The New Rules of Thought Leadership in an AI-Driven Future AI is changing everything—but…
Transitioning from Academic to Thought Leader | Michael Watkins | 217
How to you start preparing for a change from academia to thought leadership?
An interview with Michael Watkins about the transition from Harvard professor to best selling author and thought leader.
Today, we have the pleasure of talking with Michael Watkins. He is the Co-Founder of Genesis Advisors and author of Right from the Start and International Best-seller The First 90 Days. Michael discusses how he transitioned from academic to thought leader, consultant, and author. We discuss his hit book and how he changed his approach from his first book.
Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:
- How academics differ from thought leaders.
- Why being able to scale your thought leadership is the key to a successful business.
- How thought leaders can take advantage of a test bed audience.
Are you an accidental guru? Do you want to start transitioning from academic to thought leader? Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you with the process. Contact us and start the conversation!
Transcript
Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Michael Watkins. Michael is the co-founder of a group called Genesis Advisors. He spent two decades working with leaders, both corporate and public, as they transition to new roles, negotiate the future of their organizations and craft their legacies as leaders. He’s an expert in his field, and he’s the author of the international bestseller The First 90 Days, which is a phenomenal book. I must have bought 20 of those over the years to give to friends and colleagues. He’s also a professor of leadership and organizational change management at Imd Business School in Switzerland. And he was on the faculty of Insead and this other place called Harvard you may have heard of. And that’s where he earned his Ph.D.. So welcome aboard, Michael. How are you?
Michael Watkins I’m really good and delighted to be able to spend some time with you.
Peter Winick Great. So you’ve been at this game for quite some time and you check a lot of boxes, if you will. Right. So you’ve got you’ve got a consulting firm. You’re on the academic side. You’re a speaker or you’re an author. Tell us, if you will, sort of how those things play together in your world, where they’re different and where they’re connected. Sure.
Michael Watkins So as a starting point, I describe myself, Peter, as the accidental guru, Right. So I wasn’t sort of going out to do this and thinking, you know, fame and fortune awaits. I got interested in a problem. This is often how it begins, right? The problem was about leaders transitioning in a new role. There wasn’t much out there. Both that I did research, I wrote. I wrote the book. Right. And so the book was the starting point. And actually, the first day, this was the second book I wrote about transitions. The first one was right from the start, and it was a good book, and it sold 35,000 copies. But it wasn’t really written for the audience. It was more an academic book. And so, you know, the first sort of transition I made personally in this space was to really understand how to write to this audience, right? To write to a professional audience, to put it in terms that were really useful, to hit on problems that they really cared about. And that led to the writing of the first 90 days, which then took off like a rocket ship in a way I never really expected it to.
Peter Winick Well, I want to push on that, though, for a minute. Let me posit for a second, if I could, Michael. So first off, 35 thousands of units of a book that’s more academic. That’s like that’s a big deal, right? Because academic is sort of code for unreadable to the normal business population, typically. Right? And academics often write to academics. So the fact that your first book, you sort of said, only 35,000 you know, the average business book today is under 1000 units. I want to touch on sort of how you made the transition, because 90 days was I don’t know how many copies it sold. It’s frightening. Li Large number. But how did you have to change you? Because you, you were an academic and there’s nothing wrong with that, obviously. But what did you have to do differently in order to articulate and communicate and get the message out in the first 90 days and in a way that resonated with a more general business audience?
Michael Watkins Yeah, it was a really important and pretty big change for me, right? So I mean, I come out of a pretty traditional academic background engineering, applied math. You know, I was teaching it at Harvard and, you know, writing for academic audiences and hating every single moment of it. It was just like torture to me. And so and I struggled honestly. I really struggled with the writing. And then I sort of found a voice, right? And I kind of almost can remember when it happened, when I just started writing out of my mind and through my fingers onto the page. And it started flowing because I was speaking to an audience that had practical concerns and I resonated to that and wanted to communicate about it and felt passionate about it. And all of a sudden writing became a joy. And that was a huge shift for me. In parallel with that, you know, I was up for tenure at the Harvard Business School and was writing about this stuff against the advice of my, you know, department heads and so on. But I’d concluded I wasn’t going to get tenure at Harvard, so I might as well do stuff I cared about and not worry about it too much. And so I had this really funny experience of, you know, at almost exactly the same moment being told, okay, you’re not going to get tenure at Harvard and having, you know, the first thing you do is publish and take off like a rocket and on what was then the Businessweek bestseller list for ages. And I was supposed to be in mourning because I hadn’t gotten tenure. I was putting on this big smile on my face. Right. And so, you know, it’s funny how these things happen sometimes, Peter, like these changes that can look on the surface like, that didn’t work out or I didn’t it didn’t make the goal I wanted to it. But it opens up a whole new set of doors.
Peter Winick What was the logic of your colleagues at Harvard when they sort of Pooh poohed the concept in 90 days? Why? Why were they advisor? Because I’m sure their intent was, well, why were they telling you that 90 days as a concept or as a book or construct? It’s not going to work. What was the underlying logic?
Michael Watkins Because I was I was researching and writing leadership without a license. Right. I was in I was in the negotiation and decision group. I had done a lot of work on negotiation. I built a second year course about advanced negotiation and diplomacy concepts. And then I kind of took this right turn because I was just really interested in something. And so they were giving me thoughtful advice about this, but I had already concluded I wasn’t going to make, you know, get tenure at Harvard. And it’s hard to do right. And so I just decided to follow my passion. And that, fortunately, you know, worked out in this circumstance. I guess that’s the message, Peter Right. Which is I mean, I think if you’re going to really be a thought leader for the long run, you need to have some passion and some sense of mission and vision for what you’re doing. Right. You need to find that audience, find that.
Peter Winick Voice. Well, I think the passion is key. But I also think, you know, it’s great to have various opinions, weigh in and give you advice, but you are the you know, you have veto power over everything. So what they said to you was totally true. If the objective was, I want to get tenured at Harvard. Right. The advice that they gave you, first off, you probably shouldn’t have even asked a bunch of academics, what should I do to have a viable, commercially successful business book and a career as a speaker? You wouldn’t even go to them to ask that question, right? So I think it depends on what you’re asking, who you’re asking and what the outcomes are, because I would argue at some level they were 100% sure they were totally right, probably the wrong people to ask the question at that point in time. Based on what your objectives.
Michael Watkins Yeah. Well, no. So it’s a great point, Peter, and you’re absolutely right. I mean, I didn’t ask they, they, they offered. Right. But you know and will mean.
Peter Winick It will.
Michael Watkins Give you well-meaning advice but only you can decide as you said Peter, so appropriately what your what direction you’re going to take, what risks you’re willing to take. I mean, it was a risky thing to do to go this way, right? But it showed up for me and in this case.
Peter Winick So I’m going to talk about the risk because I think you called yourself an accidental guru. And I always say most folks in this space, it’s accidental. I mean, I think it’s less than 2 or 3% of the folks I’ve worked with and talk to over the many years where they made a deliberate effort to say, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to be an author. Speaking like that had sort of the deliberate plan and it was somewhat manufactured and business planned out, all that sort of stuff. For most, it just sort of happened. And then at some point you have to pause and say, whoa. So I want to ask you what the transition from academics. So that’s, you know, steady paycheck, nice life, good stuff to, you know, entrepreneur because now you’ve got content that’s great but holy crap, you got to you got to sell it, you got to have clients. You got to figure out how to price it. You got to figure out if the market values it. How did you tackle that piece of it? Because that’s a whole different game.
Michael Watkins It is a whole different game. And I think, again, Fortune favors the ball, right, as we say. But, you know, and Fortune favors a prepared mind, right? Having some sense of plan, some sense of what you’re going to try. Right. And for me, one of the most important things was having an initial client that really was kind of very jazzed up about the work. Right. And that client was Johnson and Johnson. I formed a partnership with them to bring the first ideas to their leaders. I built programs for them and I learned a tremendous amount through doing that. And so I guess that’s one piece of advice I’d give, John, which is find yourself almost like a test bed, a place that you can refine your ideas, your thinking, you know, a set of people that are on the practitioner side or the audience side that can help you kind of craft yourself. Because it, you know, for me, that paid off tremendously. By the time the first 90 days was published, I had already had a couple of years of working with JJ, with their leaders, refining the tools in the approach and so on. And so when I, you know, when I came to write the first 90 days, it kind of just flowed out of me and it was already sort of battle tested.
Peter Winick Sure.
Michael Watkins And so I think that, you know, and I think there’s a general lesson there, Peter, which is find a way to really test yourself. Sure. Right. Find a, you know, a client, an audience, someone you can work with your stuff with to really refine it before you try to take it to market.
Peter Winick So I want to stay there for a minute because I think that’s a critical point. There are, broadly speaking, two ways that people go about developing their thought leadership and their content. Number one, you know, they dive in deep, they have a hypothesis, they research the heck out of it. They write, they research, they rewrite the research. And then, you know, they unfold the curtain and reveal it to the universe. And either things happen or they don’t. That’s one way. The other way is, is it’s an ongoing iterative communication and a process and a testing of hypotheses where the book is not the greatest place in the world to test the hypotheses because it’ll take you 18 months, it’s 250 pages. And if you got it wrong, it’s wrong. But blogging articles, there’s other ways to develop content work, you know, client work, my client work something better than life, client work. Even if you’re you have to discount it a bit to get in the door. Exactly. So. It sounds like you were more open minded in testing the hypotheses. So by the time the book came out, you didn’t know what would be the success it would be. You know, actually, this stuff works exactly right.
Michael Watkins And I think that lots of people have had that reaction to the book of, Wow, this is really practical. Wow. It really works. You know, like, yeah, and that’s good. But I think if I try to do what you just said and actually for the first book that was modestly successful, compare the proceedings. That’s what I did, right? I went out and researched with a colleague, Dan Champion wrote a book that, you know, was intended for practitioners but had a practical, you know, had a somewhat academic tone to it. And it did fine. Right. But it was when I did the work that deeper work of engaging with the audience beginning to do that iterative work you’re describing and refining it, see what works and what doesn’t until you really had something that was well thought through and worked and you could take it to the market and then boom, you know, you’re kind of away to the races.
Peter Winick If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcasts, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple podcast and on all major listening apps as well as at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts.
Can you give an example? Maybe if you recall, of a couple of things that you learned during the sort of beta phase, A, J and J that you then went back to the model or the methodology, the book tweak, modified it, etc. and geez, if I hadn’t picked up that insight, this may have had a different outcome.
Michael Watkins Yeah, no, I can give you at least one or maybe a couple of examples, right? And I think so very early in the work I was doing with leaders, how change and this was programs for leaders that had just been promoted. It became obvious that the way you take a new job depends a lot on the nature of the situation you’re inheriting, right? Is that a yes? Is it a crisis? Is it an accelerated growth scenario? Are you coming in after someone who is really successful? And that led me to create what I called the stars model, which is startup turnaround, accelerated growth realignment, sustaining success, which is probably the single most thing that people remember the most about the framework, right? And so and I wouldn’t have got there without that engagement.
Peter Winick So, so basically the entire model would have been missing is what you’re saying.
Michael Watkins You don’t know for sure. Right. And, you know, I mean, it’s one of these things where we’re like, in retrospect, it’s blindingly obvious, right, as so many things are. But it was really only through that engagement, you know, that I saw that the ideas I had had to be tailored and applied very differently depending on the situation. So there’s a set of principles that are general and tools that work, but the way you apply them in the context, well, duh. But on the other hand, that that set of interactions with those leaders really helped me refine and distill that down into something that turned out to be very, very useful.
Peter Winick Cool. One area I want to touch on is because sometimes we don’t see it in the moment. So now you’ve got the book. The book is starting to take off and now it’s a thing. At what point do you realize like, whoa, there’s a rocket ship and what do I need to do? And maybe this is outside of my comfort zone and man, people are inviting me to be like, things start happening really, really fast in a short period of time. Yes. And I’ve seen people freeze and miss a lifetime opportunity. I’ve seen people embrace it with grace and wisdom, and I’ve seen people do everything in between. So how did you do that? Did you actually get something right?
Michael Watkins I did. I did. And I think the key thing is to recognize when you need a platform from which to begin to really have a larger impact. You know, if it’s just you, you can you can do a lot. You know, you can do a lot of speaking as an individual. You don’t need much of a support system to do that. But if you’re really going to have a bigger impact, especially if you’re, as I wanted to really want to take this work to client companies, you’ve got to decide at some point you need to build a platform, as in an organization, as in a firm, to do that right now, you know, think about me coming out of academics. I actually had some entrepreneurship in my background and I kind of always have been a sort of intellectual and entrepreneur, but I knew diddly about how to build a consulting company, right? And so it’s at that point that you really need, you know, the right people and you need to find the right people that can help you scale. You know, this this idea, take it to market, effectively, build products around it that are robust, You know, because the other thing was, I mean, I used to do these workshops, you know, and I do a dozen or more a year at JNJ, and no two would ever be the same, right? I mean, it was absolutely because I was kind of just trying things out and seeing what’s happened and always not interesting around. I could pull it off. I could pull it off. Peter Sure. But if you want to scale something, you’ve got to have it. Systematized, you know, boiled down to its essence, able to be transferred to other people who can do it. And that’s just a whole other order of business right to do. And you need.
Peter Winick To find the people that can do it. So. So you’re preaching to the choir, totally preaching to the choir. And I want to sort of push on a couple of things that you said and unpack them a little bit. So, number one, there’s nothing wrong with getting paid well to go speak and do workshops and be the guy or the guy that’s not. And a lot of people initially fall into that trap because it makes it that implies that it’s a negative. But that’s the path they take. Right. And it’s a limiting path on a couple of reasons. It’s a limiting path financially. It’s a limiting path relative to the impact that your work can have. And then ultimately you get bored, right? Like you don’t want to do the same thing every day. And I think when you make those investments in the platform. And codifying the model and the methodology so that it could stand on its own. I mean, obviously you need people to deliver it, but it’s not dependent on you being in the room with your content. You change the trajectory of having a nice practice, and practices are limited by their very nature. Yes. To an actual business that’s scalable. And you’ve been doing that for a long, long time. And that’s, you know, it’s the heart of what we do with so many of our clients. And it’s interesting to me that you saw that early on because sometimes people don’t come to that realization until much later.
Michael Watkins Well, I think I think you absolutely nailed that, Peter. Right. And as you say, there’s nothing wrong with saying, look, I’m going to build a nice practice. Yeah. I’m going to gradually increase my fees. I’m going to do X number of speeches a year. You know, to be honest with you, Peter, there’s days when I yearn for that, right? Because it was simpler in so many ways, right? And now when you’re running an organization or more importantly, when you’re the thought leader for an organization, there’s a lot that rides on you, right, in terms of your ability to continue to generate ideas to generate business. So there’s a little bit of nostalgia for me for a simpler, simpler life, if you will.
Peter Winick Sometimes the right.
Michael Watkins But the flip side is there’s enormous, you know, satisfaction in seeing an organization take root, grow, become excellent at what it does deliver superior value for the organization, extend the, you know, the reach of your ideas, become a platform for you to do other interesting things with. I mean, it’s incredibly rewarding, right? But it’s not obvious how you do that, right? Which again, I think is why that’s the sort of work you do is so important because I consider myself somewhat fortunate that I was able to sort of navigate this transition to running a consulting company. And I want to it was interesting. Easy.
Peter Winick Sure. Well, and for most folks, if we were to document, what does it take and what are the attributes and capabilities of a great academic, what are the attributes and in the capabilities of a great workshop facilitator, what are the attributes of capabilities of a managing partner of a consulting firm? The crossover is very small, yes, right. So that’s why people struggle with this, because you can you kill an unfortunate. I’ve seen some amazingly mind blowing content that never sees the light of day because people don’t have the business savvy or the business acumen or whatever the case may be because running a consulting firm is not easy. You have to deal with things like clients and deliverables and receivables and, you know, having the balance of a bench and bill ability. And those are not the metrics that we’re looking at when we’re doing some cool research on a book. So I, I think it’s, it’s unusual for someone to be able to thread the needle on all those.
Michael Watkins It is. And, you know, I think I feel like I got pretty lucky. But even then there were ups and downs, right? I mean, you know, we had our highs, we had our lows. And I’m sure, you know, today I’m fortunate to have a CEO who is immensely capable and experienced in running these kinds of businesses. Right. And so and I he is my absolute partner in every sense of the word. And he has someone like him, frees someone like me to do the thought leadership work, the client development work, the strategic delivery work. Yeah. But really is what a thought leader in a business like this should be doing. But, you know, I again, I won’t claim that I had a brilliant plan for doing this. And I was very fortunate because Rich Wexler, to be able to build this partnership with Rich because he’s just so capable in those areas. So let me.
Peter Winick Ask you this. So I don’t know. Rich, Right. Most people, when they’re authors are thought leaders. When they think of a partner, they want someone like them. They want a writing partner. They want someone that’s that they can bounce ideas off of that’s creative or whatever, and it’s often what they need the least. So like, are you and rich opposites or where do you get overlap? So I want to extend the partnership.
Michael Watkins No, no, we’re very much opposites and therefore very complementary. Right? I mean, he came up through, you know, consulting firms initially as finance and then as CFO person and then interim chief operating officer and doing lots of deals and, you know, growing businesses like these businesses. And he’s very connected in the industry. You know, he’s just a. Really a capable operating and strategic executor, which is which, you know, I can make a shot at doing those things. You know, I’m okay at organizing things, but it’s not my. Not my true talent by any means. Sure. So no, Rich and I are really different people, but together we we’re a absolutely great team. And I think to your point, you’ve got to understand that you probably need people who are quite different than you if you’re going to run a business. Exactly right. I mean, I collaborate with people lots right around, you know, I just had a paper, a new article in this, the brand new Harvard Business Review on how insider CEOs, you know, can be more effective in making that transition. And I did it jointly with the chairman of a big executive search company. Right. So those are very valuable. You’re writing partnerships, but it’s not the core of what it takes to do what you’re describing, which is creative organization, scale of business, the sorts of things that you do.
Peter Winick I love it. I love it. So as we’re wrapping up now and any final thoughts to let me just you know, I would be remiss if I didn’t take advantage of the of the 90 days, but someone who might be in their first 90 days as an author or a thought leader.
Michael Watkins Yeah, well, I mean, the foundation to me, Peter, always is, is the ideas. Right? You need ideas. And so whether you do the, you know, route that you describe, which is go ahead and do that research, you know, and come and come to the market with something just astonishing. Or you go through the process I did of finding, you know, lead users and prototyping and refining. You’ve got to you’ve got to, you know, get that diamond because the diamond is the basis for everything that happens thereafter. Yep. Right. And I think and I think and then once you’ve got the diamond, you’ve got to make the second set of choices you alluded to. Right. Which is I’m just going to kind of be, you know, Peter Incorporated or am I going to try and build something? And if I’m going to go down the road of building something, where do I get the help I need.
Peter Winick To do that?
Michael Watkins Exactly right. Where do I find the support, the advice, you know, to create something because that’s not necessarily going to be something that comes naturally.
Peter Winick Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I’ve been a fan for a long time. It was great to get sort of the, you know, behind the scenes story. So thank you so much.
Michael Watkins Great to be able to join you, Peter. Thank you.
Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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