Since the acquisition of Accelx Services by Gold Private Equity, Jack Shorn has moved from a CRO role to CEO. But Gold is demanding dramatic changes to the business model, and they’ve promoted Jack without any guarantees that he has the experience or wisdom to succeed in senior leadership. With a 90-day ultimatum, Jack buckles down and hires a management coach to learn the business fundamentals necessary to keep his C-suite from imploding—and to keep his own job as well.
With the confidence of an industry insider, Annissa Deshpande’s THE CHANGE UP is a perfect send-up of private equity and corporate leadership. Jack is a great protagonist; struggling to stay afloat in an absurdist culture, he performs the euphemisms and values of that culture as best he can. Jack’s house has a “great room.” He “[feels] very aligned with the company’s mission,” which is slick healthcare profiteering. During a tense meeting with his C-suite, he chides, “In today’s competitive environment, companies either grow or die, so please reframe your mindset on growth.” This absurdity trickles outward, especially as it becomes clear how the dysfunction at Accelx is a series of self-inflicted wounds by the private equity firm. Accelx was evidently already profitable, and remains so, but Gold Private Equity wants it to expand outside its core competencies. As Jack puts it, they have “met the revenue numbers, just not in the right verticals.” The result is a C-suite stacked with private equity appointees bickering, infighting, and floundering at the head of what had once been a perfectly successful business—a situation so dire that an entirely separate industry professional must be tapped to sort out the mess.
The competent, level-headed Meg is the story’s saving grace. The device is fairly transparent, but Meg’s meetings with Jack are the pivot points in the novel, where an obvious fix redirects Jack’s poor leadership. It’s Meg who acknowledges that experienced professionals are often promoted to C-suite jobs without any regard for whether they actually have the knowledge and skills to thrive there; it’s Meg who diagnoses Jack’s personal foibles and how they’re affecting his team; and, most significantly, it’s Meg who insists that, for these people to be leaders, they must be held accountable for their actions—Jack included.
Ultimately, the text pivots away from its critiques for a more romantic resolution. However, its observations are still insightful and funny, and the underlying lessons are inescapably real.
Annissa Deshpande’s THE CHANGE UP is a fun, flippant, and lesson-laced portrayal of how private equity firms and corporate groupthink ruin a business.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader