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
Ending the Illusion of Control: Let's Kick This Bad Forecasting Habit
By Porchlight
"Many reputable institutions issue regular economic forecasts that are widely cited in the international press. And yet, how accurate are these forecasts? Should we really trust them? [...] In this manifesto, we note the dismal historical track record of much if not most economic forecasting. Despite this reality, however, people still have an insatiable need to issue and consume forecasts. We therefore make three proposals that can make forecasts both more relevant and useful."
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Who's Got Your Back: Why You Need the "Lifeline Relationships" that Create Success and Won't Let You Fail
By Keith Ferrazzi
"Behind every great leader, at the base of every great tale of success, you will find an indispensable circle of trusted advisors, mentors, and colleagues. These groups come in all forms and sizes and can be found at every level and in nearly all spheres of both professional and personal life, but what they all have in common is a unique kind of connection with each other that I've come to call lifeline relationships. These relationships are, quite literally, why some people succeed far more than others. There's a good chance that you've already experienced the power and potential of lifeline relationships at some point in your life. Imagine some of the attributes of the best bosses you've ever had—the kind of boss who encourages you, who gives you space to grow, who appreciates your efforts, who doesn't micromanage but guides your development with wisdom, and who handles your slip-ups with firmness, understanding, and candor. Or think back to that good friend or family member who dropped everything to be there for you at a critical juncture in your life and didn't let you fail.
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Destination: Work - Thriving in a Tough Economy by Tapping Into the Discretionary Effort of Your Employees
By Harry Paul
"Has your company's bottom line taken a serious hit because of today's lousy economic climate? Has your company tried to fix the situation by undergoing a round or two of layoffs only to see your productivity plummet because of reduced morale and your better performing employees jumping ship to other companies or surfing the internet for job postings on your time? If so, would you like to turn your situation around instantly—as in overnight? If you think something like this is impossible, think again. The secret for turning things around is to tap into the discretionary effort of your employees—get them excited about coming to work and applying every bit of energy, creativity and passion they have toward performing their jobs instead of doing only what they have to do to in order to stay employed."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Before You Open Your Mouth: The Keys to Great Public Speaking
By Nick Morgan
"Why is most public speaking so awful? Why do we subject our fellow human beings to this form of torture when there are so many better things we could all be doing, like cutting our toenails, baking snickerdoodles, or watching re-runs of The Prisoner? You're in a ballroom with no windows in some random airport hotel. The lighting is dim. The whir of the heating system fills your ears with white noise. The colors around you are shades of grey and beige with puce trimmings. You're only awake because you've had 1300 cups of coffee from the urn in the hallway. Let the speaking games begin. It's a diabolical sensory deprivation experiment. Why is most public speaking so awful? Beyond soulless venues and Death by Power Point, speakers make the same four mistakes over and over again, continuing the sorry state of the art."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Hit the Ground Running
By Jason Jennings
"Taking charge has never been easy. New leaders are expected to diagnose correctly, land on a brilliant strategy, pull together a powerful team, and inspire everyone to execute. Unfortunately, long lead times are gone. The months that leaders used to get for pondering, debating, or hiring outside consultants has shrunk to days. New leaders are expected stop the bleeding, decide who's in and who's out, make the strategic choices, and start racking up their wins right away. Shareholders, employees, customers, and communities believe that if you're tapped to lead you'd better be able to hit the ground running from day one. I started looking for a database of dos and don'ts for new leaders learned the hard way through years of trial and error and discovered there's virtually no reliable data available. Ninety-three percent of executives admit that their organization has never kept any records of the steps that led to their best or worst management decisions. So I started from scratch.
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Calling All Corporate Couch Potatoes: Put Down the Doritos and Get Moving! Or, How Managers Can Succeed in Uncertain Times
By Jeanne Liedtka
"I am convinced that a good many of the 'survival strategies' that organizations are adopting are just wrong. Tragically wrong. For more than three years, my colleagues and I have been studying a set of managers who successfully grew their businesses in the face of uncertainty and scarcity. And they taught us an alternative path—a road less traveled—that suggests that growth needn't come with a high price tag and lots of risk. Their approach is custom made for today's climate of risk-aversion and limited capital. It may sound counterintuitive at first—and you've got to be willing to entertain a different view of reality to understand it. But once you've wrapped your head around this different worldview—this 'alternative reality'—you'll wonder why you didn't see it sooner. [. . . ] Your biggest challenge is not to find a way to trim another 10% off your work force; it is to make dealing with instability your sweet spot; to hone your ability to leverage surprise and uncertainty rather than just react.
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Blog / ChangeThis
Righteous Anger: "Mad as Hell" at "Greed is Good"
By Porchlight
"It is easy to wallow in the magnitude of the current catastrophe. But to prevent the next catastrophe, we must examine how and why the fall occurred. After all, the best solution is not to pad the ground, but to prevent the slip—more accurately, to prevent the many slips that culminate in the final slip before the fall. Corporate leaders have slipped, repeatedly. And finally—inevitably—they fell, hard. On us. After so many slips and slides, they should have seen the fall was coming, and done something about it. But they didn't, and so here we are. So, what's next. How do leaders prevent the next slip. That is, what can leaders do to defuse the current anger and lessen its likelihood in the future. The answer is to treat people fairly, and when that fails, rebuild the trust. Sounds too simple. It's not, but it is basic. This is why when the cynics and critics say that that is warmed-over recommendations from the past, we reply: Go back to basics; we know what works. In fact, what got us in this mess were leaders ignoring those tried-and-true basics.
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Built To Fade: The Advent of the Biodegradable Brand
By Porchlight
"I might feel good about myself as I sip on a mouthful of 'green' this or that, but this sanctimoniousness should be seen as more than an innocuous behavioral tic. The diversion of attention into a me-brand-good pseudo experience, the holy grail of brand building, is actually part of the problem. When green brands manage to nurture egocentric self-cherishing among its users through packaging and advertising, a fundamental, environmental disjoin has taken place."
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The Recognition Microscope: Fuel for Human Acceleration
By Adrian Gostick, Chester Elton
"Can recognition be analyzed under a microscope. Categorized here as a business manifesto, you might assume that recognition ROI—what we call the return on 'Carrots'—would be the first order of conversation. In other words, how purpose-based recognition can boost your bottom line, motivate employees to achieve, and create high-performance teams. And, because most readers here are searching for quick, easy to execute applications, you may even assume that a prescriptive "how-to" focus should warrant an initial discussion. Or, maybe even more to the point, scientific research should be presented to qualify the case for the most effective human performance accelerant in existence—recognition. The ROI is astounding. The application is easily trainable. And, now there's global research proving that recognition accelerates human performance to a level beyond comparison in every culture studied—the impact has no boundaries, and the way humans respond to recognition reveals an outstanding driver of performance.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Corporate Guy and His Quest for Success
By Porchlight
For the first time in history, the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world are tethered securely to one big honkin' global economic engine. But, do we really want a life strapped to a high octane go-fast engine? Or is it something else entirely that we're after? "The Corporate Guy" takes an honest look at his life in the corporate world and finds 7 Secrets to Success and Happiness. "There was this young Corporate Guy, And all of him was neatly pressed. All except his Walking Hat, Which was very old, soft and wrinkled. He loved his Walking Hat, But he didn't wear this hat very often anymore. These days, he wears mighty fine, high gloss, spit shine, On his black wing-tip shoes, like Executives wear."
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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.