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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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The World on Reset
By John Hope Bryant
"It is as if society has a vested interest (and we do, by the way) in 'keeping the party going,' and doing precisely that, even if for only a little while, and even if that means fooling ourselves. Fear has the world in its grips these days, and fear is the ultimate prosperity killer."
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Freedom, Inc. Free Your Employees and Let Them Lead Your Business to Higher Productivity, Profits and Growth
By Brian M. Carney, Isaac Getz
"From Genesis 'in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread' to Marx's ]the proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains,' work has always been seen as a constraint and the workplace as a ship's galley. But this is beginning to change, and it comes, we have discovered, not from workers but from their bosses. This is the most important corporate movement of the last two decades, a movement that has been quietly transforming the fortunes of dozens of businesses and the lives of thousands of employees by using a source of benefits neglected by most—complete freedom and responsibility for employees to take actions they, not their bosses, decide are best."
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Chief Culture Officer: Building a Living, Breathing Corporation
By Grant McCracken
"The American corporation is bad at culture. It's good at management, finance, technology, and HR. It's getting better at innovation, cocreation and social media. But culture? It still pretty much sucks at culture. Culture is the 'last mile' for the corporation. It's the final 'core competence' required for its skill set. Until it masters culture the way it now master the other pieces of management—finance, strategic planning, human resources—it will suffer the blind side hit or miss yet another opportunity. The thing about errors here is that they are not small. They do not merely take a percentage point of volume or profit. They do not merely inflict a tiny ding on a CEOs reputation. No, the mistakes that come from culture can cost millions. And they lay a CEO low. It's time to bring in a Chief Culture Officer."
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Brands Are People Too
By Porchlight
"When you talk about 'branding,' you are not discussing a superficial activity. More and more business people are finally starting to understand that. A brand is not a veneer you apply to make a business (or product or service or idea) appealing to its intended audience. Instead, a brand begins to exist when a business has something to offer to the world—values, services, or products. From there, the brand's work is to articulate those unique attributes and strive to communicate them the right way, and to the right people. Even so, a brand is not what a business says it is. It's what the consumer ends up perceiving it to be."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Start the Soloist Journey: Become the Hero in the Face of the Ten Least Wanted
By Jonathan Littman, Marc Hershon
"The hero's journey has been the cornerstone of great literature and hit movies. We all know the winning dramatic premise: a beaten-down protagonist battles everyone from evil characters to wild beasts in a dangerous passage of self-discovery. Strangely, the main frictions of modern man's largest battlefield have often been ignored in the books designed to steel you for that daily 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. grind. Except for a few notable exceptions, the hostile territory otherwise known as the workplace has been treated with kid's gloves. We've been advised that the key to success is to 'be nice,' to develop 'lifelong mentors,' and a host of other absurd fantasies that no ten-year-old would ever swallow as remotely realistic or helpful."
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Relational GPS: The Road Map to Outstanding Business Relationships
By Ed Wallace
"Identifying your core relationships is the vital first step you must take in shifting how you perceive your role in any business relationship. Instead of just wishing that better business contacts would magically appear in your professional life, drive the business contacts you've already established to more productive and rewarding levels. The initial step of pinpointing your core relationships will lead you toward participating with an actual person rather than with a digital line in a CRM system or on Linked In. A process, however, for driving your core relationships to success, is also vital. I call this process understanding your contact's Relational GPS."
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The Upstarts Are Here!: What Can You Possibly Learn from Entrepreneurs in Their Twenties? Plenty.
By Porchlight
"We're smack in the middle of 'perfect storm' conditions for young entrepreneurs, which means that if you haven't already noticed that the CEO down the road may look more comfortable at the local skate park than in a board room, you will soon. And if you have noticed the trend, you may be asking yourself who these young people are, why they seem to be starting companies at an accelerated rate, what kinds of companies they're starting, and if they're really so different from the young entrepreneurs of the past couple of decades. As it turns out, the entrepreneurs of Generation Y (those born between 1977 and the mid-nineties) are really quite extraordinary. So if you are tempted to dismiss business owners in their twenties as self-centered, arrogant dilettantes who approach the start-up process like a teen with a new video game, better think again. Humor me for a few minutes, and consider that you may even have a thing or two to learn from them."
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Meaningful Digital Strategy: The Next Evolution of Marketing
By Bob Gilbreath
"Four years ago, I grew frustrated with the lack of brand investment in digital marketing and set out to understand the fundamental reasons why this promising new space was still only attracting a small sliver of marketers' multi-million-dollar budgets. I discovered that the issue was bigger than tiny click-thru rates and cautious organizations. Rather, there was a need for an entirely new way of approaching marketing strategy from the ground up. The interruptive, tell-and-sell model of slick ad copy and buying eyeballs by the thousands was already showing strain, and most digital advertising tactics were simply replicating this failing marketing model. I set out to discover an alternative path, starting with the handful of our clients that had put digital in the forefront of their strategy, and then broadening my vision to companies that seemed to be enjoying success with a completely different course. I found that these organizations had a common approach: People were choosing to engage with their marketing and they were using marketing itself to add value to their customers' lives.
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Social Response Capitalism: Today and Tomorrow
By Bruce Piasecki
"I believe we need something no less than a new kind of leader. Most social commentators today, from Sarah Palin to Barack Obama, note that we need leaders we can trust, leaders who can compete on price, quality and social needs—from avian and swine flu, to new forms of energy, and better cars, computers and homes. We need to combine the best that MBAs get with what Masters of Public Administration know and get in their experiences of a lifetime. How is this possible? And where will they work? This essay explores what I mean by social response capitalism—sometime quite necessary but still missed by Fox News and the Heritage Foundation, as well as by most of the liberal leaning members of our thought establishment. Is this a new form of capitalism? Is it a deviant form of socialism? Or simply a new way to compete in a smaller more integrated and globalized world?"
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The Freak Factory: Making Employees Better by Helping Them Get Worse
By Porchlight
"If conventional approaches aren't working, then what should we do? Instead of attacking people's weaknesses, we need to find the strength that is hidden inside their apparently negative characteristics. It is time to stop trying to create well-rounded and balanced employees. We need employees that are unbalanced. We need employees that are freaks. It is time to build a freak factory."
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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.