Blog / ChangeThis

Build This: Your Culturematic Laboratory

By Grant McCracken

"Every organization needs a Culturematic laboratory... It gives the senior manager a "landing party" with which to search for navigable spaces, habitable worlds, futures we want as opposed to ones that will be otherwise forced upon us. Managers can wait for the future to "happen" to them. Or they can use Culturematics and choose. Culturematic labs are a new management tool."

Blog / ChangeThis

Unleashing the Creative Reservoir: The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited

By Richard Florida

"If the economic crisis has taught us anything, it's that putting our faith in the market alone will not work. New institutions are needed to harness powerful new economic forces, to address worsening class divides, and to make society and the economy work for all of us. We desperately need to institute and ratify a new social compact, entailing everything from investment in our human capital, the only real capital we have, to a new approach to education and learning. We need to recommit our economy to innovation, our society to openness and diversity, and we need to knit a new safety net for the truly disadvantaged. We need a complete break with the old Fordist order. It's time to forge a new society that reflects the demands, challenges, and opportunities of the Creative Age."

Blog / ChangeThis

The Shattering: How We Get From Where We Are to What and Who We Need to Be—A Non-Illustrated Guide to Becoming Honest

By Porchlight

"The Shattering is the moment where everything familiar slips away. Our protective facades of familiarity spontaneously combust and we shun faith, deny comfort. We're left voiceless regardless of our need to scream. We tread water in an ocean filled with every brilliant memory of what was only moments ago. Life has a cruel way of serving up The Shatterings, too. Nary a Google or Outlook Calendar would deign to accept the meeting and we're left simply wondering What. The Fuck. Happened? Over the past seventeen months, I've become a student of that question. In the process, I've gone through even more Shatterings. And I've come to one invaluable realization: I've been asking the wrong question. I shouldn't concern myself with what happened. I should be asking, 'What's happening?'"

Blog / ChangeThis

The Face-to-Face Manifesto: Back to the Future

By Ed Keller

"It is undeniable that Facebook, the king of the social media hill, has accumulated a huge number of users who spend growing amounts of time on the site. Its growth and ability to attract a loyal and highly networked audience is to be admired. For brands, however, it is far from the Holy Grail of marketing. Facebook and other online social networks represent merely one channel out of many that marketers can tap to spark a powerful word of mouth wave. And when looked at in the context of the 'total social' opportunity, it is but one very small part of the overall picture and needs to be seen as such. And true to Naisbitt's 'high tech, high touch' megatrend, the fact is that online social networking is no substitute for the power and impact of face-to-face communications. Real world conversations—most of which take place face-to-face—are still the dominant mode of communication, and they are the most trusted and persuasive."

Blog / ChangeThis

Let's Make Leadership Real Again

By Mike Figliuolo

"What has happened to leadership. With all the crises and challenges we face and the increasingly risk-averse environment in which we operate, leadership has become generic, ephemeral, and bland. We have devolved from leaders into managers. Admiral Grace Murray Hopper said it best—you manage things, but you lead people. The problem is we're no longer leading. We're hiding behind committees. We're using the crutches of data and metrics to make our decisions for us. We blame policies and corporate culture for the problems our teams face rather than delivering the tough messages with a sense of ownership. The result of all of this is our people don't trust us anymore. Work has become transactional. They do the work and we pay them. It's a fee-for-service mindset. When they find someone who will pay them more for their services, they're gone. And when we no longer have need of their services, we simply cast those people aside. It's a toxic environment. It's hard for people to trust their leaders when they feel like they're simply a cog in the machine.

Blog / ChangeThis

Rebooting America's Innovation Engine: Using Jugaad to Innovate Faster, Better, and Cheaper

By Navi Radjou

"The motto 'innovate or die' held true for American firms in the 20th century. In the 21st century, 'innovate faster, better, and cheaper—or die' will be your new mantra. Indeed, in today's hypercompetitive, ber-connected, and globally integrated economy, you need to crank out new products faster than you can spell 'R&D,' or else your customers will switch their allegiance to more agile rivals. Plus, your products need to deliver more value to customers—value no longer being defined by the bells and whistles in your product, but by the experience customers get from using your product. Finally, given the rapidly-shrinking purchasing power of the American middle class, your products got to be affordable to meet the frugal needs of thrifty US buyers. In sum, you need to innovate faster, better, and cheaper. Sadly, Corporate America is just not equipped to do that."

Blog / News & Opinion

High-tech, High-touch Customer Service

By Porchlight

Micah Solomon follows up his book Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit, a book he co-authored with Leonardo Inghilleri, with a new book written just by him, titled, High-tech, High-touch Customer Service. Taking some of the core values of good service and applying them to the increasing level of technology that's involved in our interactions, Solomon tells stories and shares insights about best practices in this constantly changing, yet fundamentally human business landscape we exist in. I sent Micah a few questions after reading the book, and his answers are below.

Blog / News & Opinion

Austin Kleon in Milwaukee

By Porchlight

AUSTIN KLEON Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative Wednesday, May 9th 12:00pm-2:00pm Hosted by our friends at: Translator 415 E Menomonee St, Milwaukee Steal, you say? Well, while we're not advocating criminal acts, we do want to invite you to a very interesting discussion with Austin Kleon, who talks about creativity, visual thinking, and being an artist online. Some of you may have also seen him in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, PBS, at TEDx and SXSW, or heard him on NPR.

Blog / News & Opinion

KnowledgeBlocks Delay

By Porchlight

Many were expecting our new product, KnowledgeBlocks, to launch today. While we certainly wish that were the case, some delays came up that were beyond our control. These should be cleared up by early next week and we'll post again here when the site is officially live.

Blog / Excerpts

Every Nation for Itself, An Excerpt

By Porchlight

One of the real stand-out successes in business books of 2010 was Ian Bremmer's The End of the Free Market. It stood out because it wasn't a typical business book—it seemed like something more likely to come out of Foreign Affairs than Portfolio—and there wasn't much precedent for a book of its type being a big commercial hit in the genre. His previous book, The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall was a critical success, selected by The Economist as one of the best books of 2006, and got him on some of the cable talk shows, but The End of the Free Market turned into a national bestseller.