Review: “The first 90 days” by Michael D. Watkins

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

At the time of the Jetlore acquisition, a colleague of mine recommended that I read “The first 90 days”. We were embarking on a new journey at a large corporation so it was important to get up to speed fast. Furthermore, the challenge was to juggle running the business at Jetlore and executing the new roadmap at PayPal — essentially two jobs. To conclude the review, I recalled a story from my childhood relevant to the subject.

Summary

The main message of the book is that the actions that you take at the beginning of a new role will largely determine your success or failure going forward. You want to put yourself on a top shelf, get a few quick wins and build up the momentum. However, a failure to do so can result in the end of a career. And even outside of failure, the wrong start can prevent to realize full potential.

The book urges the importance of getting to the break-even point faster. This is the point at which you have contributed as much value to your new organization as you have consumed from it.

The author warns against the transition traps:

• sticking with what you know — this is mostly when you pick up a new role
• falling prey to the “action imperative” — the need to take the action right away to establish yourself
• setting unrealistic expectations — you might perform well but still fail to meet the expectations of your boss or other stakeholders
• attempting to do too much — trying to run multiple initiatives at the same time
• coming in with “the” answer — alienates people who can help with the understanding and squander to get the support for good solutions
• engaging in the wrong type of learning — focus too much on the technical aspect of the job rather than cultural and political dimensions
• neglecting horizontal relationships — focus too much on the vertical relationships

The author outlines the two cycles that you can establish: vicious and virtuous. The vicious cycle starts with inadequate learning and ineffective relationship building. They lead to bad decisions and a lack of supportive alliances. As a result, you lose credibility and face resistance. You start to establish a downward spiral. The virtuous cycle is the opposite of that and it starts with focused learning and effective relationship building. They lead to good decisions and informed strategy and vision. As a result, you increase the credibility, build supportive alliances, and reap the early wins. You establish an upward spiral.

The book proposes the systematic methods that you can employ to lessen the likelihood of failure and reach the break-even point faster:

• Prepare yourself — prepare yourself for the role and avoid the assumption that what has made you successful to this point will continue to do so
• Accelerate your learning — there are way too much of new information so you need to be systematic and focused about what you need to learn and how to learn it most efficiently
• Match your strategy to the situation — adjust your plan to the situation at hand
• Secure early wins — early wins build your credibility and create momentum
• Negotiate success — the single most important relationship is the one with your boss so you need to build it and manage the expectations
• Achieve alignment — align strategic direction, structure, core processes and skill bases in order to meet your goals
• Build your team — willingness to make tough early personnel calls and pick the right people for the right seats.
• Create coalitions — your success depends on your ability to influence people outside your direct line of control
• Keep your balance — it is critical to preserve your ability to make good judgments in the transition and avoid losing the perspective and becoming isolated. Build the right advice-and-counsel network
• Accelerate everyone — the quicker you accelerate your direct reports up to speed or peers the more you will help your own performance.

The rest of the book covers in-depth each principle and provides tips and techniques to implement it effectively.

My experience

As a child, I spent every summer in our cottage in the village with my grandparents. We were building a new cottage so there was an abundance of wood materials and tools to work with it. Picking up some basic woodworking skills was just a matter of time especially if you wanted to entertain yourself and build the toys that were hard to buy at that time. So I joined the aeromodelling classes at the age of 9 to build myself a glider. However, no way my skills were at the point to build complex engineering projects such as aero models.

On my first day, the teacher asked about my woodworking experience. He seemed to be satisfied with my story because the first assignment was to build a large free-flight glider. I was super excited! I saw the examples of those gliders on the walls in the room — any kid would dream to build something like that.

Constructing a wing was the hardest part of the job. Each wing consisted of a large number of individual ailerons that formed the proper aerodynamic shape. Trust me, it was a very hard and laborious process to make a single aileron. First, you needed to cut out the shape from plywood using a basic manual fretsaw. The blades of the fretsaw were extremely delicate and easy to snap at the wrong angle. Then you were required to align the new shape to the template using a file tool to keep the exact same dimensions. Otherwise, the wing would not be efficient to generate the right lifting power. That step required being extra careful because the file could take out too much wood and spoil the work. Finally, the middle parts of the aileron were supposed to be cut out in order to reduce the weight of the wing.

The teacher prepared the first aileron together with me and gave it as a template. After a few weeks of going to the classes and getting some feedback from him, I decided to take the materials home to build the parts in my free time to launch the glider sooner. In order to accelerate the process of aligning the ailerons to the template, I connected them together and applied the file across all of them. Unfortunately, it was a mistake and the majority of the ailerons were damaged. The teacher was enraged! You need to take into account that all those extra-curriculum activities were sponsored by the government which at that time was struggling to switch to the free market economy. As a result, the materials allocated to each school were very scarce. In the eyes of the teacher, the most important resource at his disposal was wasted.

After giving me a hard time in front of a whole group, the teacher reassigned me to build a very simple glider. I was crushed and devasted. My ambition was to build the “real” airplane models but I failed to do it at my first attempt. The complexity gap between both gliders was glaring. However, I took the project as a way to redeem myself and earn the teacher’s trust back.

The new model had a very basic wing structure. Each aileron was being built from the cheapest material available — bamboo tree. It required to split the part of the bamboo trunk into sticks and then bend them using the heat to the right aerodynamic shape. It was extremely hard to make a mistake and the cost of replacement was negligible.

After one month, I finished my first glider and it was proudly launched in the garden in front of the school! Success! The teacher gave praise and proposed a new model. It was a similar glider but it had an airscrew that you can set in motion using the rubber string. The airscrew was built from the wood so it required more advanced skills. My hope was to get the initial project but it seemed like a positive progression so I picked it up with the same enthusiasm.

Another month and another model was ready. The model was beautiful and was flying really well. I shined with delight and felt the readiness to take another stab at my first model. But the teacher didn’t feel that way and shocked me by asking to build the model again without any further explanation. That was a heartbreaking moment to realize that I can’t win his trust back and advance to the next levels of aeromodelling. I quit the classes after that and never came back to the aeromodelling. I still worked with the wood during summers and focused on ship modeling but only as a self-learner.

There are a few lessons learned from that experience. First, it is extremely important to start well and position yourself from the right side. Once you fell into the hole, it is tenfold harder to get out. Communication and the constant feedback loop are vital. If I had brought up more visibility into the process by involving the teacher and other peers, the damage to the ailerons could have been avoided. Secondly, when you give the work to a new “hire” you need to properly assess the task-relevant maturity. Furthermore, new hires always try to impress and as a result oversell themselves. Initially, constant guidance and feedback are critical to prevent the outcomes that could be very expensive for you. I don’t think that it was the right decision to give me such a complex model in the beginning based on my skills at that time. If the teacher would have set the right expectations when I joined and outlined the path of how one can get to build the “real” gliders, I would have stuck in the classes longer and maybe my career would have been completely different.

Verdict

Reading a review is enough to get the main points. Mostly applies to managers or senior ICs.