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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
Redeeming Sisyphus: Get Out of Control! Get More Done!
By Porchlight
Walk into any company large or small and you will see employees who are suffering. These talented people hired for their breadth, imagination and initiative are not producing to their full potential. When they leave (and they do leave), their exit interviews most often cite an over controlling boss as the main reason for their departure. Task-oriented bosses under constant pressure to achieve increasing productivity goals rely too often on the "I think—You do" managerial style. Most of us know leaders like this. More of us than want to admit it (or even know it) ARE leaders like this.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Workplace 2.0: Motivating and Managing Millennials
By Porchlight
Welcome to the 21st century. What motivates young people isn't the promise of a distant retirement check thirty or forty years after they've given all they have to a company that doesn't let them have a piece of the pie. The first thing you need to keep in mind is the fundamental idea of ownership. You don't have to give up stock in your company, to give a young worker a feeling that s(he) is contributing to themselves, as well as the firm's bottom line. But you do need to invest in their sense of desire to contribute in meaningful ways to institutions that matter. To them, coming to work is an exercise in mutual benefit.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Open Innovation: Your On-Ramp to Creating a Better Product
By Dwayne Spradlin
For most companies the process of creating new, innovative products and getting them out the door starts with tapping the most talented members of the R&D team. Once they have arrived at an idea and decided it is feasible, R&D moves to determining the most effective way to develop it and bring it to market. It sounds logical; but what if there was a way to reinvent the process and bring better products to market faster and at a lower cost?
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Finding Your Howl
By Porchlight
"To find our howl we have to pay a price... This process may feel like a death and may at its most intense terrify us and at its least unsettle us. This is the price of finding our howl, our own one of a kind authentic voice, and there is no way around it... The only way out of our self-erected prison is to go through it completely. There is no quick escape, every square inch of our imprisonment must be touched and lived through before it can be abandoned."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Let's Get Persian
By Paul B. Carroll, Chunka Mui
"Herodotus, the Greek historian, reported that the ancient Persians always made important decisions twice—first when they were drunk, and then again when they were sober. Only if the Persians reached the same decision, drunk and sober, would they act on that decision. In addition to using what might be called a second-chance meeting to review important decisions in an unbiased light, businesses should also take advantage of other means of introducing constructive contention into their decision-making. . . Our research found nine additional ways to introduce disagreement and to manage that disagreement so it keeps everyone on their toes without harming the camaraderie of a management team: 1) Informal devil's advocacy 2) Escalation systems 3) Bets 4) Staring into the abyss 5) Finding history that fits 6) Deciding (ahead of time) how to decide 7) Smoothing out management ruts 8) Constructing alarm systems 9) A formal devil's advocate review We'll look at those nine methods, one by one, starting with the relatively simple and concluding with a formal process that, we believe, should be used by every company before any major decision is made.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Today's Trojan Horse
By Diana McLain Smith
"At least as far back as Agamemnon and Achilles on the beaches of Troy, relationships have had the power to create or to destroy enormous amounts of capital—human, social, intellectual, and economic. Yet few among us can say anything even remotely systematic about how relationships work, develop, or change. [...] If relationships can have such a decisive impact on the success, even survival, of leaders and their firms, why do so many of us give them such short shrift? The answer lies in the outdated belief system that governs how we conduct business. Among the many beliefs that make up this system, four are killers. This manifesto is a call for us to shift to a new set."
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Blog / ChangeThis
I Am The Walrus: Lessons In Personal Branding from The Beatles
By Porchlight
"Side One 1. I Me Mine (Harrison) 2. I Am The Walrus (Lennon-McCartney) 3. Don't Let Me Down (Lennon-McCartney) 4. The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill (Lennon-McCartney) 5. Your Mother Should Know (Lennon-McCartney) Side Two 6. She Came In Through the Bathroom Window (Lennon-McCartney) 7. The Long and Winding Road (Lennon-McCartney) 8. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (Lennon-McCartney) 9. Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me and My Monkey (Lennon-McCartney) 10. Hello Goodbye (Lennon-McCartney) On Parrlophone 33 1/3 RPM"
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Attitude Problem In Education
By Don Berg
"We are losing the potential for entrepreneurial, vocational, and artistic genius in children and teachers around the world because the majority of schools navigate by academics alone. Academic schooling facilitates only a partial liberation of the human spirit. We have liberated some people, in some places, in some ways by making due with the limited academic tools available. [...] Parents today have already chosen to launch their children into a world of challenging conditions. The question is whether their suppliers—schools—are providing the right stuff to get the job done."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Being a Gifted Speaker Isn't a Gift
By Frances Cole Jones
"Despite a pervasive idea that some people are born with a 'gift' for public speaking—and that this gift is the reason they excel when presenting themselves—my experience has proven this isn't so. I believe that everyone can be a great speaker, and this includes you. So what's the disconnect? Why do so many people feel they don't have what it takes to present their ideas with confidence and flair? Thomas Edison said, 'Opportunity is missed by most because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.' I find the same is true for public speaking. If you're willing to put in the time, there's a science to presenting that's concrete and available."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
How to Sell a Book (or Any New Idea) (step 1 is the hard part)
By Porchlight
“Tribes grow when people recruit other people. That's how ideas spread as well. They don't do it for you, of course. They do it for each other. Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work.”
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.