(May 17, 2024) recommends another candidate for book-of-the year that changed my thinking about change!
to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies). Also, read my recent review of
I Changed My Thinking About Change!If there were a Pulitzer Prize or a Booker Prize for
“Best Beginning of a Nonfiction Book,” this year’s prize would certainly be awarded to:
Listen free to the
first 5 minutes of the audio book.
The author invites us into a corporate setting (“for the sake of illustration”). It’s Friday and the
Wall Street Journal reports “that the company you work for is in advanced discussions of some sort with your largest competitor.”
Then, after 48 hours of “much frantic pinging of your peers and little concrete news, late on Sunday comes the official press release: The two companies are merging. There follows a flurry of announcements from your senior leaders, who are, to a person, both ‘excited’ and ‘thrilled’ by the news—some are even ‘energized.’”
It gets worse (
I mean, funnier). A fanfare heralds
“the Arrival of the Management Consultants” and finally, “white smoke emerges from the regulatory chimney, and the deal is given the go-ahead.” (For more “white smoke” and change examples, view the movie,
We Have a Pope.)
What follows?• Reorganization!
• Listening Tour!
• Bad Old Names replaced by Obviously Better New Names!
• And worse!
“In all of this, you will marvel that things were quite so broken in the old world…”
It gets worse! Musical chairs, one step forward, two steps back—and more “fanfare heralds
the Arrival of the Rival Management Consultants”—and, of course, a special PowerPoint template. The new Model emerges and all of this will “help people who were, last week, working happily alongside one another to continue to do so, but with betterness.”
LOL! (There’s more: the new open floor plan, “because collaboration.”)
“This is life in the blender,” writes Ashley Goodall, a leadership expert and former Chief Learning Officer for Leadership and Professional Development. (
He’s seen it all—and it ain’t pretty.)
And speaking of floor plans, had the publisher asked me, I would have suggested a new subtitle for this Very Important Wake-Up Call:
THE PROBLEM WITH CHANGE:
Before You Play Office-Layout-Musical-Chairs Again, Reorganize Your Organizational Chart, or Rewrite Another Shiny New Mission Statement—Read THIS Book!
Frankly, I fear my feeble review will cause you to delete this and move on—but that would be your biggest mistake this year (honest). I love this book and I couldn’t stop reading excerpts and one-liners to my wife.
She loves it! Last week I emailed five colleagues—urging them to listen to the
free five-minute audio and then read (or listen to) the entire book.
But here’s my problem. My last review,
The Illusion of Innovation, trumpeted the power of disruption. This week’s book,
The Problem With Change, takes a contrarian view—and I appreciate both sides of this debate! I hinted that last week’s book might be my 2024 book-of-the-year.
Yikes! I may need two books-of-the-year.
Why? Page after page, learning about the unhealthy results of change foisted on previously healthy team members,
I was reminded of the many missteps in my leadership years—totally missing the trauma that I unwittingly perpetrated on employees. (So sorry, friends—
if we’re still friends.)
My entire view of CHANGE has changed.EXAMPLES:•
“Toxic Positivity.” The dozens of interviews with people enduring workplace changes are stunning, even eye-opening. “Leslie” grew tired of the “toxic positivity” when new leaders would babble “…there always being an upside to change, or a lesson, or that when one door closes, another one opens.”
• In the first chapter,
“Life in the Blender,” the new leader arrives and mandates that the microwave in the office be replaced because it was “nonstandard.” When employees exited—unable to deal with all the small and big changes—it became a joke: those employees were “nonstandard.”
•
First 90 Days. “Leaders are told to spend their first ninety days in a new role figuring out a plan for change, and then to launch that plan on day ninety-one, needed or not.” (
Ouch! See more on the first 90 days.)
•
“No one has ever made a name for themselves by saying, ‘Let’s stay as we were and see where it takes us.’”• And if, while leaders are explaining upcoming changes,
“they manage to say the word ‘disrupt’ a lot, they get extra-bonus-biz-dude points. A few years back, it was cool, in certain circles to describe yourself as a Change Agent; now all the change agents are looking sad and slow, and all the cool kids are Disrupters.”
“CHANGE-Y WORDS” AND “MEANING CREEP.” In the chapter, “The Cult of Disruption,” the author doesn’t hold back:
“Before Disruption, the job was to move things up and to the right. After Disruption, the job is just to move things. In this way, the advent of disruption was also the occasion for an insidious bit of meaning creep. Right under our noses, all the change-y words—innovate, disrupt, change, renew, transform, update, reimagine, reinvent, refresh—came to share a single, unquestionable meaning:
better!”
Oh, my. Ashley Goodall is a writer’s writer. I’m on my second black felt tip pen—underlining his pokes-in-the-ribs glossary:
• “Financification of business”
•
“Tagline-ification” and “big shiny change levers” and “shiny new mission statements”
• “Hubris Syndrome” and the
“Altitude Sickness” of higher-than-ye leaders who “wall” themselves off from the changes (“assaults”) they inflict on their people
• Why “foosball and free food” doesn’t cut it anymore
Here are the problems with the changes you’re throwing at your people:• The problem of uncertainty
• The problem of lack of control
• The problem of unbelonging
• The problem of displacement
• The problem of loss of meaning
Hard-headed (and hard-hearted) leaders will skip this book—thinking there’s no room for
the “softer” side of leadership. They will do this at their own peril. Read this book—and it will change your thinking.
Warning! Your misguided changes (yes, you!) often produce:• Dizzy spells and nausea. (Yes, in your people!)
• Nostalgia. (It’s a thing. Documented in the U.S. Civil War to have “caused the illnesses of 5,537 soldiers of the Union army and the deaths of 74 of those.” Oh, my!)
• Loss of meaning. (It’s not the same for each person.)
“Meaning isn’t a property of a company, and it isn’t something stapled onto us by someone else. It is a property of a person, and if we are to find it, it must be discovered by each of us for ourselves.”The simplest next steps in the Internet’s “10 Critical Changes in 10 Weeks” blather will likely backfire and boomerang on you—if you are not a student of how change impacts “the essential nature of human performance.” (
Did I mention eye-opening?)
Need to change your tagline or brand promise? “These are attempts to engage in some way with higher human purpose,
and yet they are some of the more bland and non-goose-bump-inducing things that companies say.” It’s part of the “seldom-challenged belief that things that can’t be said in one pithy sentence aren’t worth saying at all.” Must-read: the power of story-telling in the section, “The problem of loss of meaning.”
I gotta end this review—but I haven’t yet coaxed you into the deep end of the pool—how to RETHINK change. Goodall includes nine next steps—all beginning with verbs: Make space, Forge undeniable competence, Share secrets, Be predictable, Speak real words, Honor ritual, Focus most on teams, Radicalize HR, and Pave the way.
In the section, “Focus most on teams,” the author notes the “engagement” research of Gallup, Deloitte, and his co-author of
an earlier book, Marcus Buckingham. He cites studies on the performance of the “best teams” at Cisco using eight questions in three categories: company experience, individual experience, and team experience. The first two “are shaped by their overall team experience.”
The eight questions, alone, are worth the price of the book! You may become a believer: “Focus MOST on teams!”
Read why Goodall is so passionate about healthy teams:
“This is nothing short of criminal. Companies are clueless—and incurious—about their single most important organizational unit.” There is so much value in this book, I’m tempted to write a second review, maybe a “Zoom Review” with willing zealots. Any takers? This is already another nominee for my 2024 book-of-the-year.
To order from Amazon, click on the title for
The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance, by Ashley Goodall. Listen on
Libro (7 hours, 58 minutes). And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:1) Ashley Goodall quotes management prof Jeffrey Pfeffer that when team members experience a lack of control in the workplace, it “compares unfavorably with exposure to secondhand smoke in terms of physical health, mental health, morbidity, and mortality, and that diminished agency has a greater correlation with heart disease than does smoking.”
Yikes! QUESTION: Of the five major problems that change creates in our workplace, is “a lack of control” our most challenging problem?2) In the book,
Belonging Rules, Brad Deutser writes,
“Most leaders think about belonging as yet another squishy, amorphous concept more easily relegated to Human Resources than as a function under the vision, direction, and responsibility of the C-suite. Our work and research in this space says emphatically ‘No!’”
QUESTION: So who should read this week’s book? Click on the title to order The Problem With Change.3) Bonus Book! Patrick Lencioni wrote the foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of
Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, by William Bridges. I recommend this book often. (
Read my review.) See also the blog I wrote for ECFA, “
Beware the Emotional Effects of Transition.”
Mastering 100 Must-Read Books
Part 14: Leadership & Management at WarBook #78 of 100: Operation MincemeatFor your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by featuring Book #78 in
Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.
Operation Mincemeat:
How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan
Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
by Ben Macintyre
(now a Netflix movie!)
Books #77 through #81 spotlight five fascinating books with military viewpoints on leadership and management. On June 6, 2024, we will commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day in World War II, when the Allies invaded Western Europe in the largest amphibious attack in history. In this page-turning book, the leadership and management issues jump off the pages—including how to recognize the twin sins of “wishfulness” and “yesmanship.”
•
Read my review.
• Order from
Amazon:
Operation Mincemeat • Listen on
Libro (11 hours, 17 minutes).
•
Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).
In World War II, following the successful North Africa campaign, a tiny team at British Intelligence in London attempt to create the biggest ruse in war history—convincing the Germans that the Allied invasion of Europe would come through Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily.
The big idea: find a corpse, build an identity, dress and drop it off the coast of Spain by submarine—and deceive the German spies in Spain into believing that the officer’s secret documents contained the invasion plans.
It’s a true thriller—and the details and insights are extraordinary. The small team in London (about 20 men and women and just five typewriters in a stuffy underground office) executed the plan with spy movie genius.
CLICK HERE FOR BOOKS BY JOHN
Issue No. 658 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (Oct. 3, 2025) features a new book coming Oct. 7—describing the four seasons of a CEO. The “...