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
Leadership Lessons from Poetry and Prose
By Bob Vanourek
"I have a life-long love of leadership, literature, and poetry, and I've realized over time that literature and poetry have a lot to teach us about leadership."
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Leading Innovation From the New Middle
By George E. L. Barbee
"There is a new wave of innovation taking place inside many organizations that gives people an opportunity to make important, innovative contributions to business and to society. My beliefs about innovation have evolved and are now centered on three basic tenets: Most of us can be far more innovative in business than we give ourselves credit for—especially when we realize innovation is a lot broader than just invention. We can quickly learn to more innovatively observe and then transfer these innovations from one category to another. Being more innovative is, in fact, learnable and even self-teachable. [...] Innovation is more than an "I" thing... it's a "WE" thing. It is true that we must make a real, conscious effort to improve our own innovation skills. But there are also important changes that we can and should bring about in the organization. Together, this will allow us to begin leading innovation from the new middle."
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How to Start When You're Stuck
By Jason W. Womack, Jodi Womack
"Maybe it's a career change, a health and fitness transformation or a personal project or side business you want to start, but for some reason—whatever it is—you haven't started yet. 'Not enough time.' 'Not enough resources.' 'Not enough support.' Statements like these not only limit your potential but hinder your productivity. In order to find the time, the resources and the support you need, you first need to GET MOMENTUM. You need more than a little motivation, but a true forward movement. Momentum means you're moving, and things are happening. It means you're making progress, and it feels good! Momentum is as personal in nature as it is different for everyone and for every project. What works for someone else may not work for you. The key is to practice thinking bigger and more creatively to put yourself in a position to move beyond the inertia that is holding you back from you dreams."
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Networks Are Eating the World
By Barry Libert
"In the age of digital networks, businesses' abilities to create and share intangible assets, such as ideas, software, and relationships that are owned by each of us—the Network—has grown exponentially. Further, digital networks allow organizations to access assets that exist outside of their traditional boundaries. Uber is a transportation company without cars. Airbnb is a hotelier without properties. Amazon is retailer with stores. Network orchestrators—as we call them—are eating the world as we know it, changing the very nature of industries around the world. The key is their ability to reach and leverage each and every one of us and all our relationships, information and assets. This access to and relationship with us and what we have (cars and homes), do (labor) and know (relationships and expertise) are critical to their success—as are the digital platforms that they use to enable us to share what we have with others. In short, where Thomas Friedman wrote the book that laid the ground for this network revolution—The World is Flat—and Marc Andreessen followed on with his 2011 article—'Software is Eating the World'—it is now clear that those were the foundation for today's reality—networks are eating the world.
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A New Territory of Maturity: Updating Our Stories To Enhance Our Lives
By Rosamund Stone Zander
"In those endless years it took you to grow out of childhood and stand on your own two feet, you learned about the world in doses. Some of what you learned (and thought you understood) has evolved over time with added experience, but some of the discoveries you made and the stories you constructed around them as a child, even as young as three, have stayed the same, child-like and unchanged, no matter how many years have passed. [...] That's living life in the past, seeing the world around you through a child's eyes in a child's story. You've been walking around in kid's sneakers and they're much too small for you. Here's how to fit yourself out with good pair of hiking boots to go the distance."
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Keeping On the Blade: How Successful Startup Founders Persist To Discover Hockey Stick Growth
By Bobby Martin
"Coverage of the supposedly meteoric revenue growth of a number of Silicon Valley startups—most recently Uber, Snapchat, and Instagram—whose hugely ambitious and driven founders had genius ideas and attracted massive amounts of venture funding, has fueled unrealistic notions: what a good idea looks like; how fast a founder should expect to be able to attract investment capital; and how quickly, even with a really great idea, growth will take off. If we use unicorns as a guide for our own startups, it appears that success springs up fast and out of the middle of nowhere. This mythology can lead founders to abandon their efforts too soon because they're not seeing rapid revenue growth and can't get funding. They haven't planned in a realistic way for the first three or often more years of false starts, missteps, and market resistance which are generally required before growth takes off."
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The Becoming Principle
By Porchlight
"As adults—in the workplace and elsewhere—when we're asked to do something we've never done before, when we need to grow beyond our current capabilities, we can tap into what we naturally did as children, and perform our way to who we're becoming. For adults, though, play, performance, and pretending can feel anything but natural. We got the message in a myriad of ways as we left toddlerhood: Play is for kids, not for big people. We're supposed to color inside the lines; know the correct answer; understand how to behave and fit in. And there's no denying the importance of that learning—obviously we need to learn how to safely cross the street, say our ABCs and wake up an iPad. But this need to get it right eventually takes over. We learn what we need to in school and by the time we get into the job market, the support we got to learn developmentally as children is long gone. As an adult, it is embarrassing to not know. There are repercussions if we don't get it right. We feel stupid, and we make others feel stupid if they don't 'have it together.
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The Internet as Art
By Virginia Heffernan
The Internet ... is a massive and collaborative work of art— something billions of us contribute to every millisecond, with every Instagram photo, every "like," every message-board post, every tweet, every eBay review, every streamed video or song.
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The Sweet Spot of Purpose: A Three-Legged Stool for Productivity and Success
By Dan Pontefract
"Far too many corporate social responsibility statements and annual reports claim, 'Our employees are our most important asset.' Is that what we are? Assets? No, we are not assets. We are not human capital. We are not headcount. You cannot count me. We are the individuals who make up our organizations. We are team members. We are co-workers. We are colleagues. We are individuals. We are both leaders and followers. We strive for purpose in our lives, and in the organizations that we work for. It matters not what level we reside on in the corporate hierarchy. We are all on the same team in defining and enacting that purpose. Team members are not an asset, but rather the key link to improving society. The importance of purpose on the lives of employees, and for the betterment of society, has become table stakes. Indeed, the individuals that make up the organization are its most important advantage."
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The Social Business Mandate
By Clara Shih
"As venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has said, 'Software is eating the world. ' We live in an age in which every aspect of our lives from physical devices to offline services is being digitized; the impact of social media on consumers and business alike today is as profound as the rise of Google 15 years ago. Yet, many business leaders and CEOs are thinking about what I call Social Business in exactly the WRONG ways. The mistake leaders make is over-delegating social and digital efforts to fairly entry-level marketing and customer service teams. Senior executives then confuse having a social media team with having a social business, and have a detrimental misconception that these efforts are far from the business's core initiatives. In reality, business leaders need to personally own and drive these digital and social initiatives. To fully become a Social Business, an organization must truly embrace digital opportunities on every platform; and this transformation must be led by C-Suite Executives.
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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.