Seth Godin, marketing guru and writer of the supposedly Number 1 ranked business blog on the web had the original idea for Change This. If you look at his site, you will be overcome by the mundanity and self promotion. Hell, here is another self absorbed obsessively driven over achiever. I try not to be cynical, however I am highly suspicious of books with titles like Small is the New Big, All Marketers are Liars, Free Prize Inside, Survival is Not Enough. So I was shocked to find the idea for Change This was his.
Change This is not a blog in the sense of the concept. This site actually offers more than some pithy comments and links. Change This offers erudite and often controversial manifestos written by some of the world's leading thinkers, offered for free. All you have to do is subscribe at the site.
The thinking behind Change This is the creation of a new kind of media. A form of media that uses existing tools like PDFs, blogs and the web to challenge the way ideas are created and spread. Their tag line is " We're on a mission to spread important ideas and change minds."
Recent manifestos include
The Necessary Revolution: Creating a Sustainable Future by Peter Senge and Bryan Smith
Peter Senge, a senior lecturer at MIT, is founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and the author or co-author of several bestselling books, including The Fifth Discipline, Schools That Learn and Presence. Bryan Smith, coauthor with Senge of The Dance of Change and two other Fifth Discipline fieldbooks, is a member of the faculty at York University ’s Sustainable Enterprise Academy and president of Broad Reach Innovations, Inc.
This manifesto is Senge's and Smith's reflection on sustainability from a business model and management perspective.
Gridlock Economy: The Tragedy of the Anticommons by Michael Heller.
Heller is Vice Dean for Research and Lawrence A Wein Professor of Real Estate Law at Columbia Law School. Since is original article on the topic in a998, his articles and presentations on the anticommons have described its implications on patent law, copyright, property rights, environmental law, cyberspace, African- American history, Native American politics, and the transition to a market economy in formerly socialist states.
This excerpt will give you some idea of Heller's article.
"There has been an unnoticed revolution in how we create wealth. In the old economy, ten or twenty years ago, you invented a product and got a patent; you wrote a song and got a copyright; you subdivided land and built houses. Today, the leading edge of wealth creation requires assembly. From drugs to telecom, software to semiconductors, anything high-tech demands the assembly of innumerable patents. And it’s not just high tech that’s changed—today, cutting edge art and music is about mashing up and remixing many separately-owned bits of culture. Even with land, the most socially-important projects, like new runways, require assembling multiple gridlocked parcels. Innovation has moved on, but we are stuck with old-style ownership that’s easy to fragment and hard to put together."
The most popular manifesto is still How To Be Creative by Hugh MacLeod written in October 2004.
If you are looking for quick information bites, Change This is not that. You will need to set time aside to read these well researched, beautiful written and designed on-line manifestos.
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