GROW: How to Change the Narrative of Business by Jim Stengel

“The business case for brand ideals is not altruism. It’s self-interest and mutual interest. In addition to its wider positive impact, a devotion to brand ideals will do more for your own business and career than any other factor. Maximum business growth and high ideals are not incompatible. They’re inseparable.”

Transcendent Leadership: How to Lead Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime
by Les McKeown

“What if each successive leadership role brought out more of what makes you you, rather than asking you to compromise your core values, bury your deepest wishes, hold ransom your dreams? Having coached and advised hundreds of leaders, I know this isn’t a pipe dream.”

Shift & Reset by Brian Reich

“There are lots of excuses for not making real, demonstrable changes in the way we live, work, and how we interact as individuals and engage in groups/communities. I have heard them all. I have used many of them myself. But they are bullshit. All excuses are.”

It Really is As Simple As ABC: What Leaders Can Learn from Masterful Orators of the Past by Matt Eventoff

“Millions of meetings and presentations occur daily. Each of these presentations is meant to drive ‘someone’ to do ‘something.’ And what do the vast majority of [them] have in common? Unfortunately, they usually fail to get anyone to do anything.”

Make Social Media Sell—Now by Jeff Molander

“The ‘social media revolution’ is over-hyped nonsense. The real business opportunity is to become more relevant and meaningful to customers in ways that create sales.”

The Promise of Entrepreneurship by Adelaide Lancaster

“We are made to believe that when it comes to business success, bigger is always better. In our super-sized, consumption-oriented culture, not even small business is exempt from the pressure to grow for growth’s sake. … There is an alternative that is both rewarding and attainable—it just requires rethinking things a bit.”

Leading Transformation and Captivating Communities by Brian Solis

“At the center of any revolution is the burning desire to bring about change. But it always comes down to people, shared experiences, and a common ambition. And it is people who need one another for leadership, support, and inspiration. What’s missing from the equation is your vision and leadership.”

Blending Art & Science To Create More Effective Ideas by James Trezona

“Blending art and science is about collaborating in ideas generation: the inter-relationship is critical, you can’t have one thing without the other. A bunch of code or data is just a bunch of numbers without the art.”

Does Your Customer Really Need You? Lessons from Zappos by Joseph Michelli, Ph.D.

“Let’s face it, every business is at risk of becoming a commodity, thanks in large part to the speed of information delivery, consumer empowering technologies, and media outlets that tell consumers that the economy is too fragile for them to be spending money.”

The Business Genome Approach: Finding Your Next Competitive Advantage by Andrea Kates

“You have the wrong tools. And you use them the wrong way. It isn’t your fault. You were taught, as we all were, to make forecast models out of past results. … But, now, the rules have changed: our game plans have gone public, and whoever knows what the customer will do next wins.”

Putting a Signature on Customer Experience by Michael T. Kanazawa

“Customer experience needs to be thought of as a strategic agenda item on par with and actually integrated with corporate strategy, managing the brand, and new product development. If you share that vision for your customer experience efforts, here are some strategic tools and ideas to help you do that.”

The 5,000 Year History of How We Lost Half Our Mind (Or How Blah-Blah-Blah Has Gradually Taken Over Our Lives) by Dan Roam

“Over the millenia, we have gradually purged our visual mind from our understanding of language, communications, and intelligence. Just when we need pictures the most, we no longer have the ability to think visually. It’s time to bring our visual mind back.”

Innovate or Perish! What’s Your Strategy? by Kevin & Jackie Freiberg
and Dain Dunston

“It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, someone, somewhere right now is building a product, process or business model designed to kick your butt. If it’s you, then you define the rules by which others must play the game. If it’s NOT you, then you had better get comfortable playing by someone else’s rules.”

Innovation You: Creating Growth By Jeff DeGraff

“Growth comes from developing a deeper understanding of the interplay of the forces and how to manage the tensions of conflict and cooperation. … Our opportunities to become better and new—to become whole—to succeed, are discovered in the places where the world around us is growing and calls us to do the same.”

Crime and (the Lack of) Punishment by Neil Senturia

“I am passionate about great crimes and the criminals who commit them. But, I often wonder if the long arm of our law, the finest justice system in the world, is at times deeply corrupt, especially with regard to the most recent financial meltdown of 2008.”

Success or Suckcess: It’s Up to Senior Management to Decide by Dan Hill

“Over the past 25 years, the breakthroughs in brain science have systematically documented that thought and emotion can’t be artificially separated and that, in fact, the capacity for emotion proceeded thought in evolutionary terms and continues to do so with every deliberation and act an employee makes.”

Clickability: A Skill for Life by Dr. Rick Kirschner

“Whether the times are great, or the economy is in the tank, the people who do the best, who prosper and advance, are the people who know how to connect with other people and have it matter.”

Starting this month, ChangeThis manifestos will have a slightly different look.

We’ve had repeated requests from readers to make our manifestos easier to read on their mobile devices, and we’ve done just that. Our designer extraordinaire, Joy Panos Stauber of Stauber Design Studios in Chicago, Illinois is the woman who makes our manifestos sparkle every month, and she has now designed a new template for them that retains most of the visual elements you’re all familiar with, while tweaking the dimensions, margins, and aspect ratio to make it more mobile-friendly.

We’re really pleased with what she has come up with and hope you like it, as well.

And now, here are this month’s manifestos.

Guarding the Guards: Crushing the Bureaucratic Rules that Limit Success by Tom Rieger

“As managers are forced to do more with less, contend with limited resources, or battle for headcount and budget, many will begin to build walls to help protect their ability to meet their own local goals. Unfortunately, sometimes those walls become so high that those inside lose sight of the ultimate outcome. Their world becomes defined by the piece, and not the puzzle.”

How Unplanning Your Business Can Make It Happen Faster How Unplanning Your Business Can Make It Happen Faster by Ian Sanders & David Sloly

“The problem with writing a fixed plan is that you can get stuck in amber mode. You get so bogged down with hypotheticals, financial modeling and revenue projections that your cool business idea gets stuck in a spreadsheet and the light never goes green.”

Responding Effectively to Workplace Bullying: Managing Behavior at the Time of an Attack by Aryanne Oade

“This manifesto is written against a backdrop of increasing bullying at work. Its objective is to equip you with the interpersonal know-how and the insight you need to respond effectively to incidents of bullying workplace.”

Reinventing the Wheel: Creating Lifetime Customers by Chris Zane

“Creating lifetime customers requires that you offer every customer or potential customer more service than they consider reasonable. Further, it means that you actively solicit customer feedback about what you could be doing better and use that information to expand and tweak your offerings to best service the customer.”

The Power of Trust and Mistrust by Dr. Judith Bardwick

“When trust levels are high, so is the quality and performance of business—and the reverse is also true. These facts are demonstrated dramatically when we look at the financial outcomes of companies that are among the best to work for and their peer companies that aren’t.”

Go Do: How Hard Can It Be? by Lou Imbriano

“It’s important to realize that the only true barrier in life is you. Sure, there can be obstacles that you face every day and people who are impediments to achieving your goals, but ultimately, you will be the reason that you achieve or fail.”

The Art of Hassle Map Thinking by Adrian J. Slywotzky with Karl Weber

“We’ve found that organizations that excel at demand creation … examine the lives of customers through the lens of what we call a Hassle Map—a detailed study of the problems, large and small, that people experience whenever they use their products.”

The Best Leader in the World: It Could Be You by Jon Wortmann, Jay Therrien, and Tom Endersbe

“As daunting as leadership can be, what you need to do is straightforward. We’re about to teach you a model that will make you the kind of leader whose team people beg to join; and the kind of person who develops other leaders as a natural part of your every day work and life.”

At the Speed of Seth: What I Learned Working With Seth Godin and the Domino Project by Michael Bungay Stanier

“Getting anything up and flying is a tricky business. I’m still learning how to catch the wind just right in most of the things I do. This story is about launching a new project, a book. But if it was a kite, right now we’d be seeing it crashed and broken on the ground.”

The Most Important Sales Conversations You’ll Ever Have by Mike Schultz & John E. Doerr

“Success as a rainmaker depends on your ability to lead masterful sales conversations from ‘hello’ to ‘let’s go,’ but the first sales conversation, the most important sales conversation, happens before you talk to actual prospects. The most important sales conversation you have… is the one you have with yourself.”

The Six Rules Women Must Break in Order to Succeed by Jill Flynn, Kathryn Heath, and Mary Davis Holt

“To rise to the highest ranks in business, women need to unwind some of the traditional thinking that holds us back. We need to rethink the conversations we are having in our heads and tell ourselves a new story. We need to break our own rules.”

How to Capture a New Market by Stephen Wunker

“New markets are too poorly understood and change too quickly for the standard approaches of graphing trend lines and computing market share. Here are 10 approaches that work—for businesses and the people within them—when the market is fuzzy and in flux … ”

Sober Entrepreneurship: Why Modern Entrepreneurs Won’t Succeed Under the Influence by Carol Roth

“If we are going to hang our hat on entrepreneurship, we need to ensure more successes, avoid the number of true failures and make sure that we have the right people pursuing the right opportunities at the right time with the right preparation. Friends don’t let friends start businesses under the influence.”

Adapt: The Benefits of Safe Mistakes by Tim Harford

“We cling on to the idea that successful business people are talented leaders running objectively brilliant corporations. But the world is far too complex and changes far too rapidly for us to have any confidence that this fondly held idea
is true.”

A General’s Guide to Deploying an Army of Entrepreneurs by Jennifer Prosek

“While I may have started out building a chain–mindful that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link—I came to see that interweaving the threads of a rope came much closer to meeting my goal of a cohesive, interactive team.”

Lessons from S&P Recession Survivors by Larry Mallak

“Investors have heard many decry the decade of the 2000s as the ‘lost decade.’ A dollar invested in the S&P 500 on the first trading day of 1999 saw it worth just 65 cents a decade later. This “underperformance” is seen by many as a failure of the U.S. economic engine. If we look at the Top 20 performers of the S&P 500 during that same time period, we see a vastly different story.”

The End of the Roundabout Way: Why Quality of Life Will Finally Take Center Stage by Julia Valentine

“The next quantum leap will occur when a critical mass of people realizes that one of the major purposes of life is JOY. Until then, most people will accept an ersatz, an imitation, or a roundabout way of creating joy.”

Right Fights: Making Conflict Productive by Saj-nicole Joni

“Your job as a leader isn’t to eliminate dissonance–your job is to make conflict productive. Right Fights enable you and your team to stop fighting about everything that doesn’t matter and start fighting, in a high-minded manner, about what really matters.”

What If They Listened to Entrepreneurs? by Henry R. Nothhaft

“Before any significant and sustained increase in the creation of good middle-class jobs can take place, the voice of the entrepreneur who is the source of all breakthrough innovation and job growth must be heard.

Sadly, however, entrepreneurs are just about the only Americans without a voice in Washington”

TouchPoints: Why the Interruptions That Drive Us Crazy Just Might Be the Most Productive Opportunities We Have Every Day
by Douglas Conant & Mette Norgaard

“Some days it feels like the information age has morphed into the interruption age. But what if those interruptions turned out to be our best opportunity to make a difference in our workplaces?”

Brains, Bones, and Nerves: The Only Three Things an Enterprise Leader Should Focus On by Rajeev Peshawaria

“Just as the human body needs all three systems—the brain, bones, and nerves—functioning in perfect harmony to maximize longevity and performance, a business needs its strategy, architecture, and culture to work in harmony in order to maximize results.”

It’s All About Them: Marketing to the Digitally Empowered Buyer
by Rebel Brown

“Thanks to the digital age, today’s buyers can research, select and purchase their products without getting you involved in the decision. You won’t even know they were buying. Everything shifted. Your choices: shift, too—or get left in the past.”

Your CQ: Why It Might Be the Most Important Number You Don’t Know!
by David Livermore

“How do we move beyond mantras about cultural sensitivity and global awareness to successfully adapting to various cultures while simultaneously remaining true to ourselves? Both sides of the equation are essential—being true to ourselves and adapting to different cultures.”

We First: How Consumers and Brands Can Partner to Build a Better World
by Simon Mainwaring

“We First capitalism posits that we can no longer accept the myopic, short-term, profit-for-profit’s sake practice of capitalism we invite corporations and consumers to engage in today.”

Why a Corrupted Service Covenant Has Made Customers Wired and Dangerous by Chip R. Bell & John R. Patterson

“Today’s customers are already picky (all about value), fickle (reluctant to show loyalty), vocal (quick to comment on poor or indifferent service) and vain (only interested in tailor-made offerings). Armed with a computer and a network, the new normal customer becomes wired and dangerous if frustrated.”

Put Your Mindset to Work: The Secret Weapon in Winning, Keeping, and Flourishing in the Best Jobs by Paul G Stoltz & James Reed

“What does it really take to win, keep, and flourish in the best jobs? Let’s begin by shattering a sacred assumption. If you want a good job, it’s all about qualifications. Put another way, the best way to increase your chances of getting a great job is by upgrading your skills. Right? Wrong!”

Reputation Rules: Don’t Neglect Your Company’s Most Precious Asset by Daniel Diermeier

“Trust is now an essential part of business success. [...] Companies have not responded to these changes. Their reputational risk has increased dramatically, but their capabilities have stayed the same. The result is one crisis chasing another and the long-term erosion of public trust in private enterprise.”

CLEARED HOT! by Vernice “Flygirl” Armour

“You HAVE permission to Engage! Notice, the emphasis is on the word ‘have.’ That’s because you already possess your own permission to engage. I’m not giving it to you. In fact, I can’t. You’ve always had it; you just have to release it. It’s up to YOU to make the decision to engage. Once you have given yourself permission, you are Cleared Hot to create realities from possibilities beyond your expectations.”

The Third Screen: Why Mobile Is a Game Changer by Chuck Martin

“We’re in the midst of a revolution bigger than the TV or PC and businesses of all types and sizes will be faced with how to deal with it. Not only are many businesses not ready, others are totally unaware.

The new market is mobile and it’s about to change everything. Mobile is a game changer.”

Change In a Leader Can Change the World by Jeremie Kubicek

“Our world is in trouble. We need leaders who lead for the benefit of others.

I believe we need to systematically transform the leadership culture from a dominating system to a liberating system. I believe it starts one leader at a time. Each leader must play a part in this transformation by thinking differently about the way they lead if we are to ever see true ‘Change in the World.’”

Little Bets: Think Differently by Peter Sims

“Our education system places great emphasis on teaching us about facts that are already known, such as historical information or scientific tables, and then testing us in order to measure how much we’ve retained about that body of knowledge. Those skills work perfectly well for many situations, but not when doing something new. Or creative. Or original. They certainly won’t help us invent the future.

As education and creativity researcher and author Sir Ken Robinson puts it, ‘We are educating people out of their creativity.’ But it’s still there. And unleashing our creativity, however deeply it’s hidden, begins with little bets.”

Don’t Let the Sidewalk End: How To Create a Revolution by Patrick J. Howie

“This manifesto is about creating revolutions. Not big political revolutions, although it could help there too, but revolutions of any size and in any field or industry. It is also about innovating, and how to be better at it and how innovations, properly nourished, are the catalysts of revolutions.”

To start with, we should all recognize that innovation is a process, not an event. When the process results in dramatic change, it is called a revolution.”

Happiness Advocacy, Or, How Positive Psychology Will Save Us From Zombies by Annie Passanisi

“Happiness. That feeling you get from StuffOnMyCat.com or Skyping with a far away friend. Side effects include: joy, contentment, glee, elation, and surges of confidence, hope, and gratitude. That happiness. If you’re ready to throw in the towel (or this in the garbage), kindly allow me to clarify something. This ain’t yo’ momma’s (or for that matter my momma’s*) self-help book so don’t get all judgmental. If MacGyver can stop a bomb with a toothpick, we can save the world with happiness. ‘Fiction!’ you say? It’s even been scientifically proven. You see, it’s all in the technique, my friends.”

The Four Strands: Creating Companies Aligned With Human DNA by Henry Cloud, Ph.D

“There are universal developmental issues and milestones in the construction of all people, which like gravity, must be obeyed. They are like the laws of physics, non-negotiable. Break these laws and dysfunction occurs. But, obey these laws and people thrive. They will be what we call “healthy.”

So, when a company is designed and operates in ways that are aligned with how people are constructed, it will be like an airplane aligned with the laws of physics that govern force or torque.”

How to Sharpen Your Sales Strengths by Tony Rutigliano, Brian Brim

“There is no single right way to sell. In fact, we believe there are as many ways to sell as there are salespeople.

Does that feel liberating? We hope so. If you enjoy sales, if you’re good at it, and if you’re finding some of the success you want, you possess a rare ability—and you should celebrate it. You’re someone who can do this job. And if you’re trying to follow a method or emulating a sales hero and it’s not working, it might not be your fault. Who you are is who you should be. You’ll be most successful at sales if you make the most of who you are.”

Make It Happen: Turning Good Ideas Into Great Results by Peter Sheahan

“The world is not short of ideas. It’s not. It is short of people who can execute on them. It is short of people who know how to take their aspirations and make a real impact on the world with them.

What differentiates the great ideas that end up on the cutting room floor from those that wind up changing the world? There are five steps, or rather five competencies you can build that separate the haves from the have-nots, the doers from the talkers … They are not a mantra for meditation, they are not positive affirmations that you chant to yourself in the mirror, they are actions.”

Why “Free” Is the Wrong Price for Water—Even If You Live on $1 a Day
by Charles Fishman

“Free turns out to be exactly the wrong price for water—whether that water is being used by huge global corporations, farmers, ordinary middle-class citizens, or the poorest people living in developing countries. Water that is so cheap provides no incentive for big users—corporations, farmers, even cities—to spend money necessary to better manage their water. [...] And poor people—who have to stand in line for water, or walk to get it from suspect ground-water wells—pay the highest cost for ‘free’ water of all, sacrificing time, good jobs, and even the educations of their children in order to secure their daily ration of water.”

This Sentence Has 5ive Words: Eigen Values, Creating Truisms and the Future of Marketing by Stephen Denny

“Our first sentence—“This sentence has five words—is an eigen value: a self-referencing, self-defining concept. The thing itself is its own definition. Our last rambling sentence is not an eigen value. It isn’t self-defining and frankly lacks meaning to anyone but its author. This is an important distinction, because the casual reader of this sentence frankly doesn’t care one way or another about the message or the messenger.

[...] Why is this concept important to your idea, your brand or your movement? Because creating eigen values is what marketers do when they’re doing their very best work. The concept of eigen values should change how you look at the marketing discipline completely.”

Shine: Brain Science, Practical Psychology, Ancient Wisdom and the Cycle of Excellence by Edward M. Hallowell, MD

“How do we draw the best out of people when so many of the rules and practices in life have changed? How in today’s new world can people reach their best at their best, given the speed of life and the torrent of information and obligation? Is there a coherent, evidence-based plan that every person can use to bring the best out of themselves or the people they manage? With the help of Dr. Shine, I offer a theory here of how to do just that. It includes 5 steps. I call it the Cycle of Excellence.”

The Mistake Manifesto: How Making Mistakes Can Make Us Better
by Alina Tugend

“While I am not advocating that we all run around blundering and goofing up all the time—and certainly none of us like dealing with people who make the same mistake over and over—our fear of mistakes has a very high cost.

We exert enormous energy blaming each other when something goes wrong rather than finding a solution. Defensiveness and accusations take the place of apologies and forgiveness. Mistake-avoidance creates workplaces where making changes and being creative while risking failure is subsumed by an ethos of mistake-prevention at the cost of daring and innovation.”

The Three Gaps Between Goals and Greatness by Pelè Raymond Ugboajah, PhD

“In the global race to achieve faster, better, cheaper business greatness, most leaders face a huge gap between the goals they set and the actual results achieved by the people in their organizations. This phenomenon is not a failure to plan, but rather, a failure to execute. […]

While there are many possible explanations for the root cause of the gap, the one common, recurring element is a stubborn, nagging blind spot: People issues.

Social Sharing Manifesto: The Arguments For and Against The Rise of the Sharing Consumer by Simon Salt

“Nothing has really changed, even with the popularity of terms like social consumer, sharing consumer etc. people have always shared. Whether sitting around the campfire, standing at the water cooler, or chatting over the garden fence, human beings share their opinions with others. If those opinions prove to be useful, that person will be sought out for an opinion about other things and on a more frequent basis.”