REthink Wine Blog

Is there a statute of limitations for how long you can talk about the New Year and its attendant resolutions? If there is, if January 17th is too far in, then I am calling for absolution on this pox against self-improvement.

I happen to love the freshness of New Year’s and the opportunity to do some navel-gazing analysis to improve life-love-work. Done correctly, you monitor your resolutions until they become a part of your life.

With that in mind, I suggest to everybody that you pick one single thing to improve upon in your work life—an idea—that can make a difference in your business, no matter your role.

Where to find inspiration?

Everybody loves a good business book—the one with some insight that taps that far away repository in your brain matter that then sends a synapse firing against your memory bank of experiences that creates a new idea. It has been said that there are no new ideas—just ideas that can be manipulated within a different context or ideas that are new to us based on some sort of new understanding. Books help to feed that fire and add to our repository.

Recent business books, full of ideas that have captured the mainstream zeitgeist include “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell, “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson and “Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath.

But, let’s be honest, reading books takes time, and most of us have, at best, an hour a day for leisure reading—which makes getting through a book, or several books to spark an idea something of a bit of work, and that presumes that we’re choosing non-fiction books and not a bit of escapist fiction.

There are numerous services that offer, for a reasonable fee, business book distillation summaries—a Cliffs Note version of the book—the essential truths and ideas without all of the interminable anecdotes that fill up 225 pages of a 250 page tome. Clearly, this sort of option lets you glean the ideas, quickly, retaining the good stuff and not engaging in the non-productive activity. Google “Business Book Summaries” for multiple options for this type of service

However, the business book summary isn’t the point of this post, the point is to actually highlight a web site with Powerpoint presentation summaries (called Manifestos) from leading authors and guru’s that is FREE and also QUICK TO READ.

ChangeThis, found here, is a web site that features distilled Powerpoint presentations of some of the best leading academic and business thinkers in the world. Gladwell is here. So too is Chris Anderson—they are all presenting ideas, all presenting ideas in short form, for easy consumption.

The January email newsletter highlighting new content for the month includes content from noted marketer Seth Godin and the CEO of Stonyfield Farms, Gary Hirshberg, who has a current best seller called “Stirring it Up” a book about his leadership with Stonyfield Farms, the world’s leading organic yogurt producer.

Hirshberg has many good ideas—including his ChangeThis manifesto that posits that only economic self-interest will create the massive change that is required for environmental conservation. Think about that for a second—capitalism is the key to environmental conservation.

As January gives way to February, let’s not let the resolutions and the freshness of self-improvement give way to another year of status quo. Feed your brain with ideas and implement a single good, game-changing idea in your work.

ChangeThis Manifestos are a good place to start.

This entry was posted by admin on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Merchandising, Resources and Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.