Goodall shares a perspective that resonated greatly with me - change has become a cult, treated as a sacred easy button for leaders and organizations. The problem that change initiatives often disregard the change toll or on the people and organization's resources for true transformation. What if there were fewer change initiatives and more resources/effort were put into improving what already exists? What if there was more stability and less turbulence that would allow people to thrive? Fix what's really broken, transform what's not longer relevant, and create environment and systems that honor humans.
If you’ve had enough of the constant turbulence that defines corporate life today, you’re not alone. Learn why change is bad for people and for business, and discover how to create the stability that we all need to thrive.
For decades, “disruption” and “change” have been seen as essential to business growth and success. In this provocative and incisive book, leadership expert 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 Goodall 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 performance. 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 why change is not the same as improvement, and how, by prioritizing team cohesion (instead of reshuffling teams at will), by using real words (rather than corporate-speak), by sharing secrets (not mission statements), 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.
