The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter

What a difference a decade makes. When I set out to write The First 90 Days in 2001, little was out there about getting up to speed in new roles or onboarding new hires (hereafter “leadership transitions”).¹ At the time, I was teaching negotiation and corporate diplomacy at Harvard Business School. Although I had coauthored a modestly successful book on senior executive transitions in 1999—Right from the Start with Dan Ciampa—I had been counseled by my colleagues at HBS that it was a risky career move to focus further on the subject.²

While I appreciated their advice, in the end I decided to push forward to write the book. Leadership transitions were just too interesting and ripe for study; it was virtually an untilled field from both intellectual and practical points of view. Also in late 1999, soon after the publication of Right from the Start, I had been asked by Johnson & Johnson’s corporate management development group to develop workshops and coaching processes to accelerate the company’s leaders in transition. This work soon evolved into an engaging development partnership, and J&J became a test bed for the development and deployment of my ideas.

The First 90 Days was a distillation of what I had learned during roughly two and a half years of working with hundreds of leaders at the vice president and director levels in all regions of the world. The book built on some foundational ideas developed in Right from the Start; for example the importance of accelerating learning, securing early wins, and creating alliances. However, the ideas had been augmented, tested, modified, and turned into practical frameworks and tools for helping leaders at all levels accelerate their transitions.

It was that distillation—the mix of concepts, tools, cases, and practical advice—that really hit the mark with leaders in transition. I had the wonderful experience of seeing sales of The First 90 Days, which was published in November 2003, take off like a rocket. By the summer of 2004, the book was on the BusinessWeek best-seller list; it stayed there for fifteen months. This success coincided fortuitously with my departure from Harvard and fueled my decision not to seek another academic position. Instead I cofounded a leadership development company—Genesis Advisers—dedicated to helping companies accelerate everyone who is taking new roles.

Business books, even highly successful ones, tend to sell strongly for a year or two and then fade. This has not been the case for The First 90 Days. I have had the pleasure of seeing the book sell strongly for a decade, having so far sold almost eight hundred thousand copies in English, including seventy-five thousand in 2011. For the past ten years, the book has consistently remained among Harvard Business Review Press’s best-sellers. It has also been translated into twenty-seven languages and was the basis for Leadership Transitions, Harvard Business Publishing’s award-winning e-learning tool.³

Enduring success of this kind has qualified The First 90 Days to be labeled a “business classic.” The term “classic” evokes a whiff of mustiness with which I am not entirely comfortable. Nonetheless, I was honored in 2009 to have the book named one of the 100 best business books of all time after an extensive review by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten at 800-CEO-READ. That recognition was a mark not only of the importance and staying power of the ideas, but also of the continuing need for every new generation of leaders to learn to make successful transitions.

The success of The First 90 Days also fueled and was fueled by a rising wave of interest on the part of companies in talent management, onboarding of new hires, and CEO succession. From the outset, Genesis Advisers’ work at J&J focused on both accelerating new hires and speeding up internal promotions; I continue to believe that it is a mistake to focus just on onboarding and not on accelerating all transitions. However, it was interest in onboarding that really propelled the field forward, as the war for talent became ever more fierce, and the high costs of derailment, under-performance, and lack of retention of new hires more evident. So many companies began to adopt First 90 Days ideas to accelerate onboarding of new hires. Beyond the work we have done with our clients at Genesis Advisers, First 90 Days concepts and tools have independently been adapted and implemented by learning and development and human resources professionals in thousands of companies. In 2006 The Economist named The First 90 Days “the onboarding bible.”⁴ More recently, the increasing maturity of the field has been marked by major conferences devoted to the subject of onboarding and transition acceleration.

My own thinking, of course, has also evolved over the past decade, and this has resulted in numerous improvements in this new edition of the book. I have remained deeply engaged in working with leaders in transition, doing research, and translating my practical experience and findings into better frameworks and tools. Key follow-on publications include:

• Shaping the Game, a 2006 Harvard Business Review Press book that looks at how new leaders should apply ideas from the fields of negotiation and influence to make successful transitions.⁵
• The First 90 Days in Government, a version of The First 90 Days adapted to the public sector and coauthored with Peter Daly, a retired senior Treasury Department official, and Cate Reavis.⁶
• “The Pillars of Executive Onboarding,” an October 2008 Talent Management article on the major focal points for onboarding: business orientation, expectations, alignment, cultural adaptation, and political connection.⁷
• Your Next Move, a 2009 Harvard Business Review Press book that highlights the need for leaders in transition to distinguish between the organizational change challenges and the personal adaptive challenges they are confronting. It also takes a deep dive into specific types of transitions such as promotion, leading former peers, onboarding, and international moves.⁸
• “Picking the Right Transition Strategy,” a January 2009 Harvard Business Review article that further develops the STARS framework (start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment and sustaining success) introduced in the first edition of The First 90 Days for matching transition strategy to these various types of business situations.⁹
• “How Managers Become Leaders,” a June 2012 Harvard Business Review article summarizing the research I did on “the seven seismic shifts” that leaders experience as they make the very challenging transition from a senior functional role to running an entire business.¹⁰

My thinking has also been powerfully informed by my work during the past eight years in developing successive generations of First 90 Days offerings for our clients at Genesis Advisers. Recently this has included a new generation of Acceleration Coaching process, a web-based workshop that includes virtual breakout groups, and a specialized program to help physicians transition from clinical practices and research institutions into commercial environments.

I also have been gratified that The First 90 Days, and my subsequent work, have spawned so much interest in the study and practical application of transition acceleration ideas. Much excellent original research and writing has been done.¹¹ And, since imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery, I have been flattered to see many of my concepts, tools, and terms adopted by other practitioners and consultants—for example, the STARS framework, transition traps, the importance of securing early wins,¹² the idea of “the fuzzy front-end” (referring to the period between getting a job and formally stepping into the role and developed jointly with Dan Ciampa),¹³ and the important distinction between the organizational change challenge and the personal adaptive challenge in assessing the transition risk confronting new leaders.¹⁴

The past ten years have been a wonderful journey, and I have many people to thank for helping to make it happen. Foremost are the two people who had the biggest impact on the early development of my ideas and their application in the real world: my Right from the Start coauthor Dan Ciampa and my partner Shawna Slack. Then there have been my editors and publishers at Harvard Business Review Press, especially Jeff Kehoe, who has been consistently wonderful in encouraging, directing, and refining my work. I also very much appreciate the support of leaders at key Genesis Advisers client companies who have been willing to take the leap and invest in our work, notably Becky Atkeison and her colleagues at FedEx and Inaki Bastarrika, Ron Bossert, Carolynn Cameron, Michael Ehret, Ted Nguyen, and Doug Soo Hoo at Johnson & Johnson. Finally, my heartfelt gratitude goes to the staff at Genesis Advisers for all their hard work, especially to our COO Jerry Cogliano, who has been instrumental in making the dream of a leadership development company—focused on accelerating everyone—a reality, and to Kerry Brunelle for her support in editing the manuscript.