous and influential people on the planet, I've discovered that many of their lives have not been as wonderful as perceived. While giving themselves over to fortune and fame, they surrendered their capacity to live as well-adjusted, fulfilled human beings.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Do It! Marketing Manifesto
By Porchlight
"What is marketing? Put bluntly, marketing is the set of strategies, tactics and tools that make selling unnecessary. OK, that's a bit extreme. Let's try again... Marketing is the set of strategies, tactics and tools that help you sell more products and services—more easily AND more often. There, that's better. Bad news: Marketing for the sake of marketing is broken. Kaput. Finished. Smart marketing is all about helping you generate MORE leads, BETTER prospects, and BIGGER sales. Period. Good news: That also happens to be the purpose of this cheeky, powerful little manifesto you're reading right now."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Growing Up Jersey
By Porchlight
"The Azelby brothers grew up in Northern New Jersey, just outside New York City, with their eldest sister Terri and a middle brother Tom. Their dad was a New York City police officer and their mother was a substitute teacher at the local catholic grade school. The brothers thoroughly enjoyed their childhood and the many stories they lived or heard from that era shaped their view of the world and inform their business decision making today. The manifesto they would like to share is a very simple one. If you want to impart a lesson and have it stick in the minds of your audience, it is best to do it within a story. . . stories go deep under your skin and penetrate both the conscious and subconscious mind. You will almost always remember a good story and it's quite likely you'll remember the message within it. We want to share a few memorable stories from our "Growing Up Jersey" collection that we draw upon today to help us lead large complex businesses. If you remember these stories a few days from now or they pop into your mind a few weeks from now then our manifesto may have some validity.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Right or Kind? Navigating the Soft Skills Revolution
By Maxine Kamin
"Do we care about talking to each other anymore, or are we settling for mostly texts, emails, tweets, and electronic quickies? Is this like quickie sex, compared to romantic adventures with all the accoutrements of a love making session? Are we too busy to really connect? What is the draw of fast talk? We often think that quick communication saves time. This is true in some cases. Relying only on cursory communication though runs the risk of misunderstanding, and a lot of hoopla about 'what did she mean by that e-mail?' Once those questions get started, they take on a life of their own and end up as huge time wasters, not time savers, and the intent of the communication may be lost, and so badly misinterpreted that trust goes astray in the translation. Let's regroup and think about the advantages of face-to-face communication, what might get in the way, and types of skills that promote cooperation, even in difficult instances."
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.