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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
Disciplined Dreaming: How to Build Your Organization's Creativity Mojo
By Josh Linkner
"I developed the Disciplined Dreaming system to give creativity its own place and practice, to provide everyone in the organization a structure for developing their own creative ideas, and to bring creativity back to the heart of business—where it belongs. Disciplined Dreaming isn't a stifling, rigid "innovation process", but an open system. It provides a strong and flexible framework that frees individuals and organizations to improvise and explore—and, in the process, develop their creative chops. The ideas, processes, and practices of Disciplined Dreaming will help you build your chops by expanding your creative capacity and targeting your creative energy."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
How to Turn around Problem Performance in Five Questions or Less
By Porchlight
"Underperformers suck. They suck the productivity out of a team or organization. They suck the morale out of your high performers. [. . . ] That begs a question that is central to this manifesto: What are underperformers costing you. How much time do you spend reacting to problems related to underperformance. Think of the things you could do with that time if you could only get it back. There's the bait, now here's the switch. It's easy to condemn underperformers for stealing your time and contributing to the ills listed above, and they do own their share of the blame. But here's the hard truth: you do too. As a manager your job is to enable your people to achieve their performance goals. If they're not then you're underperforming in this critical area of your job. It's not really your fault that you're in this situation; managers aren't often taught how to address performance problems in people. But that's no excuse to let the status quo ride. You're doing a disservice to yourself, your team, and even the underperformer by not taking action.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
As One: A Manifesto for Individual Action and Collective Power
By Mehrdad Baghai
"As One. Five letters that make all the difference between a group of individuals and a unified team. Two words that transform individual action into collective power. One idea that can help you realize the full power of your people. [...] Adding the phrase "as one" to another word changes its entire meaning. Imagine the possibilities: Working versus Working As One. Competing versus Competing As One. Winning versus Winning As One. The sources of inspiration are endless. Believing As One. Stronger As One. Succeeding As One."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Seven Myths of Hyper-Social Organizations: Why Human 1.0 is Key
By Porchlight
"With the rise of social media, which provides a massive platform of participation and a social infrastructure that is finally catching up with the conference infrastructure, the social element is reentering commerce and business with a vengeance. People can now claim a share of voices that is equal or larger than that of companies, employees can now develop support networks that cross the traditional hierarchical organization charts, and people can once again behave the way they were hardwired to behave in business and commerce–tribally, humanly, and socially. To understand the changes that are afoot in the world of business you are better off understanding Human 1.0, which took tens of thousands of years to develop, rather than Web 2.0, which took merely a decade."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Past Is Prologue: 4 Cases For An Old Approach to New Media
By Jonathan Salem Baskin
"Perhaps what we're experiencing isn't an exception to the experiences of past generations, but rather another opportunity to do things we human beings have always done... only faster, more broadly, etc. Certainly our technology is also contributing novel changes to how we live, but I wonder if those instances are circumstantial to the more fundamental behaviors that prompt them. Applying these lessons of history to today's social media planning might yield better (or at least different) insights, and ignoring this knowledge leaves business leaders bereft of an extensive track record of what works, what doesn't work, and why. In fact, history provides antecedents for every behavioral, cultural, and commercial quality we ascribe to our latest social media technologies ... "
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Strength Is the Group: A Business Case about Ants, Chips and Your Team's Breakthrough Results
By Adrian Gostick, Chester Elton
"In the mid-cretaceous period—sometime around 120 million years ago—a concept emerged that changed the world as we know it. And although the science to prove the significance of this concept has rested under our noses, under our feet, and even sometimes crawling onto our toes, as humans most of us are dumb-founded by it. 'It' is the concept of teamwork. It has been perfected by possibly one of the smallest insects seen by the human eye—the ant—and yet it is an elusive concept to master in business."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The RARE Manifesto: How Building Better Relationships with Your People and Your Customers Can Deliver Sustainable Growth
By Adrian Swinscoe
"What if we lived in a world where all companies took care of their existing customers with as much effort as they pursued new customers, where companies were trusted and liked, where doing business with a company was a good experience, where companies and their employees cared about their customers and each other? What kind of world would that be? I believe that it is a world that is worth striving for."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Zen of Business: 7 Habits of the Highly Creative
By Matthew E. May
"Frank Zappa once said: 'The most important thing in art is the frame. For paint, literally. For other arts, figuratively—because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where the art stops and the real world begins.' What he's saying is that how we frame something, like an idea or a problem, for example, has everything to do with how well it turns out. He's saying that there is an art to framing. That framing is an art. Frank Zappa had it right. And the reason I believe that is because how I view the world changed completely a few years ago, during an eight year long engagement with a very large and very successful Japanese company, the focus of which was essentially to help unite two distinctly different cultures, Eastern and Western, together in a common approach. This meant I had to straddle two different ways of looking at the world. Two completely different ways of looking at the same thing."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Practically Radical: Four Simple Truths about Leading Change and Making a Difference
By William C. Taylor
Today, the most successful organizations don't just out-compete their rivals. They redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world filled with me-too thinking.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Happiness Work Ethic
By Shawn Achor
"The single greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy is a positive and engaged workforce. That is not conjecture. That is now a confirmed scientific fact. [...] In my research and consulting in 42 different countries during the worst economic downturn in recent history, I have discovered that most companies and schools around the world follow the same implicit formula: If you work hard, you will become successful, and once you become successful, then you'll be happy. This pattern of belief explains what most often motivates us in life. We think: If I just get that raise, or hit that next sales target, I'll be happy. If I can just get that next good grade, I'll be happy. If I lose that five pounds, I'll be happy. And so on. Success first, happiness second. The only problem is that this formula is scientifically backwards."
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.