Michael Watkins
Member of Advisory Council
Thinkers50 | Author of The First 90 Days | Professor at IMD Business School | Co-founder of Genesis Advisers | Advisor to Leaders Taking New Roles | Speaker on Leadership in Turbulent Times
Michael 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”.
Michael advises CEOs on how to succeed as they take challenging new roles. Leaders work with him to avoid the inevitable pitfalls and achieve peak performance as rapidly as possible through systematic application of his First 90 Days methodology. Michael’s particular passion is working with first-time CEOs as they move to the top of businesses in these turbulent times.
Michael 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.
Before joining IMD in 2007, Michael was an Adjunct Professor at INSEAD and Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.