Your Next Move: Onboarding

FOURTH post: Review of Your Next Move: The Onboarding Challenge: Watkins wrote extensively and exclusively in his previous book, The First 90 Days, which I reviewed in depth on my blog (just search for it). So, I won’t recreate those comments. However, I actually think this single chapter is an outstanding overview of that book. One analogy that he uses for new onboarding executive is that of immunology. Basically, the corporation is like a body and as an outsider approaches, it’s defenses go up or don’t. In some cases the corporate body over-reacts too quickly thus rejecting even good people. Sometimes it doesn’t react fast enough and bad outsiders get in and hurt the corporation...think Enron. The key is not to be labeled as “dangerous” too quickly, or you’ll never get a chance to do even good/needed things for the company.