Few staff in the global university start to think about how their workplaces are actually run until they are in the middle of a change process. Day-to-day work does not provide a vocabulary with which to read fluently the language of change, and the act of coping with change processes as they occur makes it difficult to reflect on their meaning. Somewhere in the cycle of review, restructuring and redundancy emerges the uncomfortable truth: that the change process itself is not an anomaly but a product of how universities are run, in New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere.