Blog
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Blog / Book Giveaways
Creative Quest
By Porchlight
Questlove's new book on the creative process, and living a connected, creative life, is one of the most honest, open, amusing, and best I've ever read.
Categories: giveaways
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Blog / Editor's Choice
New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World—and How to Make It Work for You
Book Review by Porchlight
Jeremy Heimans & Henry Timms detail how technology-enabled collaboration and mass participation are enabling a new power that is changing the world before our very eyes.
Categories: editors-choice, narrative-biography
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Blog / Excerpts
The Deals That Made the World: Reckless Ambition, Backroom Negotiations, and the Hidden Truths of Business
By Porchlight
Jacques Peretti looks at the world we live in today through the lens of ten business deals that "have ramifications far beyond business," and have been "especially crucial in shaping modern society."
Categories: excerpts
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Six Headwinds Threatening the Global Economy
By Dambisa Moyo
"Yes, years of stimulus and ultra-low interest rates have finally brought the global economy to a point of rising employment and stronger economic growth. IMF and World Bank forecasts for global growth increased in January prompting a fresh wave of optimism. This revival in growth prospects is increasingly synchronized across advanced economies—notably in the US, EU, and Japan, and the leading developing countries, such as China, India, and Brazil. At a more granular level, many economies are seeing increases in capital investment and private consumption, as well as notable declines in unemployment. Yet, 10 years after the crisis, the global economy faces six structural headwinds that, left unchecked, promise to derail economic progress and damage living standards in the years ahead."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Start Imagining a Future of Human + Machine
By Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson
"In the first wave of transformation, businesses standardized processes. Think Henry Ford and the assembly line, where steps in the overall process were broken down, measured, and optimized to achieve gains in efficiency. The second wave of transformation brought automated processes. Think business process reengineering powered by advances in information technology like desktop computers, large databases, and software that automated various tasks. Now, the third wave is bringing adaptive processes. Think of mobile map apps that continuously use real-time data to create living, dynamic, optimized maps that get hundreds of thousands of individual users to their destinations as quickly as possible. And then imagine that principle of adaptability extended to business processes across all industries, organizations, and functions—that's the third wave that is transforming business as we know it."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Making 'Agile' Business as Usual
By Todd Warner
"There is more to Agility than putting lipstick on a pig. Organizations that attempt to migrate to Agile approaches need to take accountability for their 'inner pig.' Any sector can espouse Agile practices, such as SCRUMS, Sprints, and Stand-ups. That is the easy part. The challenge that most organizations face is that they layer Agile approaches on top of their existing social system, without addressing the intricate web of local practices and tribalism that have developed over time."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
How Women Rise: Helping Women Change the Behaviors that Get in Their Way
By Sally Helgesen, Marshall Goldsmith
"It's not surprising that many of the behaviors that hold men and women back would be different. After all, women often have very different experiences at work. And experience shapes habits and responses. Familiar habits and responses may feel intrinsic, like part of who you are. But they are not you; they are you on autopilot. Bringing them to conscious awareness is the first step on the path to effective behavioral change. Why focus on behaviors instead on of the cultural and structural factors that hold women back? Isn't that just a way of blaming women? Not at all. We are acutely aware that cultural and structural restraints still keep many women stuck, despite decades of admittedly uneven progress. But our focus in this book is on what lies within women's control, what women themselves can change."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Paradox of Leadership
By Porchlight
"San Francisco Giants manager Bruce Bochy is as gifted as any CEO we've ever met. Intelligence, strategy, creativity, courage, heart, and leadership presence—he's got the whole package. This guy gets leadership. In a game that has enough data, statistics, and sabermetrics to tax a supercomputer, you can't adequately measure these character strengths, and you would certainly be hard-pressed to put a price tag on them. Like all great leaders, Boch is a blend of many attributes and actions that are paradoxical. His success is anchored in how he manages these paradoxes."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Beyond Business Results: Achieving Sustainable Success
By Julie Rosenberg
"For most of my career, I focused on my next professional opportunity rather than on my present situation. I was committed to serving patients and to helping my company meet its goals; I was always looking down the line to what was coming next. What I was not fully committed to was the process of my own development—the learning and growth that builds a career by helping you to become a better version of yourself. I was smart, poised, well-trained and committed, but I was also resistant to change, angry at my boss (thinking that, after all, I should have been chosen for his role), easily upset when encountering obstacles, and fearful of failure. Over the past 16 years, the practice of yoga has helped me to enhance my awareness of the present moment and to root my consciousness directly in it."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / Book Giveaways
Cousins Maine Lobster: How One Food Truck Became a Multimillion-Dollar Business
By Porchlight
Jim Tselikis and Sabin Lomac tell the story of Cousins Maine Lobster, the story of how they built a food truck into a multimillion dollar business, and the story of Maine, in their new book.
Categories: giveaways
