The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter

by Michael D. Watkins

FOGLAMP is an acronym for focus, oversight, goals, leadership, abilities, means, and process. This tool can help you cut through the haze and plan your critical projects.

to decide whether to engage in planned change or collective learning.

you would be well advised to focus on setting up a collective learning process and not on developing and imposing change plans.

Rather than mount a frontal assault on the organization’s defenses, you should engage in something akin to guerrilla warfare, slowly chipping away at people’s resistance and raising their awareness of the need for change.

exposing key people to new ways of operating and thinking about the business,

benchmarking of best-in-class organizations, getting the group to analyze how your ...

persuade people to envision new approaches to doing things—for example, by scheduling an off-site meeting to brainstorm about key objectives...

5-2 Diagnostic framework for managing change

Simply blowing up the existing culture and starting over is rarely the right answer. People—and organizations—have limits on the change they can absorb all at once. And organizational cultures invariably have virtues as well as faults; they provide predictability and can be sources of pride. If you send the message that there is nothing good about the existing organization and its culture, you will rob people of a key source of stability in times of change. You also will deprive yourself of a potential wellspring of energy you could tap to improve performance.