Michael Watkins

Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change

Michael D Watkins is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change. He is a globally recognized leadership transitions expert and author of the best-selling book The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter. A Thinkers50-ranked management influencer, Watkins has developed proven frameworks and tools to help professionals navigate personal and organizational change challenges. He has spent the past two decades working with leaders as they transition to new roles, build their teams, and transform their organizations. He is a sought-after keynote speaker and guest on popular business podcasts.

The First 90 Days has become the classic reference for leaders in transition, and an authoritative resource on leading change. It has sold more than 1.5 million copies and been translated into 23 different languages. The Economist described it as “the onboarding bible,” while 800-CEO-Read (now Porchlight) called it one of the best 100 business books of all time. Amazon included it on its list of 100 leadership and success books to read in a lifetime.

Even the best-prepared leaders find the transition to CEO to be the most challenging in their professional careers. The stakes are high, and the uncertainties are great. All eyes are on you, but you may have few people who can act as trusted advisors.

The book, first published in 2003, outlines basic principles to help leaders transition quickly and efficiently to new professional roles. It identifies the most common traps into which new leaders fall and provides the tools and strategies to avoid them. It was followed in 2009 by Your Next Move: The Leader’s Guide to Managing Critical Career Transitions, which offers additional guidance on how to apply the framework in different contexts and more turbulent times, exploring eight crucial transitions virtually everyone encounters during their career. Both books have since been updated and expanded, most recently with the 2019 publication of Master Your Next Move: The Essential Companion to The First 90 Days.

Over the past 20 years, Watkins has used his First 90 Days® methodology to help leaders make successful transitions, both in his teaching at IMD, INSEAD, and Harvard Business School, as well as through his private consultancy practice Genesis Advisers.

Watkins is also the author of 10 other books on leadership and negotiation and hundreds of articles for leading business journals. His work features in Harvard Business Review’s HBR Guides and 10 Must Reads series on leadership, teams, strategic initiatives, and new managers, and his article The future of team leadership is multimodal, co-authored with Robert Hooijberg, was the most-read piece of 2021 in MIT Sloan Management Review.

Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming, and How to Prevent Them was named one of the best business books of 2004 by strategy+business and won the 2006 annual Kulp-Wright Award from The American Risk and Insurance Association. Two of his books on negotiation – Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World’s Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts and Breakthrough Business Negotiation: A Toolbox for Managers – won the CPR Institute’s prize for best books in the field of negotiation in 2001 and 2003.

At IMD, he directs the First 90 Days open program for leaders taking on challenging new roles and co-directs the Transition to Business Leadership (TBL) executive program for future enterprise leaders.

Before joining IMD in 2007, Watkins was an Adjunct Professor at INSEAD and Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. While on the faculty of these institutions, he designed and taught world-class programs for high-potential leader development, corporate diplomacy, and strategic negotiation.

Originally from Canada, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo and business and law at Western University, before earning a PhD in decision sciences at Harvard University.

 

Selected publications
Article
The future of team leadership is multimodal
TeamLeadership
The pandemic has accelerated a pre-COVID-19 shift in how individuals and teams do intellectual work. Companies have learned that routine tasks involving transactions and coordination can be done pu...
9 February 2021
Master Your Next Move: The Essential Companion to The First 90 Days
Book
Master Your Next Move: The Essential Companion to The First 90 Days
Leadership
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 ha...
9 April 2019
Article
It's all about day one
Top TeamStrategy
The appointment of a new leader is a defining moment for an organisation. Leaders find transitions into new roles the most challenging times in their professional lives, when they either build cred...
26 June 2013
Book
Case studies in US trade negotiation
Economics
Trade policy has moved from the wings onto center stage. Between 1992 and 2000, US exports rose by 55 percent. By the year 2000, trade summed to 26 percent of US GDP, and the United States imported...
1 January 2006
Book
Predictable surprises: The disaster you should have seen coming, and how to prevent them
Decision Making
In this book, the authors show that many disasters are preceded by clear warning signals that leaders either miss-or purposely ignore. They explain the cognitive, organizational, and political bias...
23 November 2004
The first 90 days: Proven strategies for getting up to speed faster and smarter
Book
The first 90 days: Proven strategies for getting up to speed faster and smarter
General ManagementTalent ManagementTop TeamLeadership
Since its original release, The First 90 Days has become the bestselling globally acknowledged bible of leadership and career transitions. In this updated and expanded 10th anniversary edition, int...
23 May 2013
Book
Breakthrough business negotiation: A toolbox for managers
Negotiation
This book presents principles that apply to any negotiation situation and tools to achieve breakthrough results. Step by step, it demonstrates how to diagnose a situation, build coalitions, manage ...
1 January 2002
Book
Breakthrough international negotiation: How great negotiators transformed the world's toughest post-cold war conflicts
NegotiationPoliticsConflict Resolution
This book offers a revealing, blow-by-blow description of secret, headline-making negotiations in the Middleast, Korea, Africa, and Bosnia, as well as an invaluable guide to conducting such a diffi...
1 January 2001
Academic publications
Case Study
Shaping group dynamics to enhance team performance
General ManagementHuman ResourcesLeadershipOrganizational Behavior
This note summarizes group dynamics concepts and shows leaders how to apply them to improve the performance of their teams. Understanding group dynamics is essential for effective communication, de...
16 May 2023
Case Study
The rise and fall of Wade Johnson
Leadership
This is a case of leadership failure. It explores the experience of a leader who was very successful as a CFO and COO but who struggled and ultimately failed when he was promoted to the CEO role. A...
15 February 2022
Case Study
Nvidia: Winning the deep-learning leadership battle
Strategy
The case charts the evolution of NVIDIA, the market leading producer of graphics processing units (GPU), from its beginnings to becoming a leader at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) de...
10 May 2019
The first 90 days: Proven strategies for getting up to speed faster and smarter
Book
The first 90 days: Proven strategies for getting up to speed faster and smarter
General ManagementTalent ManagementTop TeamLeadership
Since its original release, The First 90 Days has become the bestselling globally acknowledged bible of leadership and career transitions. In this updated and expanded 10th anniversary edition, int...
23 May 2013
Article
Avoiding onboarding and promotion traps
Organizational DesignLeadership
Like most leaders, you have probably learned to make job transitions according to the school of hard knocks – trying things, making mistakes and ultimately winning through. In the process, you have...
1 January 2013
Article
Teaching students to shape the game: Negotiation architecture and the design of manageably dynamic simulations
Negotiation
Although important work is being done in the emerging field of negotiation architecture and “shaping the game,” little of it has found its way into the classroom. Simulation exercises are among the...
17 July 2007
Article
Strategy for the critical first 90 days of leadership
Leadership
The actions taken during the first three months of a new job will largely determine whether you succeed or fail in the long term. The goal should be transition acceleration, not just failure preven...
1 January 2004
Article
A dynamic model of top management team effectiveness: Managing unstructured task streams
Decision MakingLeadershipGeneral Management
Leadership research relating top management team (TMT) demographics to firm performance has produced mixed empirical results. This article suggests a new explanation for these inconsistencies. We f...
1 June 2003
Article
Government games
RegulationCorporate GovernanceStrategy
At a time in which the role of government in regulating business is likely to increase, the author insists that businesses must consider the impact of government as part of their strategy formulati...
1 February 2003
Insight for Executives
Implementing generative AI: A strategic guide to overcoming the challenges
Article
Implementing generative AI: A strategic guide to overcoming the challenges
StrategyTechnology ManagementInnovation
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), though a recent development, is already transforming industries
18 May 2023
The AI-amplified organization: Preparing for the large language model revolution
Article
The AI-amplified organization: Preparing for the large language model revolution
InnovationTechnology Management
Business leaders should prepare now to benefit from the next wave of AI.
18 April 2023
Beware the AI indoctrination engines
Article
Beware the AI indoctrination engines
InnovationTechnology ManagementEthics
Chatbots have the clear potential to influence people towards dangerous beliefs and behaviors. How can we mitigate the risk to ensure they deliver benefits to society, not harm?
24 March 2023
Article
How to onboard your new boss
Leadership
You’ve just learned that you will soon have a new manager. What can you do to help your new leader launch successfully? You can help your new leader (and yourself) by actively onboarding them. Acco...
27 February 2023
AI-enabled executives: How ChatGPT will sharpen strategic thinking
Article
AI-enabled executives: How ChatGPT will sharpen strategic thinking
Technology ManagementInnovationDigitalStrategy
Combinations of executives and purpose-built AI systems will soon work together to enhance decision making, problem solving and strategy formulation
30 January 2023
‘A revolution in productivity’: What ChatGPT could mean for business
Article
‘A revolution in productivity’: What ChatGPT could mean for business
Technology ManagementInnovationDigitalDiversity and Equity and Inclusion
The ground-breaking artificial intelligence chatbot looks set to commodify knowledge and transform leadership development, but companies need to be acutely aware of the risks
21 December 2022
Seven transitions good leaders must make
Article
Seven transitions good leaders must make
Leadership
There's no doubting the significant transitions that leaders go through in taking new roles. And the most challenging transitions occur in moving from being a functional leader to being a general m...
7 December 2022
Article
How to make your matrix organization really work
LeadershipStrategy
Much has been written about why matrix organizations are needed and what they look like at a surface level. Far less advice is available about what it takes to make them work. This information gap ...
17 November 2022
Energy, focus and five other key skills for future leaders
Article
Energy, focus and five other key skills for future leaders
Leadership
Facing times of unprecedented peril, we need to urgently develop a pipeline of leaders capable of mobilizing, focusing and sustaining the energy of teams and organizations.
4 October 2022
Article
The future workplace depends on efficiency, effectiveness, and balance
LeadershipTalent Management
Many leadership teams are grappling with how to build and sustain the requisite talent foundation to grow their businesses as the world emerges from the pandemic. Unprecedented high levels of profe...
16 June 2022
Six ways to engage with your teams to frame and solve strategic problems
Article
Six ways to engage with your teams to frame and solve strategic problems
StrategyLeadershipTeam
There is no one-size-fits-all method to find the right solutions, but a ‘team engagement’ checklist will put you on the right track.
17 March 2022
Designing hybrid models that boost company performance
Article
Designing hybrid models that boost company performance
Human ResourcesTechnology ManagementGeneral ManagementDiversity and Equity and Inclusion
It has been nearly two years since the first wave of COVID-19 forced organizations worldwide to rethink working practices and shift rapidly to homeworking. Yet as Omicron fears halt the reopening o...
21 January 2022
How to become a corporate diplomat as a new CEO
Article
How to become a corporate diplomat as a new CEO
Leadership
One of the trickiest tasks for new CEOs can be learning how to engage with the media, government and other key stakeholders. We provide seven organizing principles to help CEOs effectively shape th...
20 January 2022
Why you must move fast to get the right team in place
Article
Why you must move fast to get the right team in place
Leadership
Newly appointed CEOs and other senior leaders must concentrate their energy on getting the right people around them, as failure to act quickly will have serious consequences.
12 January 2022
Article
How to quit when you lead a team
LeadershipTransition
While leaders give a lot of attention to starting new jobs, it is equally important to plan your exit. Managing your leave is one of the most consequential acts you can do for yourself, your team, ...
2 January 2022
Inheriting and reshaping a team is like repairing a plane in mid-flight. Here is how to stay airborne
Article
Inheriting and reshaping a team is like repairing a plane in mid-flight. Here is how to stay airborne
LeadershipTop TeamStrategy
Newly appointed CEOs and other senior leaders must move at speed and with focus to get the right people around them, failure to act will have serious consequences.
16 December 2021
10 attributes of culture that make it so difficult to change – especially when workers aren’t in the office
Article
10 attributes of culture that make it so difficult to change – especially when workers aren’t in the office
CultureLeadership
Understanding your company’s culture is essential to design a strategy and structure that will enable your employees to perform at their best, says Professor Michael Watkins.
18 November 2021
The CEO’s post-pandemic survival guide: ESG targets take center stage
Article
The CEO’s post-pandemic survival guide: ESG targets take center stage
BoardLeadershipStrategySustainabilityDiversity and Equity and Inclusion
CEO turnover is rising after a COVID lull as boards place corporate culture and social responsibility at the heart of performance criteria, equal to shareholder value creation.
9 November 2021
Article
Five ways to help leaders who struggle to connect with teams
TeamLeadershipCoachingEmotion Management
Coaches working with leaders who lack emotional intelligence have a tough job on their hands, but here experts share the strategies that can lead to success. The COVID-19 crisis has presented leade...
27 October 2021
Article
How to reshape your leadership brand as you start a new role
LeadershipTransition
All senior leaders taking new roles need to develop and implement a strategy to reinforce or reshape their leadership brand starting well before their official “Day One.” The author offers steps le...
22 October 2021
The Essential Companion to The First 90 Days