The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders - book review

The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels by Michael Watkins, 2003.

Michael Watkins’ book tackles the opportunities and challenges that face people moving into new positions and provides some useful guidelines for setting yourself up for success in the critical first three months in a new job. It helps you to identify what type of position you are moving into (startup, turnaround, realignment, sustaining success) and gives strategies for succeeding in each of them.

Particularly useful are chapters five and six that talk about establishing a relationship with your new supervisor and how to set realistic expectations for what you plan to achieve.

The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership - book review

Recommended to me by one of the most creative and innovative Mercy Corps country directors I’ve ever worked with, Steven Sample writes an unusual and iconoclastic management book that I would highly recommend to contrarians everywhere!

Sample presents a very personal and esoteric model of leadership - his thesis is anecdotal, and his examples are drawn overwhelmingly from his experiences in two US universities - he’s certainly not for everyone.

The title makes reference to his style of presenting each chapter as turning some piece of conventional wisdom on it’s head, for example, by suggesting that, instead of keeping up with current affairs, newspapers and trade journals, a leader should focus on reading books that have been continually read for over 400 year (what Sample calls ’supertexts’). He suggests that you depend on your team members to keep up with the daily press, the point being that you can’t copy your way to excellence; rather, true excellence can only be achieved through original thinking and unconventional approaches. According to Sample, you’ll get that from Homer, not the New York Times.

Making long distance meetings more enjoyable!

Having been in some really frustrating telephone conferences in the past couple of weeks I spent some time looking for tips on how to make these meetings a) more effective b) more enjoyable. While nostalgia for the good old days when meetings were always face-to-face over a cup of tea or coffee, communication was easy, and our inboxes were managable, we have to face the fact that a lot of time is spent on phones and (increasingly) using video or web conferencing technology and figure out how to do it better. I have attached what I found to be the most useful article, a brief 1 1/2 page set of tips of things which are often common sense but often forgotten.

This link will take you to the article Tips for Virtual Meetings.
I found the most useful suggestions to be:

What do communities think of NGO approaches to security?

The Feinstein International Famine Center was commissioned by the United Kingdom NGO-Military Contact Group last year to publish a paper called 'Mapping the Security Environment - Understanding the perceptions of local communities, peace support operations, and assistance agencies' (click the link to download the pdf) by Larry Minear and Antonio Donini. This article by Michele Madore for Mercy Corps gives us a good summary.

The paper asks whether aid workers and military forces effectively assess and meet the security desires of local communities, and how well local communities view the effectiveness of military and aid groups in terms of security provision in places like Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Sierra Leone.

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The Death of Environmentalism (article)

The Death of Environmentalism - Global warming politics in a post-environmental world by Michael Shellenberger and Ed Nordhaus, published by the Breakthrough Institute. This link will take you to a pdf of the article.

The article is based on interviews with 25 leaders in the mainstream environmental movement and looks at some of the challenges of 'environmentalism' over the past decades. The authors argue that the modern environmental movement is ill-equipped to face the massive global challenges of climate change (among other things). Their critique claims that, while environmentalism has had many successes in the past decades, there is a surfeit of visionary new ideas, and 'environmental' problems are narrowly defined, with proffered solutions tending to be short-sighted and technical.