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 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 ... "
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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."
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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."
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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."
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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.
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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."
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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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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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Blog / ChangeThis
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."
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.