The First Ninety Days

This book is an excellent example of the “would this be better as a long blog post” litmus test (which it strongly fails.)

It’s not that the book is bad on its own merits.

There are a couple novel and useful pieces of advice: the framing of the breakeven point (the point at which you start to provide more value to the company than the company provides to you) is good, and the advice around early wins and different “types” of transitions are all solid.

There are also a lot of frankly bad pieces of advice (or pieces of advice that seem incredibly incorrect for my line of work).

But overall it feels just so padded and vacuous to me, a personal who has been in industry for seven years (and has read Moral Mazes, which very much feels like a deconstruction of this type of book.) If you are just entering industry for the first time, this book may be worth your while, but there are no brilliant secrets or keys that this book contains: it’s mostly just obvious advice that you have likely heard before.