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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
Below C-Level Strategy
By Porchlight
"The CEO and her senior management team have just come back from a three-day offsite in Palm Beach with the new 'global strategy' and now it's your job as a business-line or mid-level manager to figure out how to take these lofty ideas and long-term plans and build an organization to effectively implement them in the real world. Or, you're a small business owner/manager and may never have had a 'three-day strategy off-site' at a high-end resort, but you still need to figure out how to create a company that can profitably compete in the marketplace. This sort of a situation calls for a different type of strategy, one that is less about looking at 'external' factors like differentiation and positioning; and more about looking at the 'internal' strategies of how to build an agile organization that can flawlessly execute on the key business objectives. This sort of strategic planning requires someone who is down in the trenches and understands how the business really works, far away from the ivory tower.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Change Master: Why Adapting is the Most Crucial Skill You'll Ever
By Porchlight
"In a very real way, what is being asked of us now is no more or less than to become consciously aligned with what life has always required on this planet. In 1956, the father of stress research, Hans Selye wrote in his seminal work, The Stress of Life, 'Life is largely a process of adaptation to the circumstances in which we exist. A perennial give and take has been going on between living matter and its inanimate surroundings, between one living being and another, ever since the dawn of life in the prehistoric oceans. The secret of health and happiness lies in successful adjustment to the ever-changing conditions on this globe; the penalties for failure in this great process of adaptation are disease and unhappiness. ' In order to not merely to survive, but to thrive during the greatest period of transformation humans have ever experienced, we are all being called on to stretch mentally, emotionally, and spiritually into the future. It's my hope that this manifesto offers you both comfort and practical support as you take on this challenge and become a Master of Change.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Importance of Discovering Your Plan B
By John Mullins, Randy Komisar
"If the founders of Google, Starbucks, or PayPal had stuck to their original business plans, we'd likely never have heard of them. Instead, they made radical changes to their initial models, became household names, and delivered huge returns for their founders and investors. How did they get from their Plan A to a business model that worked. Why did they succeed when most new ventures crash and burn. Every aspiring entrepreneur, whether they desire to start a new company or create something new within an existing company, has a Plan A—and virtually all of these individuals believe that their Plan A will work. They can probably even imagine how they'll look on the cover of Fortune or Inc. magazine. Unfortunately, they are usually wrong. But what separates the ultimate successes from the rest is what they do when their first plan fails to catch on. Do they lick their wounds, get back on their feet, and morph their newly found insights into great businesses or do they doggedly stick to their original plan.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Green Design with Life Cycle in Mind
By Porchlight
"It is not impossible to integrate sustainability into early stages of design. Cradle-to-grave environmental impact analysis methods are rarely used as a metric during product development. In early stages of a project, companies measure feasibility according to money, performance and time metrics. Sustainability is commonly measured at a design cycle's end on finished products when design features cannot be easily modified for sustainability measures. It is ineffective to apply new design metrics to finished products. Evaluating the 'greenness' of products is typically done to market the 'greenest' product in a line. This does not address the need to create sustainable products at project onset; thus, products remain 'un-green' and unsustainable. It is time for new feasibility metric — Green Design with Life Cycle in Mind. Green design thinking must be accessible and applicable to product development through a set of tools designed for early stages of product development."
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Blog / ChangeThis
F2 | Firefly Manifesto: Remixed
By Jonathan Fields
"Try this career choice standard on for size. Will this choice allow me to: Spend the greatest amount of time Absorbed in activities and relationships that fill me up While surrounding myself with people I cannot get enough of, and Earning enough to live comfortably in the world. It sounds so simple. This is the standard I've used to guide my own evolution from six-figure, beaten down mega-firm attorney to lifestyle entrepreneur, blogger, author, copywriter, marketer and, yes, even yoga teacher. . . oh, and still earn enough to live very comfortably in the world and support my family in New York. Fact is, this definition of success keeps me honest. And, with good reason. It's evolved out of thousands of hours of testing and exploring a broad spectrum of career paths and entrepreneurial ventures, interviews with a wide cross-section of successful career renegades, from maverick CEOs to internet-earning soccer moms and extensive research into the field of applied positive-psychology.
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The Hazards of Leading Culture Change
By Chip R. Bell, John R. Patterson
"When great starts have poor endings, it can leave change pioneers disappointed, hard working organizers disheartened, and skeptics with proof they were correct all along. It makes the next initiative more challenging to launch and the next set of resistors more defiant. However, without needed change the organization risks losing its competitive advantage. Losing its edge makes it harder to attract and retain the best talent and resources, and in today's economy, the death knell begins. Planned change takes courage and tenacity. Even organizations with a burning platform, effective leaders, and well-crafted plans can sometimes miss the mark because they fail to recognize early signals that the seeds for derailment are being sown or they fail to realize the power of the signals they are sending via decisions that are unsupportive of the culture change commitment. Derailment is much more likely during periods of organizational anxiety from economic challenge, organizational shift (like a major merger or new competitor), or a change in senior leadership.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Quit Managing Your Time... and Start Managing Your Attention
By Lee J. Colan, David Cottrell
"The myth of time management never dies. Many people enroll in 'time management' classes and learn techniques like making to-do lists. That's fine. Lists can be useful, even satisfying. It's great to experience that rush—Ahhhh. —as we check something off the list. However, by the end of the day, or the week, or the month, most people discover projects that are still not checked off and some projects they haven't even started. That's when frustration begins to set in. The time is gone, and there's no way to get it back. You can't manufacture time, you can't reproduce time, you can't slow time down or turn it around and make it run in the other direction. You can't trade bad hours for good ones, either. About all the time management you can do is to cram as much productive work as possible into each day. What you can manage, however, is your attention. Attention is a resource we all possess. It's a lot like time. In fact, as long as we are awake, we produce a continuous stream of it.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Your Butt's in the Wrong Seat: A Manifesto for Public Transportation
By Porchlight
"It's not sexy. It's not tracking as a Twitter trend. And it's not a YouTube sensation. In fact, by current reputation, it's dirty, it (sometimes) smells, it forces you to interact with people you don't know, it's slow, and inconvenient. But it shouldn't be. Or at least, it shouldn't be positioned and marketed like it is. Here's the problem with 'it.' Its competitors are some of the largest, most renowned companies in the world, and despite the current 'crisis' affecting the automobile industry, it doesn't stand a chance. 'It' is public transportation, and 'it' is hurting. So what's the problem? It's simple; your butt is in the wrong seat."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Habitudes in the Classroom: Teaching the Habits and Attitudes Our Students Need in the 21st Century
By Angela Maiers
"Education shouldn't be about adding more to our lists of HAVE's, DO's , and BE's, but rather thinking outside the lines, intentionally about the BE's, DO's, and HAVE's that matter most. The 21st century world needs learners to BE critical, BE creative, and BE strategic. The 21st century world demands learners to DO their own thinking, rather than relying on someone else to think for them. The 21st century world expects learners to HAVE the endurance, fortitude, and courage to brave through each new challenge with confidence and competence."
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Design for the Other 90%
By Paul Polak
"Ninety percent of the world's designers spend all their time working on solutions to the problems of the richest 10 percent of the world's customers. A revolution in design is needed to reverse this silly ratio and reach the other 90 percent. In my book, Out of Poverty, I talk about how this can be done. I pull stories from some of the 17 million people I've help lift from poverty with the organization I founded 25 years ago, International Development Enterprises. More recently, we have incorporated an organization called D-Rev: Design for the Other Ninety Percent, whose mission is to create the design revolution."
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.