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
How to Cultivate Winning Relationships
By Morag Barrett
"Having fun and feeling satisfied with relationships at work are important! For many of us, the hours we spend at work far exceed the time we spend with our families or in social settings. So why not actually enjoy this massive part of our lives? Working respectfully is not a win/lose power struggle. Nor is it 'soft' to have a conversation about how you work together. When you cultivate winning relationships, everyone involved can benefit—especially you."
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How Your Biases Make You Blind
By Faisal Hoque, Drake Baer
We best empathize with people—be they colleagues or customers—that we have some shared experience with. So if a company is homogenous in form, it will only be able to connect with a homogenous swathe of humans outside the organization.
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Brevity Mandate
By Joseph McCormack
"The business world today is full of information overload and there is not enough time to sift through it. If you cannot capture people's attention and deliver your message with brevity, you'll lose them. For starters, the discipline to capture and manage elusive mindshare now shapes and defines professional success. Shorter e-mails, better organized updates, and tighter and more engaging presentations are immediate indicators that you've got what it takes to succeed in an attention economy. Getting to the point is a non-negotiable standard. The reasons why are plentiful. Ten years ago, brevity was a nicety and meant primarily for long-winded types that couldn't shut up. Today, being clear and concise is an absolute necessity; it's what successful people expect to see—and get quickly frustrated when it's missing."
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How To Experience a Hero's Journey and Become the Hero of Your Own Life Story
By Porchlight
"What if I told you that there a formula to living a heroic life? What if there was a basic framework, a roadmap that anybody could follow in order to become the hero of their own life story? In the 1940s, mythologist Joseph Campbell discovered that heroic myths from every culture on Earth are essentially the same story. He discovered a pattern in any story where an ordinary person accomplishes something heroic. Whether it was the Greek tales of Odysseus' return home from the Trojan war or the Nepalese stories of Gautama Buddha, who attained enlightenment and founded Buddhism, these stories follow the same set of steps that Campbell dubbed the 'Hero's Journey.'"
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The Smart People Manifesto: How to Get Our Nation's Top Graduates to Build Things
By Andrew Yang
"We've got a problem right now: our smart people are doing the wrong things. If we can get them to do the right things it will transform the country. We need more jobs, new enterprises and a resurgent culture of innovation in the U.S. The question is—how can we encourage our top people to take risks and build new things? [...] According to one McKinsey study, since 2007 eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds experienced the greatest decline in entrepreneurial activity of any group, leading the authors to conclude, 'The US economy is currently not producing enough of its next generation of serial entrepreneurs.'"
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A Manifesto for the Corporate Idealist
By Porchlight
"We are Corporate Idealists. We're in Asia's factory zones, working with local managers to make sure employees are paid and treated properly. We're in Africa, sitting on dirt floors with village elders to protect indigenous traditions amidst an influx of foreign oil workers. We're in Silicon Valley, collaborating with product developers to better protect user privacy. We're in London and New York, convincing our directors that protecting people and the planet is good for business. We have experienced heartache and disillusionment. But we also know that big business can make the world a better place, and feel compelled to do all we can to make that happen. Are we delusional or realistic? Are we changing the way that business is done or tinkering at the margins? Terrified of the risks or excited by the opportunities? Is our love of big business justified or misguided? Yes. This is our manifesto."
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Lead Positive: How to Be a Highly Effective Leader
By Kathryn D. Cramer
"When you 'lead positive,' you offer a compelling vision of the future by reframing problems into possibilities and appealing to a higher sense of purpose, a noble and mighty cause. When you think, speak, and act out of the positive side of the ledger, people feel more hopeful and confident about the future. And if you are able to articulate why your vision is so important to those you serve, people trust and respect who you are, not just your ideas. Then, when you take a stand that requires courage and sacrifice, you can rely on their support and determination as you walk together toward a new positive direction."
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A Brand-Builder's Guide to the Universe: 17 Ways to Build a Great Brand Today
By Denise Lee Yohn
"Companies with great brands conceive of their brands as complete strategic platforms. They identify the key values and attributes that define their brands and then use them to fuel, align, and guide everything they do."
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Four Forces for Economic Dominance to Unleash the Second American Century
By Porchlight
"I've been watching the American economy for decades, and for the last few years I've put it under a magnifying glass. My conclusions are strongly positive: the United States is about to enter a period of prolonged economic growth, filled with opportunity. It's not the emerging market countries that will power the world into the next economic era. It's the United States. There are four forces that explain my optimism: America's astounding levels of creativity The renewal of manufacturing Vast reserves of energy Massive amounts of investible capital. Add to these four forces two additional facts. American consumers—the world's engine of growth for more than 50 years—have less debt, as a share of income, than at any time in the last 35 years, thanks to the cleansing effects of the recession (see chart below). And, Americans are savings are at record levels. To paraphrase George Costanza's declaration to Jerry Seinfeld, 'America's back, baby!'"
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The Calorie Myth Manifesto: How We Can Eat More And Exercise Less—Smarter
By Porchlight
"Over the past few decades, we've been trying harder and harder to be healthy and fit. The result: We got heavy and sick. What's going on here? When did healthy and fit start making us heavy and sick? And why is everyone calling us lazy gluttons? If an architect builds us a house and it crumbles, is that our fault? No. But we better find a good contractor who knows how to build something solid and safe. Similarly, if a doctor prescribes us a medication and it makes us worse, it is up to us to stop taking it and to find a new doctor. We have to apply the same logic to health and fitness. We've received so much contradictory, damaging advice over the years, often resulting in frustration and extra pounds. It's high time for us to make a better choice. But what other option do we have than the decades-old, calorie-counting approach?"
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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.