Ashley Goodall

Ashley Goodall spent two decades inside the organizations that run change programs before writing the book that argues most of them do damage. He was senior vice president of human resources at Cisco, and before that spent fourteen years at Deloitte, latterly as chief learning officer for leadership and professional development.

The Problem with Change, published in 2024, makes an argument that is unusual on a change management roster: that change and improvement are not the same thing, and that treating constant disruption as evidence of ambition quietly removes the conditions people need to do good work. Restructures, rebrands, reorganizations and rolling strategy resets each impose a cost in lost context, broken teams and unlearned skills, and that cost is almost never charged against the initiative that caused it.

His earlier book, Nine Lies About Work, written with Marcus Buckingham and published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2019, applied the same scrutiny to the received wisdom of corporate life, including performance ratings, cascaded goals and feedback culture. The companion article, The Feedback Fallacy, ran in Harvard Business Review that year, following Reinventing Performance Management in 2015 and The Power of Hidden Teams in 2019.

He trained at the University of Oxford as a classical music conductor, which is an unusual route into human resources and which shows in how he treats teams: as an ensemble whose performance depends on people knowing their part and knowing each other, not on being reassigned every quarter.

He is booked most often by organizations already in the middle of a transformation, and the session is not a morale lift. It gives leadership a way to separate the change that is genuinely necessary from the change being made because change is expected, and it gives an audience that has absorbed several reorganizations a vocabulary for why the last one cost more than it returned.