The Problem with Change

And the Essential Nature of Human Performance

By: Ashley Goodall

Narrated by: Ashley Goodall

Revolutionize the way you see disruption and change with a groundbreaking alternative to corporate instability from a lauded HR expert.

For decades, “disruption” and “change” have been seen as essential to business growth and success. In this provocative and incisive book, Ashley Goodall argues that what has become a sacred dogma is both wrong and harmful.

Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is what he calls “life in the blender”—a perpetual cycle of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

The problem with change, Goodall argues, is that a culture where everything from people to processes to strategic priorities are constantly in flux exerts a psychological toll that undermines motivation, productivity, and quality. And yet so accustomed are we to constant churn that we have become numb to its very real consequences.

Drawing on two decades spent leading HR organizations at Deloitte and Cisco, Ashley Goodall reveals the truth about human performance and offers a radical new alternative to the constant turbulence that defines corporate life.

The Problem with Change is a clarion call to leaders everywhere: by prioritizing team cohesion (instead of reshuffling teams at will), using real words (rather than corporate-speak), by sharing secrets (not mission statements), by honoring shared rituals (rather than mandated bonding), by fixing only the things that are truly broken (instead of moving fast and breaking everything in sight), and more, leaders at every level can create the stability that people need to thrive.

©2024 Ashley Goodall (P)2024 Little, Brown Spark

Critic reviews

“Do you know that research shows that people undergoing organizational change are more likely to take antidepressants? While change and disruption have become catchwords, they exact an enormous toll on employees and their companies. This smart, well-written book can help leaders resist the temptations toward chaos so currently popular.”—Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and author of Dying for a Paycheck

“Change is neither good, nor bad—and much of it is essential. But that doesn’t make it easy. In his brilliantly thought-provoking The Problem with Change, Ashley Goodall argues persuasively that a big part of the job of leaders is to create stability—to dampen the disruptive nature of change and to allow their teams to perform.”—Stan McChrystal, General, US Army (Ret), CEO, McChrystal Group, and Co-author of Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

"Ashley Goodall has achieved something rare and wonderful: he has taken a subject with which we are all deeply familiar—change—and turned it upside down. And in so doing, he has not only revealed 'the problem with change,' but also how to find within it all the resiliency and creativity we need to succeed. The Problem with Change is a completely engaging book that causes us to reassess much of what we’ve all mistaken for 'truth' and reveals insights and ideas we can never unsee. Given how much change we are all grappling with today, this book could not be more timely. It is a must read for any leader trying to find their bearings in these wildly turbulent times."—Marcus Buckingham, bestselling author and strengths researcher

A long overdue critique of unnecessarynorganizational churn

The title of the first chapter is "Life In The Blender." Anyone who works in a large company, especially in high tech, knows exactly what that means: constant reorgs, leadership reshuffles, layoffs, outsourcing, insourcing, centralizing and decentralizing. But even though we have lived it and complain about it all the time, the constant change is treated like the weather - something that just has to happen. Goodall precisely lays out why change is mostly not necessary and mostly bad for business. He lays out ways to reduce change and build up a company to be strong enough to weather change when it must happen.

Goodall's audio narration is excellent.

Fun Spin

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay on Self Reliance. For, this feels more like a pseudo defense to leviathan corporate mergers and acquisitions than a performance scheme. Lookit, manners and etiquette are a salient factors to any entrepreneurial culture. A good counter study is Reginald F. Lewis and TLC. “You won’t make yourself a bit realer by crying”, said one of the twins to Alice in her Wonderland. Inasmuch, I too have empathy for the Walrus. Rare phenomena exist in both business and life. 1+1 =2, QED