Blog
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Blog / ChangeThis
You—According to Them: Accelerating Career Success By Understanding—and Boosting—Your Reputation
By Porchlight
"'Reputation' is not a line item we can find on a corporate income statement. But honestly, it should be. Instead it's lurking in there, living pervasively below the surface of the carefully calculated revenues and expenses. And yet, the accountants can't assign a specific number to it. Think about that for a moment. Companies can leverage the incalculable perceptions of a great reputation (their brand) into bottom-line success and a very real corporate advantage. Sadly, there's also the flip side. Companies can totally crash and burn because of negative reputations, despite solid product offerings. Perceptions may be unquantifiable, but they are infinitely powerful."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Why It Pays to Be Likeable
By Dave Kerpen
"40 years ago a brand such as Jolly Green Giant could sell a lot of mediocre corn with a great jingle and a huge television advertising budget. 20 years ago a company such as Circuit City could be a miserable, secretive place to work but it wouldn't matter much to shareholders or customers because they likely would never find out. Social media has changed all that, very quickly. The speed and ease with which information travels—the good, the bad and the ugly—is faster than ever before, and only accelerating. Today, the brands that succeed aren't the ones that spend the most money on disruptive advertising—they're the ones that spend the most money on creating valuable, meaningful products and customer service. Today, the businesses that succeed aren't the ones who keep costs down by not giving perks to employees—they're the ones who create an open, transparent, fun place to work where passionate people can exchange ideas. Today, more than ever before, for businesses, brands, and entrepreneurs, it pays to be likeable.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Forget Today: Start at the End
By Porchlight
"Soon after entrepreneurs and business owners start businesses, we become trapped in the day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month struggles and goals of generating more sales and profits, improving employee performance, and trying to reduce our hours and stress. At some point, virtually all of us become 101% focused on these short-term goals and lose sight of our long-term visions. As a result, we begin to wander, and never achieve our initial vision. How can we find success given the daily struggles of building a company? Forget Today; Start at the End [...] In business, as in everything else, you need to have a clear vision of where you want to go. Then, and only then, can you create a plan to follow to get you there. The key is to "start at the end." Figure out where you want to go. And then you can reverse engineer the path to get there."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Leapfrogging to Breakthroughs
By Soren Kaplan
"Surprise is the enemy. Or, is it? Could we be overlooking—even resisting—one of the most essential catalysts of personal and business breakthroughs? Could we be ignoring the most fundamental tool that anyone can use to create disruptive innovation and change? Here's the fundamental problem. Game changers—whether products, services, or new business models—don't necessarily result from big visions, carefully crafted strategies, and meticulous plans. Creating disruptive, game changing innovation requires leaders to live with uncertainty, embrace ambiguity, and respond to both good and bad surprises along the way. We've been trained to resist the very thing that's needed to leapfrog to the next level. We need to learn to live with—even embrace—what most of us view as the enemy."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Overemphasis on Profit Erodes Your Bottom Line Why Purpose-Driven Salespeople Wildly Outperform Their Quota-Driven Counterparts
By Lisa Earle McLeod
"Most people believe that money is the primary motivator for top salespeople and that doing good by the world runs a distant second. That belief is wrong. If your sales force isn't producing what it's capable of, it may well be that you're overemphasizing profit at the expense of purpose. This observation doesn't come just from personal experience but from hard data. Studies show that companies committed to improving their customer's lives outperform the market by a stunning 15:1 ratio. [...] A quota-driven mindset spirals into the lowest common denominator sales activities. You start competing on cost not value. You think short-term, fail to understand the customer's environment, and cannot grasp the link between your products and the client's need. It's a slow descent to commodity status."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Service Failure: Do You Really Care About Your Customer?
By Jeff Toister
"Executives may claim to care about their customers, but their actions frequently suggest just the opposite. How else could you explain hitting loyal customers with a sudden 60 percent price increase (Netflix, 2011). Would a company that cared about service really try to implement a $5 fee on debit card transactions and then defend the move as something that customers would appreciate (Bank of America, 2011). Can a company that cares about its customers really implement a procedure where pennies are literally stolen from its customers at the point of sale by rounding down the amount of change due when customers pay with cash (Chipotle, 2012). I know what you are thinking. You're different. You truly care about your customers and would never resort to price gouging or penny stealing. I hope so. And, the mere fact that you've read this far and may have even been a little indignant about a company skimping on toilet paper speaks volume about your character. Still, do you really care about customer service.
Categories: changethis
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Slow Fix
By Porchlight
The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honoré, HarperOne, 224 pages, $25. 99, Hardcover, January 2013, ISBN 9780061128820 After reading the first six pages of The Slow Fix at my desk, I turned to a coworker and exclaimed, “This is so good! ” And that’s truly the best way to react to a book, isn’t it?
Categories: jack-covert-selects
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - The Org
By Porchlight
The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office by Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan, Twelve, $26. 99, 320 pages, Hardcover, January 2013, ISBN 9780446571593 Just as market theory sits on the foundation of Adam Smith’s ideas, made famous in The Wealth of Nations, the study of organizational economics began with the work of Ronald Coase in a famous article entitled “The Nature of the Firm. ” Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan explain in their new book, The Org: Coase’s conception of the market involved a lot more friction and discord than Adam Smith’s original vision.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Midnight Lunch
By Porchlight
Midnight Lunch: The 4 Phases of Team Collaboration Success from Thomas Edison’s Lab by Sarah Miller Caldicott, John Wiley & Sons, 284 pages, $21. 95, Hardcover, December 2012, ISBN 9781118407868 Midnight Lunch is a book about collaboration, and about contemporizing the prolific Thoman Edison’s belief that collaboration is key to innovation. The title itself refers to the late night gatherings of team members at Edison’s famous laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey—collaborative sessions that spawned inventions and innovations that every schoolchild in America grows up learning about.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
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Blog / News & Opinion
New Year, New KnowledgeBlocks
By Sally Haldorson
For the past few months, we've been remodeling KnowledgeBlocks, and we are thrilled to announce that the new site is now live! What you'll see when you visit the new version of KnowledgeBlocks is a trimmer, more focused, and most importantly, free site. As always, our mission is to help you build your business knowledge.
Categories: news-opinion
