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
Forget Today: Start at the End
By Porchlight
"Soon after entrepreneurs and business owners start businesses, we become trapped in the day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month struggles and goals of generating more sales and profits, improving employee performance, and trying to reduce our hours and stress. At some point, virtually all of us become 101% focused on these short-term goals and lose sight of our long-term visions. As a result, we begin to wander, and never achieve our initial vision. How can we find success given the daily struggles of building a company? Forget Today; Start at the End [...] In business, as in everything else, you need to have a clear vision of where you want to go. Then, and only then, can you create a plan to follow to get you there. The key is to "start at the end." Figure out where you want to go. And then you can reverse engineer the path to get there."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Leapfrogging to Breakthroughs
By Soren Kaplan
"Surprise is the enemy. Or, is it? Could we be overlooking—even resisting—one of the most essential catalysts of personal and business breakthroughs? Could we be ignoring the most fundamental tool that anyone can use to create disruptive innovation and change? Here's the fundamental problem. Game changers—whether products, services, or new business models—don't necessarily result from big visions, carefully crafted strategies, and meticulous plans. Creating disruptive, game changing innovation requires leaders to live with uncertainty, embrace ambiguity, and respond to both good and bad surprises along the way. We've been trained to resist the very thing that's needed to leapfrog to the next level. We need to learn to live with—even embrace—what most of us view as the enemy."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Overemphasis on Profit Erodes Your Bottom Line Why Purpose-Driven Salespeople Wildly Outperform Their Quota-Driven Counterparts
By Lisa Earle McLeod
"Most people believe that money is the primary motivator for top salespeople and that doing good by the world runs a distant second. That belief is wrong. If your sales force isn't producing what it's capable of, it may well be that you're overemphasizing profit at the expense of purpose. This observation doesn't come just from personal experience but from hard data. Studies show that companies committed to improving their customer's lives outperform the market by a stunning 15:1 ratio. [...] A quota-driven mindset spirals into the lowest common denominator sales activities. You start competing on cost not value. You think short-term, fail to understand the customer's environment, and cannot grasp the link between your products and the client's need. It's a slow descent to commodity status."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Service Failure: Do You Really Care About Your Customer?
By Jeff Toister
"Executives may claim to care about their customers, but their actions frequently suggest just the opposite. How else could you explain hitting loyal customers with a sudden 60 percent price increase (Netflix, 2011). Would a company that cared about service really try to implement a $5 fee on debit card transactions and then defend the move as something that customers would appreciate (Bank of America, 2011). Can a company that cares about its customers really implement a procedure where pennies are literally stolen from its customers at the point of sale by rounding down the amount of change due when customers pay with cash (Chipotle, 2012). I know what you are thinking. You're different. You truly care about your customers and would never resort to price gouging or penny stealing. I hope so. And, the mere fact that you've read this far and may have even been a little indignant about a company skimping on toilet paper speaks volume about your character. Still, do you really care about customer service.
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
We Are All Artists Now
By Porchlight
"This isn’t a manifesto for other people. This is a manifesto for you. It’s a manifesto for anyone who has been overlooked or brainwashed or seduced into being invisible."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
Death Blues: The Celebration and Opportunity of Each Moment
By Porchlight
"How much time is left. Do we know. Does our plan know. What happens when we thoroughly hold and understand that our lives are finite. How does this understanding of our end shape our present. And how do we become more 'present. ' Because each moment is an opportunity and a decision. We all have dreams for the future: Making a million dollars, getting a new car, finishing school, getting a promotion, and achieving any number of goals, while potentially important, might not be possible in this instant. But considering an overdue apology, sending a positive email to someone, calling a family member, talking to a co-worker about a project idea, connecting in any way with someone in order to make something good happen can be done right now. And consider the affect those immediate actions might have on the longer-term goals listed previously. Many big events in our lives are the results of a series of immediate but important smaller events that take place before them. Immediate positive actions are the structural building blocks for what's to come.
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
The Paradox of Skill: Why Greater Skill Leads to More Luck
By Michael J. Mauboussin
"Okay, you have gotten the memo on improving skill: 10,000 hours, hard work, deliberate practice, grit, and attentive teacher. We've all heard it. You also recognize that in many of life's activities, the results you achieve combine skill and luck. No debate there. Now, what if I told you that in many cases improving skill leads to results that rely more on luck? That's right. Greater skill doesn't decrease the dependence on luck, it increases it. If you have an interest in sports, business, or investing, this lesson is for you."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
The Snowflake Moment: Presenting the Future Today
By Porchlight
"The snowflake moment we idolize, that final and glorious crystalline state which Bentley captured on black velvet time and time again, does provide justification for everything else. It is the end, and so must mean something, must make a bold statement about the substance and quality of our existence. But the snowflake moment is just one of a countless million moments, an isolated still shot of an existence that is predominantly defined by its very motion. We are what we do every day. Nothing more. Scientists have proved the value of diversity in so many different ways that they almost seem to disprove the fundamental concept. Darwin thought the variety among finches on Galapagos derived from absolute necessity: adapt or die. And yet other scientists have found that diversity among species is greatest in times of relative ease and abundance: hard times keep the genetic nose to the grindstone, but when survival is easily achieved DNA begins to flex and bend. Again, the discrepancy seems insurmountable, and this seems true for presentation styles, too: some branch out as a last-ditch effort when everything else has gone wrong; others push the envelope of convention at the beginning of each day.
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
The Creative Instinct: How Big Ideas Happen
By Porchlight
"When we realize that our mind is a creative platform—a vast network of networks—we experience a revolutionary and profound transformation. New possibilities emerge. The process of realization and transformation is the essence of life. It means that everything in this world has an inherent purpose—and that is to find its optimal form. This is why we are constantly trying to improve ourselves, why we venture out into the unknown, why we have children, and why we want to be the best in the world at what we do. The more creative we become, the more resourceful we will be. We can transform ourselves and everyone around us. These connections, and this archetype of innovation, uncovers the building blocks of life itself, revealing our origins. Innovation is intrinsic to essence, and essence is intrinsic to the act of creation."
Categories: changethis
-
Blog / ChangeThis
How to be an Idea Guru: U.S. Department of Innovation, April 1, 2018
By Porchlight
"Please Note: The following is a transcript of the introductory workshop for the Department of Innovation's, How to be an Idea Guru program, held from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM on April 1, 2018 at the Department of Innovation's Training Center in Washington, DC. The Presenter is Dannel Malloy, Secretary of the Department of Innovation. The Guest Speaker is Bryan Mattimore, Cofounder and Chief Idea Guy at The Growth Engine Co. I would like to welcome all of you who are here in person, as well as the other 5,300 of you who are viewing this workshop on-line. This is the Department of Innovation's kick-off meeting for the How to be an Idea Guru training program. My name is Dannel Malloy, and I am the Secretary of the Department of Innovation. As many of you know, the Department of Innovation was created in early 2017 to deliver the new administration's promise to restore the greatness of American ingenuity to every institution within our society. Our mission is to "pioneer, popularize, and promote the application of state-of-the-art ideation and innovation processes to generate new ideas for the benefit of our citizens, our institutions, and the U.
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.