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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
Radical Management: Mastering the Art of Continuous Innovation
By Stephen Denning
"Radical management focuses the entire organization on the goal of constantly increasing the value of what the organization offers to its clients. Once a firm commits to this goal, traditional command-and-control bureaucracy ceases to be a viable organizational option. Instead the firm will, like Southwest Airlines or Starbucks, naturally gravitate towards some variation of self-organizing teams as the default management model for organizing work. That's because it is only through mobilizing the full energy and ingenuity of the workforce that the firm can generate the continuous value innovation needed to delight clients. Not surprisingly, those doing the work find more satisfaction as members of such productive teams."
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Era of Jack Welch is Over: Create Real Value Now, or Perish
By Douglas Rushkoff
"Yes, the net has changed business as profoundly as anything since central banking. But instead of seizing the opportunity, most businesses are still so addicted to the old way of doing things that they do the very opposite: they use the net to entrench themselves even further into the Industrial Age landscape that is fast disappearing."
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Principles Under Pressure: Working in Adversarial Relationships
By Aryanne Oade
"This manifesto is about how to work with such an adversarial character, whether they are your boss, peer or team member. It is about how to use the specific behavior you need to use to help you manage the unclear boundaries, ambivalent motives and occasional duplicitous conduct that characterizes adversarial working relationships. By the end of the manifesto I hope you will have the insight and interpersonal know-how you need to handle these tricky co-workers more effectively and retain the degree of influence in your work with them that you would like to have."
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O Brave New World: Driving Profitable Growth in the New Demand Economy
By Rick Kash
"The business world will never again be the same. For more than twenty years, the growth formula for American business has been simple: increase revenues by expanding product offerings while reducing supply chain costs. In other words, fill up the store shelves and keep the consumer's attention by constantly offering new variations on existing products, packaging and prices. Meanwhile, use the powerful new palette of Supply Chain Management tools to manage and drive down the cost of production to maintain constant productivity improvement. As a strategy, this growth formula worked brilliantly for a generation . . .long enough for both business executives and academics to forget that this strategy was merely the appropriate response to a distinct economic era, not a fundamental law of business. Now, we are being punished for that forgetfulness."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Don't You Want to Do Real Marketing?
By Porchlight
"I define real marketing as follows: treating customers and prospects the way we want to be treated, and earning the sale and the long term relationship through the value we provide. Traditional marketing based on 'Spray and Pray' blasts of mail, email, phone calls, and so on, not only doesn't work, but is also obscenely wasteful."
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Make Your Web Site a Real-Time Machine
By David Meerman Scott
"So ubiquitous have Web sites become that it's hard to believe they've been with us for less than 20 years. It was the 1994 introduction of the browser-enabled World Wide Web that gave birth to the Web site. Since then they have gone through about four stages of evolution: [...] Now, we're entering a fifth era of the evolution: transformation of the Web site into a real-time marketing (and sales) machine. This is the natural evolutionary outcome of a process that started with a new way to slip brochures under people's doors."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Turning Social Capital Into Financial Capital
By Porchlight
"Social media has the potential to dramatically improve the inner workings of every company. The interstitial connections can quickly cross business silos, inform decision making, educate people at all levels, and allow employees—especially new entrants—to pick up the natural rhythms of how people around them work. But only if the company allows access to social networks. And most companies don't."
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The Amish and the Case for Humility
By Erik Wesner
"When they're not around you or me, the Amish speak a language called Pennsylvania German. Demut is their word for humility. And Demut isn't just for the Amish. Why does humility matter? It matters in business. It matters in life. It matters in our relationships. "Celebrity" is a word you don't often see next to "humble." If you're gunning for stardom, there are only so many spots. Unless you're one of a select lucky few, you're bound to be disappointed, or worse. Humility is healthier. A humble approach in a relationship helps one recognize the other person's inherent value and needs. Humility fosters human understanding. If you're guided by humility in business, you are less likely to blow up the company by going too big, too quick. Humility checks you when that demon in your brain says "more." The one you know you should ignore. And as some find out the hard way, humility can save a heck of a lot of pain."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Forget Cinderella, Find Fred Astaire
By Porchlight
"Most companies would like to become more gender balanced at all levels, with women and men dancing together in a smooth and natural way. They have been trying for decades to attract, retain and promote more women. They have tried to grow their female customer bases. They are embarrassed by the all-male faces on the boardroom website, dancing to the tune of their own drummers. Most have gotten rid of the photos, but not the problem. Yet some companies have tried really hard, for a really long time. And almost everyone, male and female, is suffering from gender fatigue. [...] Why so much effort for so little result? Because we have over-focused on kissing Cinderella awake from her slumber and inviting her to the ball. But nobody ever bothered checking if the prince can actually dance."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Through the Fog: Solving Health Care in Companies
By Porchlight
"Major change usually comes off a platform of crisis, and I think everyone can agree that crisis conditions surely exist in health care economics. The nation's health care bill has been doubling every eight years for the last four decades. The runaway costs have been busting the budgets of federal, state and local governments, and they have bled the bottom lines of corporations. [...] We began our quest with a simple goal: neutralize the upward spiral in health costs so we can avoid annual premium increases for the company and its co-workers. How did we do this? As CEO and now chairman, I asked our 460 workers to take ownership of their health and healthcare costs, and we gave them the incentives and information to become expert consumers of health care."
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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.