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
Flow, Flee or Fight: Declare Yourself For Change In Your Organization
By Porchlight
"It's time for a shake-up. This one won't happen because your boss decides it's time. It will happen because you and your peers decide it's time. Rather than relying on organizations to see what's in their long-term best interest, individuals are in a better position to instigate change. It will feel uncomfortable. You'll be labeled a heretic. As solace, you'll have the knowledge that you're right."
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Deliver the "Wow!" to Make More Money
By Glory Borgeson
"In this day and age, it is not enough to have a system in place for dealing with customers' issues promptly and smoothly. Now, you need a strategy with built-in extras, benefits that are above and beyond what the public expects from you and your business. These extras have to be planned into your regular, day-to-day commerce because you can be sure that your competitors are hanging out their own honeycomb trying to attract the same bees as you. I call these built-in extras the 'Wow!' These are the actions you (and anyone representing your business) do for customers and, as a result, your customers actually say 'Wow!'"
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Too Big to Live: Why Letting Banks Fail Is Actually Good For Real People
By Douglas Rushkoff
"The current economic crisis is less a function of poor decision-making by a few bonus-seeking executives than it is the embedded logic of a banking and currency system developed during the Renaissance for reasons that had little to do with promoting wealth and opportunity."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Being Strategic: The Antidote to Fear
By Erika Andersen
"The antidote to fear? Pull people out of their panic and self-protective impulses by first acknowledging the difficulties, then raising their eyes and hearts to a possibility of success. At that point you can take advantage of their newly available and hopeful energy to make that possibility a reality. This is the essence of what I call being strategic: doing a clear and accurate assessment of the current situation, then articulating the possibility of a successful future. And at that point, when you see clearly where you are and where you hope to go, staying strategic means making core directional choices ... about how to achieve that future you've envisioned."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
A Mind for Selling: Brain Science Is Turning Management On Its Head
By Porchlight
"We don't have direct knowledge of the physical world; we only have knowledge of our ideas of it. This may seem like just an interesting curiosity until we realize that the world we know is not an objective record of the one that exists outside of us, but the version of it we create according to whatever else is going on in our minds at the time. We don't live in the world of atoms; we live in the world of ideas."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Trusting Google and Yahoo: Search Engines & Information Literacy
By Porchlight
We pride ourselves on thinking critically. But how do our critical thinking skills apply to what we find in our searches? Because the results seem to appear like magic, many of us tend to think of search results as being "unbiased." But in actual fact, there are many individuals and companies working hard every day to try to push their information to the top of the page in your Google search.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Corporate America's Big Problem: And How to Fix It for Good
By Porchlight
"Big business has a serious problem to solve: most people don't trust it. They haven't for over a decade, as evidenced by compelling research from firms including Roper, Forrester, Edelman and The Reputation Institute—not to mention the rise of a multi-billion dollar watchdog industry comprised of websites, books, magazines and feature films dedicated to depicting the modern corporation as today's most powerful and evil force."
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Change Your Thinking > To Change Your Results!
By Tony Jeary
"If you think you can keep doing the things you've been doing and sustain past success, you are mistaken. America voted for change and it is going to get change. Much of it will radically transform the way American businesses function and compete. For example, it has suddenly become frowned upon (politically) for companies to have motivational meetings for employees and appreciation events for customers. New solutions to meet these needs are necessary. Business as usual is unrealistic in our current economic climate. Leaders must accept the fact that success is likely to become a moving target and their organizations must become faster, leaner and better equipped to compete and change quickly. To embrace speed as a strategic asset requires higher levels of clarity about the real needs and goals of the organization. Clarity means that the value and purpose of every effort must be evaluated and put to the test."
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Creative Elegance: The Power of Incomplete Ideas
By Matthew E. May
"It is nearly impossible to make it through a typical day without exchanging ideas. Whether deciding on something as simple as a restaurant for a long overdue night out, or as complicated as the design of an entirely new product, we are forever involved in sculpting and selling our creative thought. Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete, and certain. But what if that's wrong? What if the most elegant, most imaginative, most engaging ideas are none of those things?"
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Small Revolution
By Linda Kaplan Thaler, Robin Koval
"When tackling problems, we are often told to think big. We filter out life's seemingly insignificant details in order to concentrate on the greater issues. After all, big ideas yield big results, or so the assumption goes. Certainly, no one wants to be thought of as the person who 'can't see the forest for the trees. ' But many times, these very same little details are the ones that can serve as the real catalysts for change in our own lives and in the lives of others—if we only start to recognize their potential. The SMALL revolution asks people to forget about the old ways. To tackle today's issues and achieve our greatest goals, we need to shift our thinking away from the big picture and focus instead on the small pixels. These new times call for a new outlook, and therefore, we must change our perspective from the grandiose and difficult to the humble and doable. By rediscovering the magic within our smallest actions and celebrating the tiny victories that each of us accomplish daily, we can overcome the big obstacles and effect real change.
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.