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
Leading Transformation and Captivating Communities
By Brian Solis
"Social media is not the catalyst for change, but merely one of its agents. We must remember that Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and the like are the networks that facilitate an uprising. However, it is repression, angst, injustice, inequality, vision, aspiration and hope that serve as the true stimulus for insurrection and progress. Technology plays a part in transformation and it is up to you to learn how social, mobile, real-time, and all other emerging trends are affecting your industries, communities, or markets. What we learn as a result however is that these new tools can bring people together and unite them under a common front or concerted mission. At the center of any revolution is the burning desire to bring about change. But it always comes down to people, shared experiences, and a common ambition. And it is people who need one another for leadership, support, and inspiration. What's missing from the equation is your vision and leadership."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Business Genome Approach: Finding Your Next Competitive Advantage
By Andrea Kates
"You have the wrong tools. And you use them the wrong way. It isn't your fault. You were taught, as we all were, to make forecast models out of past results. You were taught to look in the rear-view mirror. You were also taught to look straight ahead of you. If that competitor was in your line of sight, you had their number. That's how you knew you were staying ahead. They were good people that taught you these skills, great professors of the craft in business school, veteran managers and executives in your first, third, and twentieth job. But that was a different time. That was when we could see the future by looking back. Somehow, it made sense back then. But, now, the rules have changed: our game plans have gone public, and whoever knows what the customer will do next wins."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Putting a Signature on Customer Experience
By Porchlight
"To reach it's full impact, customer experience needs to be thought of as a strategic agenda item on par with and actually integrated with corporate strategy, managing the brand, and new product development. Customer experience should not be confused with existing efforts to focus on customer service or touch-point management. These efforts are focused more on delivering tactical reengineering of customer-facing processes. As a customer experience leader, you want customers to talk with everyone they know (and don't know) about your company, employees to live and exude the best qualities of the brand on and off the job, and to be rewarded as a market leader. If you share that vision for your customer experience efforts, here are some strategic tools and ideas to help you do that."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Blending Art & Science To Create More Effective Ideas
By Porchlight
"Blending art and science is about collaborating in ideas generation: the inter-relationship is critical, you can't have one thing without the other. A bunch of code or data is just a bunch of numbers without the art. Science can enable us to be more creative, and creativity allows us to get the most out of our data. But consider 'the multiplier effect'. If either the data or creative are bad, the idea will fail. It's not one or the other that we need, it's both. It's not science plus art equals results, it's more science times art, so a zero for either means failure. That is where the interesting ideas are - at that intersection. The future is all about ideas connecting. Those who can bridge art and science will be in demand, will be powerful. So if our ideas are going to change hearts and minds, let's blend them together."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Innovate or Perish! What's Your Strategy?
By Porchlight
"It doesn't matter what industry you are in, someone, somewhere right now is building a product, process or business model designed to kick your butt. If it's you, then you define the rules by which others must play the game. If it's NOT you, then you had better get comfortable playing by someone else's rules. Someone is going to start a revolution that will change your world. How? By producing change that matters—change that disrupts the competition and amazes your customers. Why can't it be you? ... In a world where everyone and everything around you is getting better, where technology waits for no one, and where smarter, more sophisticated customers who are "wired and dangerous" demand more, people are constantly in search of the next big thing. Want to find what's next? Make these 10 rules part of your cultural DNA."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Clickability: A Skill for Life
By Porchlight
"Most of what you need to know about success in life is personal in nature. I've learned, through my own experience and that of the people I've worked with, that people need each other to have fulfilling work, successful careers and meaningful lives. Regardless of your cultural background, your age group, or your social status, your need to get along with people is fundamental to your happiness. No matter how much technical skill you have in your particular field of expertise, no matter how smart you are, how capable you are, how gifted you are, if you don't know how to connect, relate and communicate with people, there's little hope for you. Whether the times are great, or the economy is in the tank, the people who do the best, who prosper and advance, are the people who know how to connect with other people and have it matter. Whether you are a homemaker, a parent, a business owner, a manager, a waiter or a postal worker, your skill with other people determines everything. And when you have the skill to build relationships and networks of relationships, the world is your oyster, and all options are open for you.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Success or Suckcess: It's Up to Senior Management to Decide
By Dan Hill
"Ever since the Enlightenment, Western civilization has been on the wrong track. Eager to put the superstitions of the Dark Ages behind him, the French philosopher Rene Descartes famously declared, "I think, therefore I am. " But the truth is that over the past 25 years, the breakthroughs in brain science have systematically documented the greater reality that thought and emotion can't be artificially separated and that, in fact, the capacity for emotion proceeded thought in evolutionary terms and continues to do so with every deliberation and act an employee makes. There is no such thing as objectivity. . . . Trust is a feeling. Hope is a feeling. Loyalty is a feeling. As companies struggle to emerge from the Great Recession, now is not the time for half-measures like polite (but empty) focus groups, or for the fear that executives may have regarding exposure to the honest feelings of their employees that serves as justification for not pursuing progress. Executives who exhort employees to accept change and sacrifice their own comfort zones must surely be ready to do so themselves.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Crime and (the Lack of) Punishment
By Porchlight
"I am passionate about great crimes and the criminals who commit them. But, I often wonder if the long arm of our law, the finest justice system in the world, is at times deeply corrupt, especially with regard to the most recent financial meltdown of 2008. ... [S]everal fistfuls of ... corrupt, devious, deceptive, crooked, manipulative titans of the financial industry have somehow completely avoided any liability, responsibility or accountability for the crimes they committed—as have their accomplices in Washington, D.C. It seems that bad behavior has become an acceptable business practice. If you get caught, you only pay a fine. If you get away with it, you win. What kind of system is that?"
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Blog / ChangeThis
Innovation You: Creating Growth
By Jeff DeGraff
"There are four fundamental forces that pursue competing values and pull us and all the constituents in our situations in different directions: Collaborate, Create, Compete and Control. These forces drive or thwart growth in dyadic oppositions: Collaborate vs. Compete and Create vs. Control. The paradox of growth is that it is born from the tension and constructive conflict of these opposing forces and their agents."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The 5,000 Year History of How We Lost Half Our Mind (Or How Blah-Blah-Blah Has Gradually Taken Over Our Lives)
By Dan Roam
"32,000 years ago, our most ancient ancestor drew a beautiful bull on the wall of a cave in a place we now call France. That bull is the oldest known human sketch ever found. In the sweep of recorded human history, it is the beginning of the "whoosh." 27,000 years later, another ancient ancestor created Hieroglyphics by drawing a similar bull on a muddy brick, and written language was born. From that moment on, pictures were doomed. Yes, humanity's five-thousand-year love affair with words has given us so much—but at what hidden cost? Over the millenia, we have gradually purged our visual mind from our understanding of language, communications, and intelligence. Just when we need pictures the most, we no longer have the ability to think visually. It's time to bring our visual mind back."
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.