About book The First 90 Days, Updated And Expanded: Critical Success Strategies For New Leaders At All Levels (2013)
The First 90 Days is now one of my favorites, right up there with Leadership 2.0 (a must-read for leaders). This book is a great and practical guide to help any leader transition into a new job, position, and organization—within 90 days (a critical timeframe to be considered as “hitting the ground running”). There’s a checklist at the end of every chapter to help you absorb key lessons, apply them to your situation, and tailor them to your own transition plan. The book is loaded with practical strategies, lessons, and advice for a smooth transition. The First 90 Days - Chapter Summaries:INTRODUCTION: THE FIRST 90 DAYS- The actions you take in your first three months in a new job will largely determine whether you succeed or fail. 1. Promote Yourself: Make the mental break from your old job and prepare to take charge in the new one. The biggest pitfall you face is to assume that what has made you successful to this point in your career will continue to do so. 2. Accelerate Your Learning: Accelerate the learning curve as fast as you can in your new organization. Understand its markets, products, technologies, systems, structures, and culture, and politics. 3. Match Strategy to Situation: Diagnose the business situation accurately and clarify its challenges and opportunities.4. Secure Early Wins: Early wins build your credibility and create momentum. 5. Negotiate Success: Figure out how to build a productive working relationship with your new boss and manage his/her expectations. Plan for a series of critical conversations. Develop and gain consensus on your 90-day plan.6. Achieve Alignment: Figure out whether the organization’s strategy is sound. Bring its structure into alignment with its strategy. 7. Build Your Team: If you are inheriting a team, evaluate its members and restructure it to better meet the demands of the situation. Make tough early personnel calls. 8. Create Coalitions: Influence people outside your direct line of control. Rely on supportive alliances, internal and external, to achieve your goals. 9. Keep Your Balance: Work hard to maintain your equilibrium and preserve your ability to make good judgments, professionally and personally. 11. Expedite Everyone: Help everyone in your organization—direct reports, bosses, and peers—accelerate their own transitions. The faster this is done, the faster you can perform.CONCLUSION: BEYOND SINK OR SWIM- The biggest danger you face is belief in a one-size-fits-all rule for success.
I was given this book by my boss at Cisco, Shailesh Shukla, when I took on a new role as head of engineering for MARSBU. If you are curious about the acronym, yes, it is the Business Unit from MARS. I opened the book and randomly landed on page 115 which had a section titled "Educate your Boss"; that definitely made this a must read.The book is definitely a quick read and I had to pace myself so that I don't read it all in a couple of sittings and quickly forget all that I had read. There are some narratives in each chapter thath outline some simple example scenarios, but the author fails to develop any of them beyond a couple of paragraphs. The main theme of the book is compelling. Whenever a manager takes on a new role, he/she will take several days to reach the break-even point, which is defined as the point where the executive creates more value than he/she consumes. Regardless of which level you are at, your first few days in a new role set the stage for your success and if you can properly plan your transition you can make the right first impressions and greatly improve your chances of success. Around 25% of the managers in a Fortune 500 company take on a new role every year. If this book accelerates the transition of even a small fraction of these, then it has achieved its purpose.There are a few things in the book, that while obvious, are a useful reminder for all of us. The author carefully underscores the importance of first understanding the situation that you are in, i.e. are you in a startup situation, or is it a mature organization in need of a turnaround, re-alignment or sustaining operation. Your strategies are different depending on the situation. There are several other nuggets that the book imparts and I will not give it all away here. The book does tend to get repetitive and does not have too much meat behind the nuggets of wisdom. Nevertheless, it is a useful reminder to all of us when we take up a new role. I recommend this book to anyone who is recently promoted or changing jobs and is most relevant before or as soon as you take on your new role.
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This book was great. Very concise, and extremely well organized. From soup to nuts, it provides excellent guidance for those who find themselves in a new position of leadership within an organization. Chapter by chapter, Watkins provides effective tools for diagnosing specific types of leadership crises/ oppotunities and helpful suggestions for negotiating a path to success. I found the anecdotes he provided to be extremely helpful and not cheesy or inappropriate, as is often the case with a lot of the management literature out there. I will definitely come back to this book for continued guidance.
—Kathryn
I'm very skeptical of business books - I see them as slightly more serious versions of Get Rich Quick books and Self Help books. But this was actually helpful. As someone who's worked in less traditional office and business settings, starting a new job in a real organization would be a very different experience. The First 90 Days provided some productive ways of thinking about how offices and coworker and boss relationships work. It also gave strategies of thinking about how to hit the ground running in any new situation. Planning for goals after the first day, week, month, two months, and three months helps you think about what you might want to be doing. Even for less senior people, the chapters that go through how a new CEO starts surveying her team and figuring out who should stay and go are interesting - you end up looking at a common situation through another set of eyes. Other helpful thoughts ranged from how you want to introduce yourself to new coworkers, how to organize priorities, and how to split up what you need to learn into easily manageable chunks. Much better than I thought it was going to be.
—Ryan
An interesting read with great points to ponder for anyone in a work transition -- weather you work with someone or you yourself are transitioning. However, I have to say that I think it's a little over-rated. Many of the examples in the book explore theory through negative anecdote. Almost every chapter explains what to do by explaining what not to do. It's as if a designer were to say, "We're going to paint the room not blue." So what color is it? The end result is a very, very general book. I get that it's trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. The author talks of time-tested theories and consulting with clients in a wide range of industries and professions. If that's the case, I would have preferred a longer book with chapters that outline positive examples of success, pulling from stories in a variety of industries. Not only would that be more helpful, I think it would be more interesting.Nonetheless, I've got my list of questions I need to explore, and items I need to learn, and a loose plan of attack for a new role that is coming up quickly. In that sense, the book accomplished the goal I had hoped when I borrowed it from the library.
—Timothy
