I really dig ChangeThis. While plenty other destinations on the net--including blogs such as this one--are places where great ideas are seeded and gain traction, ChangeThis packages these ideas into manifestos that are as enjoyable to look at as they are to read.
What's more, with retrospect, ChangeThis is tomorrow's business best-seller list today; authors like Chris Anderson (The Long Tail), Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan) and Seth Godin (Tribes and just about everything else) have used the manifesto platform as the launchpad for their brain-shifting works. (Full disclosure: let's hope history repeats itself, as ChangeThis will be featuring my Pow! manifesto as an accompaniment to my book in February, 2009).
That said, I was particularly enamored with one of this month's manifestos--"I Am The Walrus: Lessons in Personal Branding by The Beatles" by Alan Parr and Karen Ansbaugh of the OpenSky Consortium. While some of their "lessons" are a little bit of a stretch, the overall result is charming and thought-provoking (a la "Leadership Secrets of Atilla The Hun" and "The Tao of Pooh"), and--on the 40th anniversary of the White Album--gives me another reason to call up the Fab Four on the ol' iPod.
The line that really--pardon the pun--struck a chord in their manifesto was the one that went:
How about Paul McCartney’s CV?
Do you even believe that The Beatles had resumes?
Quick, can you quote anyone’s resume, even your own?"
As a long-time antagonist of cursed resumes (I used to deliver a speech to college students, which was actually turned into a TV series, both called "Throw Away Your Resume"), I was able to relate as we're in the midst of recruiting a P.R. intern at Airborne, and the CV flow is dreadful, dull, uninspiring and--given the fact that most are still coming in on paper--a crime against the environment.
While their point led in a different direction, Carr and Ansbaugh's manifesto rekindled my wish for a new resume, one that tells stories, uses photos, audio, video, tchotchkes--ANYTHING other than the dreaded "accomplishment list"--to sell a candidate. Welcome to the new millennium, almost a decade late.
Perhaps I'm aiming too high too soon, but what I did do was tell my colleague Shevaughn Battle to toss the pile she's already received into the recycling bin and then toss the candidates a resume challenge:
Then write a press release that sells you to me.
Let's see what we get.
In the meantime, I'm going to listen to The Beatles for inspiration. And I'm gonna start with "Paperback Writer."