Michael Watkins

Michael Watkins is a professor of leadership and organizational change at IMD. He is also the author of the highly influential leadership transition guide, The First 90 Days, described as “the onboarding bible” by the Economist and included as one of the best 100 business books of all time by 800-CEO-Read (now Porchlight) and on Amazon's list of 100 leadership and success books to read in a lifetime. In 2023, Watkins was inducted into the Thinkers50 Management Hall of Fame, which recognizes remarkable contributions to the realm of management concepts and ideas spanning many years.

Over the past 20 years, Watkins has used his First 90 Days® methodology to help leaders make successful transitions, both in his teaching at IMD, INSEAD, and Harvard Business School, as well as through his private consultancy practice Genesis Advisors, which he co-founded.

Watkins has authored 15 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.

Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming, and How to Prevent Them was named one of the best business books of 2004 by strategy+business and won the 2006 annual Kulp-Wright Award from The American Risk and Insurance Association. Two of his books on negotiation – Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World’s Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts and Breakthrough Business Negotiation: A Toolbox for Managers – won the CPR Institute’s prize for best books in the field of negotiation in 2001 and 2003. His 2024 book, The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, explores how executives can learn to think strategically and lead their organizations into the future.