The world’s most trusted guide for leaders in transition Transitions are a critical time for leaders. In fact, most agree that moving into a new role is the biggest challenge a manager will face. While transitions offer a chance to start fresh and make needed changes in an organization, they also place leaders in a position of acute vulnerability. Missteps made during the crucial first three months in a new role can jeopardize or even derail your success. In this updated and expanded version of the international bestseller The First 90 Days, Michael D. Watkins offers proven strategies for conquering the challenges of transitions—no matter where you are in your career. Watkins, a noted expert on leadership transitions and adviser to senior leaders in all types of organizations, also addresses today’s increasingly demanding professional landscape, where managers face not only more frequent transitions but also steeper expectations once they step into their new jobs. By walking you through every aspect of the transition scenario, Watkins identifies the most common pitfalls new leaders encounter and provides the tools and strategies you need to avoid them. You’ll learn how to secure critical early wins, an important first step in establishing yourself in your new role. Each chapter also includes checklists, practical tools, and self-assessments to help you assimilate key lessons and apply them to your own situation. Whether you’re starting a new job, being promoted from within, embarking on an overseas assignment, or being tapped as CEO, how you manage your transition will determine whether you succeed or fail. Use this book as your trusted guide.

The authors address the crucial differences between the private and public sectors. This concise, practical book provides a roadmap to help new government leaders at all levels accelerate their transitions.

Your next professional move can make or break your career. Are you ready? In business, especially today, you are only as successful as your next career transition. Do well, and you'll be on the fast track to even more challenging roles. Fail, and you could irreparably harm your career--and your organization. In his international bestseller The First 90 Days, transition guru Michael D. Watkins outlined a set of basic principles for getting up to speed quickly in new professional roles. Since that book was published Watkins has worked with thousands of leaders, helping them to accelerate their transitions. These leaders posed challenging questions on how to apply the basic principles in real-life situations. The truth that emerged: the First 90 Days framework can be applied in every transition, but the way you apply it is entirely different when you have been promoted to a higher level than it is when you are joining a new organization or taking a role in a different country. Master Your Next Move answers a distinct need, focusing on the most common types of transitions leaders face and the unique challenges posed by each. Based on years of research, and now with a new introduction, this indispensable book explores eight crucial transitions virtually everyone encounters during their career, including promotion, leading former peers, onboarding into a new company, making an international move, and turning around a business in crisis. With real-world examples and many practical models and tools, Master Your Next Move is your guide to surviving and thriving as you make your next move . . . and every one after that.

Start Six Sigma Fast—And Achieve Powerful Business Benefits Within Months This book offers leaders a proven turnkey approach to launching a Six Sigma initiative in 90 days and using it to transform your company within a year. Drawing on their experience with fifty Six Sigma programs at companies ranging from AlliedSignal to Motorola, Stephen A. Zinkgraf and his contributors show how to rapidly align people, strategy, processes, and customers in support of your initiative—and gain powerful momentum for success. You’ll walk through preparing for an enterprise-wide launch, executing it flawlessly, and establishing a foundation for achieving sustainable results over the long term. Zinkgraf’s techniques, roadmaps, and milestones can help you quickly launch any complex change initiative—even those unrelated to Six Sigma. Taken together, they offer a complete framework for driving and managing change: the #1 core competency for twenty-first century executives. Coverage includes Leading Six Sigma: roadmaps, milestones, and techniques for delivering fast, sustainable gains Effectively preparing, flawlessly executing, and extending your impact for years to come Identifying opportunities, building teams, choosing partners, defining metrics, managing risk, and much more Discovering best practices from over fifty successful launches: techniques that work with any large-scale change initiative

"Whether you're going for that promotion, looking to jump ship, or change careers entirely, Michael Watkins' Your Next Move is a book you'll want to read." So starts the positive review of Your Next Move on the influential 800 CEO Read website. It's true that all leaders--no matter how seasoned--need guidance through the professional changes that define a career. In fact, transitions into new roles are the crucibles in which leaders get their toughest tests, and they're the defining factor in professional careers today. Yet far too often, leaders fail to transition effectively into new roles. The resulting costs are high, for individual careers and for organizations. In Your Next Move, leadership-transition guru Watkins shows how you can survive and thrive in all the major transitions you will face during your career-including promotions, leading former peers, on-boarding into a new organization, making an international move, or turning around or realigning an organization. With real-life examples and case studies, Watkins illustrates the defining hurdles associated with each type of transition. He then provides the insights, strategies, and tools you'll need to accelerate through these crucial turning points and continue moving up in your career. The necessary complement to the author's bestselling guide The First 90 Days, which has been translated in more than 20 languages worldwide, Your Next Move offers the keen observations, tried-and-true management wisdom, and practical good sense Watkins is renowned for. It's a vital resource for any manager or executive seeking to maintain career momentum. To quote the reviewer from above: "It's not just about "moving" but about what happens when those actions are taken. Success or failure are the two options, and which option you emerge with will determine what happens going forward. Watkins' book definitely has the research and insight to equip you for the better of the two paths."

You just got hired! Congrats! Now what? It takes most new product managers six to eight months to reach full productivity. Most companies and managers don't have onboarding training designed specifically for product managers. This means you would spend half of your first year haphazardly gathering the bits of information you need to be an effective product manager. Every Product Manager's First 90 Days is the solution to this problem. With over 40 interactive exercises and 90 questions, you will systematically work your way through your company discovering the knowledge necessary to be successful. Know Your Role - Learn your responsibilities and what others expect of you. Know Your Team - Learn who does what and what strengths they bring to the organization. Know Your Stakeholders - Learn which people you need input from on each aspect of the protect and who to ignore. Know Your Customer - Learn who uses your product and how they use it. Know Your Competition - Learn who you are up against and what makes your product unique in the marketplace. Know Your History - Learn how the product has evolved and how that impacts the future. Know Your Product - Learn your product inside and out. Know Your Numbers - Learn what metrics are critical to focus on. Know Your Marketing - Learn what channels work and how your product is portrayed. Know Your Sales - Learn what closes a sale and what is being promised to customers. Know Your Future Product - Learn how you approach product management and what that means for where the product is headed.

Whether challenged with taking on a startup, turning a business around, or inheriting a high-performing unit, a new leader's success or failure is determined within the first 90 days on the job. In this hands-on guide, Michael Watkins, a noted expert on leadership transitions, offers proven strategies for moving successfully into a new role at any point in one's career. The First 90 Days provides a framework for transition acceleration that will help leaders diagnose their situations, craft winning transition strategies, and take charge quickly. Practical examples illustrate how to learn about new organizations, build teams, create coalitions, secure early wins, and lay the foundation for longer-term success. In addition, Watkins provides strategies for avoiding the most common pitfalls new leaders encounter, and shows how individuals can protect themselves-emotionally as well as professionally-during what is often an intense and vulnerable period. Concise and actionable, this is the survival guide no new leader should be without. "Few companies develop a systematic 'on-boarding' process for their new leaders, even though this is a critical function with major organizational implications. Michael Watkins's The First 90 Days provides a powerful framework and strategies that will enable new leaders to take charge quickly. It is an invaluable tool for that most vulnerable time-the transition." -Goli Darabi, Senior Vice President, Corporate Leadership & Succession Management, Fidelity Investments "Every job-private- or public-sector, civilian or military-has its breakeven point, and everyone can accelerate their learning. Read this book at least twice: once before your next transition-before getting caught up in the whirl and blur of new faces, names, acronyms, and issues; then read it again after you've settled in, and consider how to accelerate transitions for your next new boss and for those who come to work for you." -Colonel Eli Alford, U.S. Army "Watkins provides an excellent road map, telling us what all new leaders need to know and do to accelerate their learning and success in a new role. The First 90 Days should be incorporated into every company's leadership development strategy, so that anyone making a transition in an organization can get up to speed quicker and smarter." -Suzanne M. Danielle, Director of Global Leadership Development, Aventis "Michael Watkins has nailed a huge corporate problem and provided the solution in one fell swoop. The pressure on new leaders to hit the ground running has never been greater, and the likelihood and cost of failure is escalating. Watkins's timing with The First 90 Days is impeccable." -Gordon Curtis, Principal, Curtis Consulting "The First 90 Days is a must-read for entrepreneurs. Anyone who's been the CEO of a start-up or early-stage company knows that you go through many 90-day leadership transitions in the course of a company's formative years. In this groundbreaking book, Michael Watkins provides crucial insights, as well as a toolkit of techniques, to enable you to accelerate through these transitions successfully." -Mike Kinkead, President and CEO, timeBLASTER Corporation, serial entrepreneur, and Cofounder and Trustee, Massachusetts Software Council