Michael Watkins
New leaders fail in their first ninety days more often than at any other point in their career, and the cost is paid by the team, the strategy, and the board that hired them. The same pattern repeats further up: senior teams face decisions where pattern recognition and systems thinking matter more than functional expertise, and most have never been taught either. Organisations need a repeatable way to accelerate leaders into new roles and to sharpen how their top team thinks.
Michael Watkins is the IMD professor and author of The First 90 Days who helps organisations accelerate leadership transitions and build strategic thinking at the top of the company.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Michael Watkins
- He owns the global category of leadership transitions. The First 90 Days is the methodology Fortune 500 HR functions, executive coaches, and onboarding programs build around, with over a million copies in print across more than twenty languages.
- His 2024 book, The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, gives senior teams a named, teachable framework for the cognitive work executives are expected to do but rarely trained in: pattern recognition, systems perspective, mental agility, structured problem-solving, visioning, and political savvy.
- The Thinkers50 Hall of Fame induction in 2023 places him alongside the small group of management thinkers whose work has shaped how large organisations actually develop leaders, not just how they talk about leadership.
- He has run the playbook inside companies as well as written it. Through Genesis Advisers, the consultancy he co-founded, his frameworks are embedded in transition coaching programs at major multinationals.
- Buyers get a speaker who has taught the same audience inside IMD, Harvard Business School, and the Kennedy School. The content is built for senior leaders, not adapted down to them.
Biography highlights
- Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at IMD Business School since 2007.
- Author of The First 90 Days, named by The Economist as “the onboarding bible” and selected by Amazon editors as one of 100 leadership books to read in a lifetime.
- Author of The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking (Harper Business, 2024) and Master Your Next Move, the structured companion to The First 90 Days covering eight common executive transition types.
- Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2023; previously ranked on the Thinkers50 list in 2019 and 2021.
- Co-founder and chairman of Genesis Advisers, a leadership-transition consultancy.
- Former associate professor at Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School; PhD in Decision Sciences from Harvard University.
Biography
The First 90 Days began as a study of why senior hires fail and grew into the operating manual that most large organisations now use to onboard executives. The Economist called it the onboarding bible. More than a million copies are in print across more than twenty languages, and the framework is embedded in transition coaching at multinationals worldwide.
Michael Watkins built the methodology while teaching at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School, refined it at INSEAD, and has anchored it at IMD since 2007 as Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change. He directs IMD’s First 90 Days open program and co-directs the Transition to Business Leadership executive program. The same body of work runs through Genesis Advisers, the consultancy he co-founded, where the playbook is delivered inside companies rather than written about from outside.
In 2024, he extended the work upward with The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, which names the cognitive disciplines executives are expected to demonstrate at the top of an organisation: pattern recognition, systems perspective, mental agility, structured problem-solving, visioning, and political savvy. The argument is that strategic thinking is not a personality trait but a teachable craft, and most senior teams have never been taught it.
The Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inducted him in November 2023, recognising two decades of work that has demonstrably shaped how large organisations develop their leaders rather than how they describe doing so.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership transitions and executive onboarding
- Strategic thinking for senior leaders
- Team leadership and top-team effectiveness
- Organisational change and culture
- Negotiation and decision-making
- Career strategy for senior executives
Ideal for
- CHROs, heads of leadership development, and chief learning officers designing transition and onboarding programs.
- CEOs and executive committees who want their top team trained in strategic thinking as a discipline.
- Boards and nomination committees preparing successors for enterprise-leadership roles.
- High-potential leadership cohorts moving into first general-management or P&L roles.
Audience outcomes
- A named methodology, The First 90 Days, that senior leaders can apply to their next transition rather than a set of principles to remember.
- Six concrete strategic-thinking disciplines that a top team can use as a shared language inside the business.
- A clearer view of why most senior-hire failures are predictable, and which interventions in the first ninety days actually change the outcome.
- Direct access to the thinking of a Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee whose work is taught inside HBS, INSEAD, and IMD curricula.