Michael Watkins

Michael Watkins Profile

The world’s leading expert on accelerating transitions, Dr. Michael Watkins is a bestselling author who has previously taught at such prestigious institutions as IMD in Switzerland, INSEAD in France and the Harvard Business School (Harvard also being where he earned his PhD).

Watkins’ book, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at all Levels, has been translated into more than twenty languages and sold more than 200,000 copies. It is considered the definitive text on ‘on-boarding’. His work has garnered many awards, including the 2006 Kulp-Wright Book Award and the 2002 CPR Institute Negotiation Book prize.

Alongside his publishing successes Watkins also designs award-winning programs for transition acceleration, notably for Johnson & Johnson where he continues to teach on their renowned leadership program, the Transition Leadership Forum. He is also Harvard Business School Publishing’s content expert for their award-winning e-learning system, Leadership Transitions.

Watkins brought his experience of business transitions into another field between 1991 and 1996 as a faculty member at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he taught negotiation to senior leaders in the national security community. This experience provided him with the material for a highly regarded series of case studies on international negotiations and the book (co-authored with Susan Rosegrant) Breakthrough International Negotiation, winner of the CPR Institute’s Prize for best book in the field of negotiation 2001.

Watkins is also the chairman of the company he founded in 2003, Genesis Advisers, which helps organizations move from an outdated view that transitioning executives should sink or swim towards a new model promoting successful accelerated leadership transitions. This model has proved its real-world worth in many Fortune 500 companies and branches of the Federal Government.

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  • Dr. Michael Watkins is the world′s leading expert on accelerating transitions. Michael is the Chairman of an executive on-boarding and transition acceleration company. Previously he was a professor at IMD in Switzerland, INSEAD in France, the Harvard Business School, and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Dr. Michael Watkins is a widely-published expert on leadership. He has designed award-winning programs in accelerating transitions, Future Enterprise Leadership™ development, negotiation, and corporate diplomacy.

  Michael is author of the international bestseller The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at all Levels. Considered ‘the on-boarding bible,’ more than 200,000 copies have been sold in over 20 languages. Watkins coined the term ‘Predictable Surprise’ in his book Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming and How to Prevent Them, which won the 2006 Kulp-Wright Book Award and was named a Strategy + Business best business book of 2004. His latest book is Your Next Move: The Leader′s Guide to Successfully Navigating Major Career Transitions (Harvard Business Press).

  A prolific writer, Dr. Watkins is the author or co-author of many books on leadership and negotiation, including: The First 90 Days in Government: Critical Success Strategies for New Public Managers at All Levels (Harvard Business School Press), Shaping the Game: The New Leader’s Guide to Effective Negotiating (Harvard Business School Press), Case Studies in US Trade Negotiation, Vol.1: Making the Rule, and Vol.2:Resolving Disputes (Institute for International Economics).

  Additional titles include, Breakthrough Business Negotiation: A Toolbox for Managers, which won the CPR Institute Negotiation Book Prize in 2002, Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World’s Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts (2001), Winning the Influence Game: What Every Business Leader Should Know About Government (2000), and Right from the Start: Taking Charge in a New Leadership Role (1999). He is Harvard Business School Publishing’s content expert for Leadership Transitions, the award-winning e-learning system, and also has written numerous articles on leadership and negotiation for Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Leadership Quarterly, Executive Update, and Negotiation Journal.

  From 2004-2006, Dr. Watkins was a Professor of Practice in Organizational Behavior at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, where he taught leadership and negotiation in INSEAD′s Advanced Management Program.

  In 2003, Dr. Watkins founded Genesis Advisers, the leading transition acceleration consultancy. Genesis helps organizations move beyond the antiquated “sink or swim” approach to executive transitions, toward a model where successful, accelerated leadership transitions are the norm. The Genesis model for onboarding is used though the Fortune 500 and various branches of the Federal Government.

  From 1996 to 2003, Dr. Watkins was an Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School where he did research on negotiation and leadership. At the same time, Dr. Watkins began to explore how to accelerate leaders’ transitions into challenging new roles, an outgrowth of his work on change leadership. After co-authoring (with Dan Ciampa) Right From the Start in 1999, he entered into a research partnership with Johnson & Johnson to explore organization-wide approaches to accelerating leadership transitions. He created two new leadership transition acceleration programs and a new acceleration coaching initiative for J&J. He continues to teach J&J’s most highly rated leadership program, the Transition Leadership Forum in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and has over 1000 “alumni” in that company.

  Between 1991 and 1996, Dr. Watkins was a member of the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. While there, he began to teach negotiation to senior leaders in the national security community. This stimulated his research on international diplomacy, which focused on how leading diplomats negotiate in high-stakes situations. The result was a widely-praised series of case studies on James Baker’s efforts to build of the first Gulf-war coalition, Robert Gallucci’s negotiations on behalf of the U.S. with North Korea, US and UN humanitarian operations in Somalia, Richard Holbrooke and the Dayton negotiations in Bosnia, and Shimon Peres’ efforts to initiate the Oslo Peace process. Dr. Watkins’ studies of the Middle East conflict led to an affiliation with Shimon Peres’ Institute of Peace in Tel Aviv, where he taught conflict management techniques to up-and-coming political leaders from Egypt, Israel, Jordon, and the Palestinian Authority. These experiences also led him to coauthor (with Susan Rosegrant) Breakthrough International Negotiation, which combines the diplomacy case studies and analysis, and which won the CPR Institute’s Prize for best book in the field of negotiation in 2001.

  A native of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, Dr. Watkins received a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo. Following graduation, he worked as a project engineer on alternative energy projects, and commissioned and tested an experimental wind-diesel hybrid generator in Northern Ontario. He then did graduate work in law and business at the University of Western Ontario, prior to completing his Ph.D. in Decision Sciences at Harvard University under the tutelage of his mentor, Howard Raiffa. Dr. Watkins’s early research focused on negotiation in new product development teams, and he did extensive research and consulting at Ford of Europe in the U.K. and Germany.