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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
It All Starts With A Sense of Urgency
By John P. Kotter
In a turbulent era, when new competitors or political problems might emerge at any time, when technology is changing everything, both the business-as-usual behavior associated with complacency and the running-in-circles behavior associated with a false sense of urgency are increasingly dangerous. In bold contrast, a true sense of urgency is becoming immeasurably important. Real urgency is an essential asset that must be created, and re-created, and it can be.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
10 Rules for Branding In a Post Branded World
By Jonathan Salem Baskin
We live in the twilight of a branded world born over 100 years ago. Most marketing remains blinded by the fading glare of its old, outdated promises. Yet there is a new approach to brands ahead of us, based upon a definition that is less about static image and imagined identity, and more about real-time interaction and actual involvement between company and consumer. This is your Manifesto for making branding work in a post-branded world.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Age of Speed Manifesto
By Porchlight
In the following manifesto, we will explore our present relationship with speed and examine four behavior profiles that can help you determine if you (A) embrace speed and (B) harness the power of it. By the end, you just might discover that our 24/7, CrackBerry, more-faster-now world is not threatening to eat you alive, but rather, to set you free.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Social Capital Value Add: Value Based Management for the Networked Age
By Porchlight
"The marketing/communications mix is completely different than it was before 2004. Broadcast's monopoly on attention is dead. The symbolic brand, which has been the fastest growing source of corporate value for the last quarter century has reached its pinnacle. It is being absorbed and replaced by memetic brand. Technologies have evolved and mapped so tightly against the way humans transact, form relationships and create self-identity that it is time for business management to link the pioneering academic studies of social capital and social network analysis (SNA) to value based management and the priorities of marketers. The transition required is no less abrupt than that moment when the search of Dorothy, the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion reaches confrontation with the Great Oz faade and the curtain is pulled back to reveal a mere mortal. The corporation is at risk of being the 'humbug' caught shouting into the loudspeakers and pulling at the mechanistic levers of the past."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Presenting to Small Audiences: Turn Off the Projector!
By Andrew Abela
"The typical presentation to a small group today is designed just as if it were being made to a large group in a big auditorium. We follow the same advice in creating our slides, and then we turn on the portable projector and inflict slide after deadening slide on our audience—vintage Death by PowerPoint. Too much of this effort is wasted. There is ample research evidence that projecting lots of text and speaking at the same time is so distracting to your audience that it is less effective than projecting your slides and asking your audience to read them while you remain silent, or speaking with no slides at all!"
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Necessary Revolution: Creating a Sustainable Future
By Peter Senge, Bryan Smith
"The Industrial Era is ending. Its extraordinary successes—advances in literacy, life expectancy, human rights, and technology—have propelled us headlong into a myriad of side effects: food and water shortages, cyclonic destruction, prolonged drought and rising sea levels. To delay acknowledging the need for lifestyle and business changes—'The Necessary Revolution'—risks our very survival. What only a couple of decades ago was still a vigorous scientific debate has become as close to a consensus as scientific communities ever achieve: human-induced climate change from greenhouse gases concentrating in the atmosphere has reached a threshold of significant social and economic impact—and we are only now at the start of experiencing the effects. Stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide will require a profound reversal: a 60–80% reduction in growing worldwide emissions in the next twenty years. This is the '80–20 Challenge,' and this manifesto presents inspiring, real-life examples of how this is starting to happen.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Gridlock Economy: The Tragedy of the Anticommons
By Michael Heller
"Private ownership usually creates wealth. But too much ownership has the opposite effect—it creates gridlock. When too many people own pieces of one thing, cooperation breaks down, wealth disappears . . . everybody loses. Gridlock is a free market paradox."
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Blog / ChangeThis
Mini Sagas: Bite Sized Lessons For Life and Business
By Rajesh Setty
50 words is not a lot. Sometimes, though, you can say a lot in 50 words. Add a good picture to the background and you have a story in 50 words. In this photographic manifesto (the first in ChangeThis history) Rajesh Setty has compiled 15 mini sagas from his collection. Each 50 word story is packed with a lesson on life and/or business. Our hope is that you will enjoy these stories and it will inspire you to write your own mini saga on a topic of your interest. From Mini Sagas: "A mini saga is a story told in exactly 50 words—not 49 or 51 but in exactly 50 words. Benefit #1: Writing a mini saga expands your creativity. Constraints typically expand creativity or induce flight. When you have to put everything in 50 words, you have to 'leave behind' a lot. That's where the creative juices start flowing. Benefit #2: Writing a mini saga stretches your thinking. What will you write about. You have to think about topics that will fit in 50 words or squeeze them to fit in 50 words. That puts thinking on overdrive mode.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Uncovering Business Breakthroughs: Are you Tuned In or Tuned Out?
By David Meerman Scott
"We've developed the Tuned In Process to allow companies to create success again and again. We see these same principles at work in a wide range of successful product experiences, such as business-to-business technology products, fast food chains, and professional services firms. Anyone can use Tuned In to replicate the model for success. It works for well-known companies like Ford, Apple, and GE and those not-so-famous like GoPro and Zipcar. It works for realtors, doctors, ministers and even rock stars. With a Tuned In approach, your everyday activities can be transformed into those which create the kind of culture that builds market leaders."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Avoid Corporate Death: Nine Essential Elements Will Keep the Reaper From Your Company's Door
By Porchlight
"No company is created to fail. Yet the odds are stacked against corporations surviving more than a few decades. Many once-greats are dying a slow death, losing much of what made them superior. Others have expired quickly. And new research shows that many more are starting to atrophy as their leaders turn their focus to managing complexity—and away from leading for the future. A new, nine-element framework can help you diagnose your organization's health, and address the factors that increase corporate life expectancy."
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.