Chapter 1

1. See chapter 1 of Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

2. See B. Joseph White and Yaron Prywes, The Nature of Leadership: Reptiles, Mammals, and the Challenge of Becoming a Great Leader (Washington: Amacom Books, 2006).

3. Drucker developed this idea in his classic The Effective Executive, originally published in 1966. See Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, 4th ed. (New York: Collins Business, 2006).

4. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, lines 139–166.

5. The leadership pipeline framework was developed in Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel, The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership-Powered Company (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000). It’s a good, albeit in my opinion incomplete, framework for looking at level-specific transition challenges. I decided that it merited inclusion here, along with some additions and modifications.

6. Those promotions were relatively recent for many of the respondents and perhaps were looming quite large in their minds as they answered the survey questions. But even taking a potential “recency bias” into account, I think it’s fair to say that the shift from functional leader to business unit leader is a challenging transition worthy of study. Although fine work has been done by Harvard Business School’s Linda Hill and others on becoming a manager for the first time, surprisingly little has been written about the experience of being promoted from functional leader to business unit leader. See Linda Hill, Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

7. “Seven seismic shifts” is a trademark of Genesis Advisers LLC.

8. For an in-depth discussion of predictable surprises, see Max Bazerman and Michael Watkins, Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming and How to Prevent Them (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

Chapter 2

1. See Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Scribner, 1966). See also a good description of the model at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kübler-Ross_model.

2. For a discussion of fair process, see W. C. Kim and R. Mauborgne, “Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 1997.

3. This process is believed to have been developed by an HR team at General Electric in the early 1970s. See Steven V. Manderscheid and Alexandre Ardichvili, “New Leader Assimilation: Pruess and Outcomes,” Leadership & Organization Development Journal 29, no. 8 (2008): 661–677.

Chapter 3

1. Jim Sebenius and David Lax developed the idea of winning and blocking coalitions. See D. Lax and J. Sebenius, “Thinking Coalitionally,” in Negotiation Analysis, ed. P. Young (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).

2. For a discussion of sequencing and its role in alliance building, see Lax and Sebenius, “Thinking Coalitionally,” and J. Sebenius, “Sequencing to Build Coalitions: With Whom Should I Talk First?” in Wise Choices: Decisions, Games, and Negotiations, eds. R. Zeckhauser, R. Keeney, and J. Sebenius (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).

Chapter 4

1. This result comes from the same study of 1,200 senior HR leaders with 143 respondents referenced in the introduction.

2. This is an adaptation of the work of Edgar Schein. Schein developed a framework for analyzing culture on three levels—artifacts, norms, and assumptions. Artifacts are the visible signs that differentiate one culture from another, including symbols such as national flags, anthems, and styles of dress. Norms are shared rules that guide “right behavior” (for example, concerning modes of greeting and eating) and appropriate conduct for people at different levels in the social hierarchy. Assumptions are the deeper, often unspoken, beliefs that infuse and underpin social systems. See Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992).

3. There is an extensive literature on social networks and influence. For an article intended for practitioners, see D. Krackhardt and J. R. Hanson, “Informal Networks: The Company Behind the Chart,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 1993): reprint 93406.

Chapter 5

1. This is a reference to the (very useful) book on business culture by Terri Morrison and Wayne Conaway, Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands: The Bestselling Guide to Doing Business in More Than 60 Countries, 2nd ed. (Cincinnati: Adams Media, 2006).

Chapter 6

1. This is an organizational open systems model, of which there are many. The original was the McKinsey 7-S framework, which was developed in the 1960s. For an overview see Jeffrey Bradach, “Organizational Alignment: The 7-S Model,” Harvard Business School Note 497045, 1996.

2. 3-D Business Strategy is a registered trademark of Genesis Advisers LLC.

3. See Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996), as well as the other books that followed in their series on measurement and strategy.

Chapter 7

1. See, for example, “Influencing Behavior,” chapter 2 in P. Zimbardo and M. Leippe, The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991).

2. For a discussion on this and other influence strategies, see Michael Watkins, “The Power to Persuade,” Harvard Business School Note 800323, 2000.

3. This conceptualization was inspired by my exposure to the work of Richard Olivier and Nicholas Janni, the founders of Olivier Mythodrama. They do remarkable work with leadership archetypes, building on the seminal research of Joseph Campbell on the “hero’s journey” as well as work in Jungian psychology.

Chapter 8

1. Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Free Press, 2004).