Good Bye offers leaders of organizations strategies to keep in mind when navigating change either personally or for the organization. The authors offer a four-part model, REAR (Reality, Emotions, Accomplishments, and Ritual) to describe the ideal approach one should take when moving through a capital E “Ending.”

The authors are clearly practitioners, not academics, and they are up-front about the experiences and expertise that shape this book. You can tell that they have years of experience coaching organizational leaders, as the exercises and reflection prompts sprinkled through the book are thoughtful and practical. The exercises in particular seemed easy to put into use and valuable for a leader to journal/reflect on, when navigating change. They also include a number of fictional stories of characters going through different kinds of endings to bring their ideas to life and I appreciated that they made these examples feel real, relevant to the reader, and true to a corporate setting.

Where the book falls flat is when it tries to reference research on organizational behavior, psychology, and neuroscience to support their arguments. Their claims are vague and unsupported and their references to neuroscience, in particular, are not well explained and rather clumsy. For example, they write, “the science… explains that the brain will make us behave in ways that try to minimize perceived threats and maximize rewards. If a person feels that they are being threatened, their primitive emotional brain will work quickly to protect them and, in doing so, will reduce their capacity for rational thought, decision-making, and collaboration.” This is a gross oversimplification and borders on misleading for how much nuance it misses.

For leaders of organizations looking for general best practices to keep in mind when navigating change, this book offers a helpful framework and some good examples, exercises, and reflection questions. For anyone looking for a rigorous examination of an important organizational and individual process—how people navigate endings—this is not the right fit.

This book is a bit more like Who Moved My Cheese than it is like The First 90 Days. I wish they hadn’t tried to veer into the territory of research and science, as their strengths seem to be more in the coaching space, with their reflective prompts for practitioners to work with. For someone looking for a workbook type resource, this might be one to flip through.