MindMeat for Businesspeople: ChangeThis

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If you have an interest in business and management, either aspirational, functional, or academic, one online resource that is well worth mining is ChangeThis.

ChangeThis, for those who haven't run across it, is essentially a repository of manifestos - public declarations of principles - by people who think deeply about an aspect of business, leadership, people, or life. Each manifesto averages around 14 pages and comes packaged in a consistent pdf format for easy downloading, reading or printing.

The level of contributions is consistently high. Early contributors included Tom Peters, Seth Godin, and Guy Kawasaki; the latter, like many of those contributing manifestos, took the opportunity to summarize the key points of his most recent book.

Not all contributions are useful or relevant, and some are downright irritating, but the worthwhile and thought-provoking content far outweighs the self-promotional and boring.

A starter selection:

"Competing in a Flat World: The Perils and Promise of Global Supply Chains" by Dr. Victor Fung and Dr. William Fung, Group Chairman and Group Managing Director (respectively) of the Li & Fung Group;

"The Hard Reality of Semiglobalization...And how to profit from it" by IESE professor Pankaj Ghemawat, who doesn't think the world is so flat after all;

"Marketing Mismatch: When New Won't Work with Old (Riffs on a Meatball Sundae" by author and marketing gadfly Seth Godin;

"The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication" by Ogilvy's Mohammed Iqbal;

"Work is Broken: Here's How We Fix It" by the late Marc Orchant;

"Seduced by Success: How the Best Companies Survive the 9 Traps of Winning" by Robert Herbold, former COO of Microsoft;

"Ideaicide: How to Avoid It And Get What You Want" by consultants Alan Parr and Karen Ansbaugh;

"The Gobbledygook Manifesto" by public relations strategist David Meerman Scott

"100 Ways to Help You Succeed/Make Money, Part II" by uberguru Tom Peters;

"The Greening of Business: Recent Trends and Remaining Hurdles" by Green to Gold author Andrew Winston.

Comments

[Michael Cayley]

David - great to see how ChangeThis spreads ideas. Even into my old Beijing stomping grounds. I was first one into Yonghegong "Gardens" up by the old Capital library. Hey I have a proposal up for voting at ChangeThis: http://www.changethis.com/proposals/1279

I hope that you will vote for it and help develop support for the idea.

The manifesto draft is currently being tranlated into Manadarin.

I am following you on twitter now. I am at memeticbrand

[Michael Cayley]

The idea is to connect the pioneering intellectual enterprises of social capital and social network analysis to value based management and the priorities of marketers.

In short, social capital attributable to social media can be linked to corporate valuation in a way akin to the link established between brand and corporate valuation in the late 1980s.