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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Sustainability, The Complete Concept: Environment, Healthcare, and Economy
By Hunter Lewis
"Most of us would agree that the principal difference between children and real adults is that the latter look ahead, consider consequences, act responsibly and sustainably. Sustainability is not, however, just the essence of maturity. It is also the essence of morality.[...]Whether one looks at our ailing planet, our ever less affordable healthcare, or our failing economy, we see the same underlying problem: a rejection of maturity in favor of a childish refusal to look ahead. What we need instead is a more complete and all-encompassing concept of sustainability."
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Decide to Say Sorry: The "Peace Process" for Growing Your Business
By Jeanne Bliss
"How you apologize is your humanity litmus test. Let's face it, at some point; your business will suffer a failure that disappoints customers. How your company reacts, explains, removes the pain, and takes accountability for actions signals how you think about customers, and the collective heart of your organization. Grace and wisdom guide decisions of beloved companies toward accepting responsibility and resolving the situation when the chips are down—not accusations and skirting accountability. Repairing the emotional connections well is a hallmark of companies we love. It makes us love them even more."
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Self-Promotion for Introverts: Get Heard More. Even If You Talk Less.
By Nancy Ancowitz
"Introverts. The world needs us, can't live without us, and often doesn't quite get us. However, we persist, mostly behind the scenes, quietly contributing to society—writing, creating, designing, researching, solving problems, and digging for treasures ancient and new. Are you one of us? If you're more of a Warren Buffett than a Donald Trump, and more of a Greta Garbo than a Madonna, you've come to the right place. It's time for you to stop hiding from the spotlight. Time to get recognized and compensated for your gifts. Rather than buying in to the common misconceptions about introverts, you'll apply your quiet strengths to raise your visibility in a way that feels right for you. And guess what? You don't have to brag. Not even remotely. You can promote yourself authentically without the 'ick' factor."
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Fierce Leadership: A Bold Alternative to the Worst "Best" Practices of Business Today
By Susan Scott
"There is a bold, compelling line between leadership and 'fierce' leadership. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you'll join the thousands of leaders who are crossing the line. Fierce Leadership [feers lee-der-ship] noun 1. A fast-acting anti-venom to the business-as-usual mode of high task/low relationship, self-serving agendas, directing and telling, anonymous feedback, holding people accountable, excessive use of jargon and mandating initiatives that cause people to weep on too many fine days. 2. The act of acquiring your most valuable currency—emotional capital. 3. Also signals the acquisition of squid eye (more on this later) and the demise of truth-telling squeamishness and ethical squishiness."
Categories: changethis
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Breaking Organizational Codependence: Downsizing's Liberating Wake-Up Call
By David Noer
"I'm told there is an ancient Chinese curse that translates into 'May you live in interesting times. ' That it is a curse certainly rings true as we experience today's global pandemic of downsizing. Layoff victims and survivors alike react to this new reality with a toxic stew of debilitating emotions such as anger, fear, anxiety and depression—what I call layoff survivor sickness. We can change that though. We can reframe the death toll of the old paradigm into a wake-up call that will help us create an exciting world of work that is more autonomous, personally relevant, and more in congruence with our unique gifts. We first need to understand the nature of the change and the insidious power of organizational codependency. Then we need the courage to break its stifling grip on our human spirit and creativity. Part of our 'interesting times' involves living through the most fundamental change in the psychological contract that has connected employee to employer since the industrial revolution.
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What's Your CQ and Why Should You Care?
By David Livermore
"You've heard about IQ and EQ. But what's your CQ? CQ, or cultural intelligence, is more than just a kitschy catch phrase for cultural competence. It's a fresh, new approach to leading in our multicultural, globalized world. Cultural intelligence is defined as the capability to function effectively across national, ethnic, and organizational cultures. And research demonstrates a leader's CQ may easily be the single greatest difference between thriving in the 21st century world and becoming obsolete."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.