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
The Power of Trust and Mistrust
By Porchlight
"When trust levels are high, so is the quality and performance of business—and the reverse is also true. These facts are demonstrated dramatically when we look at the financial outcomes of companies that are among the best to work for and their peer companies that aren't. Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For have roughly double the rates of return, income, return on assets, profits, stock market returns and employee and customer retention rates compared to peer companies."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Guarding the Guards: Crushing the Bureaucratic Rules that Limit Success
By Tom Rieger
"Fear is destroying companies. Or more specifically, fear of loss is causing companies to destroy themselves. As managers are forced to do more with less, contend with limited resources, or battle for headcount and budget, many will begin to build walls to help protect their ability to meet their own local goals. Unfortunately, sometimes those walls become so high that those inside lose sight of the ultimate outcome. Their world becomes defined by the piece, and not the puzzle. With the best of intentions, barriers are born, particularly if the rules that are created make it difficult for others outside of the silo to succeed."
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Blog / ChangeThis
At the Speed of Seth: What I Learned Working With Seth Godin and the Domino Project
By Porchlight
"Getting anything up and flying is a tricky business. I'm still learning how to catch the wind just right in most of the things I do. This story is about launching a new project, a book. But if it was a kite, right now we'd be seeing it crashed and broken on the ground. [...] 18 months later, and it's all changed. End Malaria launches September 6th, published by Seth Godin's latest venture The Domino Project. 58 smart men and women share their best insights, strategies and tips to stop the overwhelm, focus on the work that matters and make a real impact in the work you do. And we've solved the money thing. $20 from every $25 book sold goes to Malaria No More, to further their mission of ending malaria in Africa by 2015. Here's why, second time around, my own Great Work Project got off the ground and what I learned (and you can learn to) from traveling at the speed of Seth."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Most Important Sales Conversations You'll Ever Have
By Mike Schultz
"This manifesto is for every sales person who is committed to becoming a rainmaker no matter what the product or service. Rainmakers are the sales elite, typically outperforming average sales people by 300 to 500%—often by a lot more. Success as a rainmaker depends on your ability to lead masterful sales conversations from 'hello' to 'let's go,' but the first sales conversation, the most important sales conversation, happens before you talk to actual prospects. The most important sales conversation you have... is the one you have with yourself."
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Blog / ChangeThis
How to Capture a New Market
By Stephen Wunker
"How do you capture a new market? There's a lot of traditional business strategy you need to throw out the window. New markets are too poorly understood and change too quickly for the standard approaches of graphing trend lines and computing market share. Here are 10 approaches that work—for businesses and the people within them—when the market is fuzzy and in flux ... "
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Six Rules Women Must Break in Order to Succeed
By Jill Flynn, Kathryn Heath, Mary Davis Holt
"We all have thoughts that limit our potential. Some of these beliefs come from our individual experiences; they take hold over the years. "I'm not good at taking credit. I'm much better working behind the scenes. I'm lucky to have this job. " Other beliefs are a result of the gender stereotypes that are all around us. They creep into our heads over time. "It's my job to nurture everyone else before I take care of my own needs. I am selfish and self-centered if I choose to indulge my ambition. " Still others are simply erroneous conventional wisdom. "I can have it all without compromise. I'm a failure if I can't make it look easy. " We get in our own way when we buy-into these limiting beliefs. But it does not have to be that way. We can nurture the beliefs that will sustain us and help us grow. To rise to the highest ranks in business, women need to unwind some of the traditional thinking that holds us back. We need to rethink the conversations we are having in our heads and tell ourselves a new story.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Art of Hassle Map Thinking
By Porchlight
"Let's face it: All too often, life is a succession of hassles. There's an endless array of frustrations, inconveniences, complications, disappointments, and potential disasters lurking in most of our daily experiences. Even very good products and services (we'll call them simply "products" for simplicity's sake) have their weaknesses and drawbacks. My new smartphone sometimes drops my calls; my favorite hotel chain sometimes loses my reservation; those new lightbulbs last longer but produce less light; my new hybrid car gets better mileage but the engine feels less peppy. . . Managers, marketers, designers, service suppliers, and salespeople for the companies that provide these products don't focus on their weaknesses. That's understandable. They devote their lives to making products that are as good as they can possibly be and then to promoting them as enthusiastically as they can. Who wants to concentrate on the negatives. Yet we've found that organizations that excel at demand creation do exactly that.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Best Leader in the World: It Could Be You
By Jon Wortmann
"Whether you have a formal leadership title or not, chances are you're reading this because you're a natural leader. You're the kind of person who steps up and steps in when others need you most. Or, you want to. As daunting as leadership can be, what you need to do is straightforward. We're about to teach you a model that will make you the kind of leader whose team people beg to join; and the kind of person who develops other leaders as a natural part of your every day work and life."
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Blog / ChangeThis
A General's Guide to Deploying an Army of Entrepreneurs
By Porchlight
"When you build a team, are you focused on joining links in a chain or weaving together a strong rope of intertwined employees? While I may have started out building a chain–mindful that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link—I came to see that interweaving the threads of a rope came much closer to meeting my goal of a cohesive, interactive team. That way, I eliminate the inevitable spaces between chain links, replacing them with a 'rope' team, where every thread is bound together. [...] This is the model I used as I found, trained and deployed my staff—my Army—and I could not be more satisfied and proud of the results we've had and the achievements I see on a daily basis."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Lessons from S&P Recession Survivors
By Porchlight
"Investors have heard many decry the decade of the 2000s as the 'lost decade.' A dollar invested in the S&P 500 on the first trading day of 1999 saw it worth just 65 cents a decade later (3/31/09 is our cutoff point). This "underperformance" is seen by many as a failure of the U.S. economic engine. If we look at the Top 20 performers of the S&P 500 during that same time period, we see a vastly different story. Instead of a 35% loss during that time, the Top 20 earned an average 426% return in stock price, excluding dividends. What accounted for this differential performance during this "lost decade"? This manifesto offers some insights based on an analysis of the Top 20's business environment and strategies deployed during the 2000s. Then, we recount some lessons that any firm can use to build a solid economic future."
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.