Free The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins

reset expectations, Claire became a victim of her own shortsightedness. She resigned when it became clear the CEO had lost confidence in her ability to lead the division.
    Far too many new leaders like Claire Weeks do a poor job of diagnosing their situations and tailoring their strategies accordingly. Then, because they misunderstand the situation, they make unnecessary mistakes like Claire’s commitment to unachievable earnings goals. This painful scenario continues to recur because people typically model their own transitions on a limited set of experiences.
    If you’re like Claire, you’ve learned to make transitions the hard way. You’ve made mistakes along the way, and you’ve learned from them. If you’re fortunate, bosses, mentors, and advisers have shared their hard-won experience with you.
    Over time you’ve probably fixed on some “must do’s” and “do not do’s.” It is worth being clear about them up front, so you can evaluate which hold up in your new situation and which do not. Consider taking some time to summarize your own rules of thumb for making a successful transition before you read further.
    Now step back and assess how robust and actionable these insights are. Your recent move suggests that your approach has worked well up to this point, but it won’t necessarily continue to work if you are moving to a different level or entering an unfamiliar business situation. Even if you have had broad exposure to managerial disciplines (marketing, operations, R&D, finance), your experience with different types of business situations (start-up, turnaround, realignment, and sustaining success) may still be narrow.
    By methodically diagnosing the situation, Claire Weeks could have avoided her problems. Matching your strategy to your situation requires careful diagnosis of the business situation. Only then can you be clearheaded, not just about the challenges, but also about the opportunities and resources available to you.

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    Diagnosing the Business Situation
    The four broad types of business situations that new leaders must contend with are start-up, turnaround, realignment, and sustaining success. (From now on we will refer to this framework of transition types as the STARS model.) An outline of the characteristics of each of these types, and their associated challenges and opportunities, will help you to recognize the key structural features of your own situation.
    What are the defining features of each of the four STARS situations? In a start-up you are charged with assembling the capabilities (people, funding, and technology) to get a new business, product, or project off the ground. In a turnaround you take on a unit or group that is recognized to be in trouble and work to get it back on track. Both start-ups and turnarounds involve much resource-intensive construction work— there isn’t much existing infrastructure and capacity for you to build on. To a significant degree, you get to start fresh. But both require that you start making tough calls early.
    Realignments and sustaining-success situations, by contrast, are situations in which you enter organizations that have significant strengths, but also serious constraints on what you can and cannot do. In realignment, your challenge is to revitalize a unit, product, process, or project that is drifting into trouble. In a sustaining-success situation, you are shouldering responsibility for preserving the vitality of a successful organization and taking it to the next level. Put another way, in realignments you have to reinvent the business; in sustaining success situations, you have to invent the challenge. In both situations, you typically have some time before you need to make major calls, which is good news because you have to learn a lot about the culture and politics and begin building supportive coalitions.
    Applying these