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
Enough of MORE: Better is Better
By Henry Mintzberg
"Economists insist that MORE is the way forward. No, it is the way backward, economically as well as socially. We don't have to destroy our progeny and our planet for the sake of a senseless dogma. Sure we need development and employment, but responsible development with robust employment. A healthy society is sustained by a decent and diverse economy, not one driven by the mercenary force of one-dimensional growth. Stock markets have done enough damage."
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Scaling Leadership: A Manifesto
By Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams
"Ineffective leadership caps the ability of an organization to grow. Leadership that works at one level of scale is likely to run into serious limitations at the next level. The men and women who may be well-suited to lead a 100-person business unit with $30 million in annual revenues may be unable to lead a 250-person business unit with $100 million in annual revenues. To scale the organization, you must scale ever more effective leadership."
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Hustle & Float: Reclaim Your Creativity and Thrive in a World Obsessed with Work
By Rahaf Harfoush
"The strategies we're putting in place to increase our productivity are hurting our creative performance. By industrializing our creative skillset, we've prioritized performance and ignored critical hidden forces at play—our cultural, historical and biological baggage—that underlie and influence our conceptions of work."
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Stop Undermining Democracy and Your Business
By Porchlight
"This is the fork in the road. Here, those who advocate external feedback as the solution to life’s problems take one path, based on the belief that people cannot develop the awareness needed for change. Those who have seen the unlimited potential of a developmental approach based on a holistic, living-systems view take another. This road is of a higher order, in that it is based on a belief that people have the capacity to be self-managing once they have learned to be self-observing and self-reflecting. But they need development to do so."
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Weathering the Perfect Storm: How to Prosper in the Reputation Economy
By Porchlight
"It is vital to understand that we are living in a perfect storm that is making our reputations more fragile than at any other time in human history! This perfect storm consists of the values-gap in behavior among leaders that litter the headlines, the fact that we are all now citizen journalists carrying smartphones to capture events, all colliding with the hyper-connected and shareable world that social media channels have created. It's a new day in the court of public opinion and oftentimes these moments go viral and a bad situation gets worse in a hurry. It doesn't just impact high-profile leaders, executives, celebrities, and professional athletes. It's true for us and can be just as devastating as individuals as it is for companies."
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My Metacognitive Journey: The Power of Understanding Yourself
By Dave Mitchell
"Perhaps the most satisfying development associated with writing a book is when you as the author stumble upon a revelation in the middle of the process. For this book, I came to understand the answer to a question that I am often asked and have struggled to answer for many years. So many times, I am approached by an attendee and asked, 'Can people change?'"
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The Power of Positive Coaching
By Julie Davis-Colan
"It wasn't too long ago that having a business coach was like having a scarlet letter on your professional suit. Back then, most coaching was remedial—there was a problem that needed to be fixed. Today, having a coach has been elevated in status. Business leaders have realized what professional athletes have always known—having a coach produces better results. That's a significant and necessary paradigm shift. Instead of symbolizing a problem, having a coach symbolizes a leader's willingness to develop and grow as a person and a leader."
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Live Big: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Passion, Practicality, and Purpose
By Ajit Nawalkha
"As an entrepreneur, you need to know that your business isn't an entity. It's an experience. It's unfolding at every moment. Every moment is vital. Critical. The only way to handle the chaos and the crazy beauty of it all is this: know that growing your business is actually about growing yourself. It's about staying sane, centered, and focused. [...] All you have is this moment, this experience. Make it an interesting one. Make it fun. Make it worth sharing. When you let love in to everything you do, everything you do seems to be created with a little more magic. When you let love in to your work, your work is better."
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The Silent Killer of Founder Owned Businesses
By D. Scot Hunsaker
"In the entrepreneurial world we have a silent killer. We don't talk about it very much, but it can put an end to a lifetime of hard work and planning. We owners take all of the risks and sometimes withering criticism and we start a business because we believe in what we and the business could accomplish in the world. Then, over time we build a thriving organization. It hums along, makes money, benefits everyone involved, meets customer demand, and helps the community grow and prosper. All good so far. But then we decide to make our exit, or the decision is made for us by health or family issues or other business interests. So, now what happens. Well, at least two thirds of the time, the business ceases operations, with all of the collateral damage that does. It happens because we never transition the company to the next generation of leaders, not because we don't know how, but because we never get around to it. As CEO's and entrepreneurs, perhaps we think it will never happen to us, that maybe we have discovered the fountain of youth.
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One Room, One Team, Different Purposes
By Porchlight
"We preach collaboration, talk and train teamwork, but all the while organizations are optimized to manage, foster and reward individual effort. I'm not the first person to notice or write about this. Nonetheless, most approaches to team effectiveness aren't designed to directly confront this organizational paradox: Collaboration is second- or third-nature for a large majority of us and this predisposes us to consistently revert to our more selfish ways, especially where we're rewarded and recognized to do so."
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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.