Books
Faculty Writings of Interest
Back to the Drawing Board by Colin B. Carter and Jay W. Lorsch
The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins
Back to the Drawing Board
by Colin B. Carter and Jay W. Lorsch (Harvard Business School Press)
Corporate boards are frequent targets of criticism in the wake of recent corporate scandals. But in their new book, Back to the Drawing Board: Designing Corporate Boards for a Complex World, HBS professor Jay Lorsch and the Boston Consulting Group’s Colin Carter (MBA ’71) argue that corporate boards have made progress in the last decade, but are being pressed to perform unrealistic duties, given their structure, processes, and membership. “Boards are trying to raise their game,” write the authors, “but they are impeded in this effort by working to a model that does not adequately recognize their central limitation — time and knowledge.”
Much of the book’s content is drawn from the authors’ extensive experience working with and serving on boards and on their survey of CEOs from around the world. Lorsch and Carter found that even when best practices are followed, implementing them is difficult or often carries deleterious side effects. The authors therefore propose that boards must be designed individually to be attuned to — and more capable of successfully carrying out — their particular mix of oversight, decision-making, and advisory roles. “Boards are most likely to be effective,” they write, “if their structures are design-ed to suit the circumstances of their company and the role the board has elected to play.”
For Lorsch and Carter, an effective design should usually include making boards smaller, ensuring their independence, maintaining three core committees, and providing leadership that reinforces the board’s independence and effectiveness. Within this general framework, they suggest numerous ways that boards can improve themselves. Boards of public companies are imperfect institutions, the authors write, “but no viable alternative has been proposed, so we must make the most of the best governance tools at our disposal.” In the future, Lorsch and Carter envision that “boards will possess a genuine portfolio of diverse skills, accept more specialized roles among directors, and demonstrate a relationship of equals based on trust.”
The First 90 Days
by Michael Watkins (Harvard Business School Press)
So you’re taking charge of a new organization. Congratulations. Now, get busy. You’ve got just ninety days to break even — that is, to move from getting acquainted with the job, to getting it done well. It’s not much time — even the president of the United States gets one hundred days — but HBS associate professor Michael Watkins insists that it can be done.
In his new book, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Watkins, an expert on leadership transition, presses his case for “accelerating” the critical transition period that begins when a new CEO — or a new manager at any level — is hired.
Watkins estimates that more than a half-million managers enter new positions each year in Fortune 500 companies alone. Each new hire costs an organization in the time spent overcoming often steep learning curves. Even so, transitioning has not generally been taught as a specific management skill, until now.
Most companies report that it takes roughly six months for new managers at all levels to reach what Watkins calls the “breakeven point” — the point at which new leaders contribute as much value to the organization as their settling-in process consumes from it. But Watkins asserts that leaders can successfully cut that transition time — with its potential costs — in half.
The First 90 Days lays out a ten-step strategy for effective transitions, giving practical guidelines on how to assess individual strengths and weaknesses, diagnose specific corporate situations and recognize challenges and opportunities, establish credibility, create momentum, and de-velop coalitions of support.
Recognizing that new leaders have very little time for long-winded theories, Watkins’s book cuts right to the heart of the matter, clearly stating what to do to succeed and how to avoid the pitfalls that lead to failure. “Transitioning,” Watkins writes, “is a teachable skill,” one that every forward-thinking manager would be prudent to learn.
— Margie Kelley
