Book review: Your Next Move
 Book author: Michael Watkins
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Australia
As a follow up to his successful book The First 90 Days, Michael Watkins has expanded on the key principles introduced and applied them to diverse transitions encountered by high-level corporate executives in Your Next Move.
When you pick it up, the book appears to be a useful handbook to a variety of career transitions for leaders across various sized businesses and sectors. However, if you aren’t at an executive level, in a large corporation, this book likely won’t be useful as the examples and strategies are mainly relevant to that niche market.
But that’s not to say that this book is rubbish.
The content in the book appears to be well-researched both through Michael Watkins’ own studies as well as through research and books published by other authors.
In the book, he addresses the eight career transitions that he found to be representative of the most common transitions that high-level leaders face, with each chapter dedicated to a single transition – the promotion challenge; the leading-former-peers challenge; the corporate diplomacy challenge; the onboarding challenge; the international move challenge; the turnaround challenge; the realignment challenge; and the business portfolio challenge.
Featuring a case study of an executive’s transition, each chapter discusses the specific transition, introduces typical problems encountered and the challenges faced, provides and expands on strategies, and concludes with a checklist to help ensure that the transition is successful.
Michael also introduces his STARS (Start-up, Turnaround, Accelerated growth, Realignment, and Sustaining success) model. Designed to guide leaders through the various transitions, the model helps to identify the business situation they are transitioning into.
While the book can be dry and the content fairly straight-forward, Michael lays out the content systematically and provides diagrams to clarify strong points. The content itself is thorough while managing to be succinct.
The most interesting chapter, and most relevant for non-corporate executives, is the onboarding chapter – when you are brought into an organisation or transition business units. Figuring out how to make your impact without getting backs up, is a key aspect of starting on the right foot and Michael covers this very well.
While Your Next Move provides some good information, the book is targeted to such a niche group that unless you fit that description this book won’t be useful.
Our rating: 7/10
By Alyssa MacLash, Co-editor, Women & Leadership Australia eNewsletter
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