Your Next Move

The Leader's Guide to Successfully Navigating Major Career Transitions

By: Michael Watkins

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

After three months in a new job, are you up to speed? Will you sink...or swim? Transitions into new roles are the crucibles in which leaders get their toughest tests, and they're the defining factor in professional careers today.

Yet far too often, leaders fail to transition effectively into new roles. The resulting costs are high, for your career and the organization.

In Your Next Move, leadership-transition guru Michael Watkins shows how you can survive and thrive in all the major transitions you will face during your career, including promotion, on-boarding into a new organization, and making an international move. With real-life examples and case studies, he illustrates the defining hurdles associated with each type of transition.

He then provides the insights, strategies, and tools-including relationship reengineering, business systems analysis, and "organizational immunology" - you'll need to accelerate through these crucial turning points and continue moving up in your career.

The necessary complement to the author's best-selling guide The First 90 Days, Your Next Move offers the keen observations, tried-and-true management wisdom, and practical good sense Watkins is renowned for. It's a vital resource for any manager or executive seeking to maintain career momentum.

©2009 Michael Watkins (P)2009 Gildan

Excellent Executive Road Map

At last, an American business author who writes as if he will be believed, a narrator who reads clearly as if he were sitting in a lounge with you, no repetition or exaggerated strong points and no examples gleaned from a clammy home life.

I found myself reviewing my performance over the past two decades and wishing I had had this book beside me. It passed the ultimate two listener's book tests: I wished I could highlight things as I drove in my car; and I went out and bought the book. No need for the abridged version; Watkins wastes no words. Dry, realistic, insightful and helpful. I shall get his first book, 'The First 90 Days'.

50% filler, 25% useful info, 25% meh.

The author does have some really good theories and advice, about 2.5 hours worth. The rest sounds like a filler. What drives me nuts is that he describes a realistic scenario for about 10 minutes, but then goes all academic on it without APPLYING his theory to the situations he set up. This leaves me hanging and unsatisfied at the end of every chapter. Also, it is not a big deal, but the narrator clearly pronounces H in words where h is silent, e.g. what, why, which is kind of annoying and funny. It reminds me of a Family Guy episode.

Solid advice

The author provides solid data-driven advice for a number of different types of transitions. My only disappointment is the fact that the book references tools and checklists available at YourNextMove.net, but that website no longer appears to exist.