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
-
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.
Categories: changethis
-
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
-
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
-
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."
Categories: changethis
-
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
-
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
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Jazz-Leadership
By Penelope Tobin
"Traditional leadership has long looked like the orchestral conductor. But we're living within a whirlwind of change, and the authoritarian individual, working to a fixed, detailed plan from a detached position of control, isn't equipped to deal with it. To survive these new circumstances, we must all learn how to improvise (from the Latin "improvises", meaning "not seen ahead of time"). [...] We need leadership in a new groove—jazz-leadership."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Your Time is Your Life—Invest it Well
By Porchlight
"Now is a time of revolution—or perhaps more precisely evolution—in the world of personal productivity. Time management no longer offers sufficient support for people overwhelmed with the onslaught of responsibility and opportunity in today's 24/7 world. The next step: Time Investment. Ironically, the people with the most time and autonomy can end up the most miserable because their relative freedom makes them hold onto the false notion that they can do everything. But the truth is that even if you have copious amounts of time and resources, you still need to make choices. Failing to do so will lead to an unsatisfying lack of depth and closure in your life."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
How to Get Employees to Manage Themselves
By Jody Thompson
"Employees don't leave companies. They leave managers. 70% of employees don't feel valued by their employers. 64% of Americans leave their jobs due to lack of recognition. This impacts the bottom line because customers feel the effects of employee success and either respond with loyalty, or get turned off by bad service or inferior products. There has to be a better way to improve employee and manager relationships in order to maximize business success. The answer is simple. Manage the work, not the people."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Alternative Answers: The Class Divide in Investing, and How You Can Close It
By Bob Rice
"Harvard's biggest single financial bet is on timber, not stocks. Yale has just 6% of its endowment in US equities; instead, it's long "absolute return," "private equity," and real assets. Each is up more than100% over the past decade. In the meantime, typical investors have, at best, treaded water. And that's no anomaly. In 7 of the 11 decades since 1900, the classic 60/40, stock/bond portfolio has returned an average real return of a whopping. . . 1%. Yes, those other four decades were big winners; but then those gains were walloped by the kinds of big crashes that are only becoming more frequent. Fact is, a class system has developed among investors over the past few decades. Elite money managers have used a proprietary set of tools to ride economic cycles up, but also to avoid big losses during downturns. Meanwhile, the rest of us all thought that "investing" was synonymous with simply buying stocks and bonds, with maybe a bit of real estate tossed in. [. . . ] Fortunately, times have changed—even if most people still don't know it.
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.