This article aims to share my thoughts on reading this book and what happened in the end.

Origins

About eight or nine months ago, my boss recommended this book to me. I love reading, so I finished the book before starting the job and began writing this article. A large part of the draft was written at that time.

During the first lunch gathering after joining the company, I asked the other colleagues about their thoughts on this book. An colleague who was about to leave told me: “I couldn’t finish reading half of it. I felt there were some unreasonable parts, and I think it has some brainwashing elements.”

My reaction was just “Oh, really?”, thinking to myself that much of the content in this book aligns with MBA management courses, what’s the problem? (laughs)

Later, I learned that several of my colleagues who joined the company at the same time as me didn’t finish reading the book. Those of you who can read this article to the end will probably understand why.

Now, let’s look at my notes for the entire book:

Reaching the Break-even Point

The book mentions that for the first one to three months in a new position, you might still be consuming value, and it’s not until the fourth month that you start to contribute. By the sixth month, you might be able to make up for the value consumed earlier. Among the 200 leaders interviewed who were externally hired or promoted, the average time to reach the break-even point was 6.2 months.

I think this content is quite reasonable. Three months is probably just enough to understand the organizational structure and operational model. My three-month progress in this small company was fast, having already completed some projects, but I still didn’t have a full grasp of historical issues.

The book also mentions some traps for newcomers and basic principles for job transition periods, which can serve as daily reminders:

Common Traps

• Sticking to the familiar: Believing past methods are the best
  
• Falling victim to the “action imperative”: Eager to perform, rushing to show results
  
• Setting unrealistic expectations: Misalignment between your expectations and those of your boss or peers
  
• Attempting to do too much: Multitasking excessively
  
• Coming in with “the” answer: Jumping to conclusions too quickly on everything
  
• Learning the wrong things: Focusing too much on technical learning while neglecting interpersonal relationships, team culture, and other aspects
  
• Neglecting horizontal relationships: Only considering direct subordinates’ feelings without establishing connections with lateral stakeholders.

Basic Principles for Job Transition Periods

• Prepare yourself: Including breaking away from the mindset of the previous job and preparing for the new position.
  
• Accelerate learning: Keep up with the organization’s pace, understand the market, products, technology, systems, and structure.
  
• Adjust strategies according to the situation: Judging the situation is important.
  
• Secure early wins: Seek momentum early to create a positive cycle, fostering an atmosphere that good things are happening.
  
• Negotiate for success conditions: Don’t fabricate or guess your superior’s expectations, but engage in serious dialogue with your boss to discuss the current situation, expectations, work (communication style), resources, and personal development. In simple terms, the plan for these 90 days needs to reach a consensus with your superior.
  
• Promote strategic alignment: Understand if the organization’s strategy and structure are consistent and coordinated.
  
• Build your team: Select the right people, match talents to roles.
  
• Create alliances: Find support groups (like-minded individuals), analyze stakeholders, judge who is most helpful to your success, and find ways to persuade necessary allies.
  
• Maintain balance: Find inner balance to make the right decisions
  Help everyone accelerate: Assist others in adapting to the changes brought by your arrival.

Risks and Difficulties of Job Transitions

This book uses a simple test to help everyone understand the different risks of job transitions and promotions. The risks of each team transition are different, whether it’s an internal transfer, leading a team, changing job content, or crossing regions, the content to pay attention to is slightly different and worth a closer look. I particularly like the following quote:

“Joining a new company is akin to an organ transplant—and you’re the new organ. If you’re not thoughtful in adapting to the new situation, you could end up being attacked by the organizational immune system and rejected.”

In my four job transition experiences, I have encountered the obstacles mentioned in the book, including not understanding the new team’s communication methods and who influences whom. These are the most important things to overcome in the first three months. In many slow-paced company cultures, even three months might not be enough. People will still be reserved towards newcomers who are still in the adaptation period. The worst scenario is thinking everything is settled and understood, only to suddenly realize later that the organ is being attacked.

“To overcome these barriers and succeed in joining a new company, you should focus on four pillars of effective onboarding: business orientation, stakeholder connection, alignment of expectations, and cultural adaptation.”

Among these, alignment of expectations is almost the core of all problems. I think what’s most special about this job transition is that I’ve come to Japan, an environment that emphasizes “reading the air.” Many people don’t dare to speak directly about what’s happening face-to-face, but they might complain to stakeholders behind the scenes. The person involved only finds out at the end.

Although there are big cultural differences, consensus really needs to be carefully studied. This point applies to all cultures; as long as you don’t guess, there’s no problem.

Business Orientation

When I was reading this book, I was comparing the English version with the Mandarin version. The Mandarin version translated “Business Orientation” as “familiarizing with business.” This reminds me of a small story. When I was working at a Korean company, I often needed to help with cross-departmental translation and communication. Every time I directly translated the Korean word “업무 (business)” into “business” in Chinese in emails, it would cause controversy. For example: “I suggest handing this business over to the engineering department for handling, please ask them to write a simple report.” Taiwanese engineers would always object, saying: “Hey! Why should engineering do business work!”

PS: The Korean word “업무 (business)” means work obligations and duties, almost never having the meaning of sales or the “business” position as in Mandarin. In the Ministry of Education’s Mandarin Dictionary, the definition of “business” is: work-related affairs, generally referred to as “business,” such as “travel business,” which is consistent with the meaning of business in Korean or Japanese.

⋯⋯Anyway, since that job, I’ve been subconsciously avoiding using the word “business,” super afraid that readers would complain about why this book is all about business affairs, isn’t it applicable to other jobs?

Well, the Business Orientation mentioned in this book is the same. What the author wants to express is that regardless of the position, whether or not one is engaged in sales or marketing work, one should understand the company’s products and operations, as these will affect whether you can exert influence.

I deeply felt the importance of being familiar with the business during my recent interview process.

A startup HR proactively arranged a Coffee Chat, which is a step before the formal interview, but during this hour and a half casual chat, she gave me a company introduction similar to an enterprise pitch, using her own complete company report, including the company’s business model and current progress. Because I had watched several founders’ pitches and interview videos before this call, I already had some curious questions, and of course, I fully utilized this time to ask her, and she was able to answer all of them, which impressed me very much. Later I found out that she had only joined the company a few months ago.

Her understanding and identification with the company left a very good impression on me. Later, I also had the opportunity to meet the senior product manager of that company, who mentioned that every candidate praised this HR person, her enthusiasm helped the company find many rare talents, even though her job content may not necessarily require doing so much.

Alignment of Expectations

I’ve almost become a devotee of expectation setting, believing that many conflicts in the world stem from inconsistent expectations. For example, “I hope you’ll rinse the bowl and put it in the dishwasher right after eating, but you never do” VS. “You never said so, how would I know?”, “You always make jokes at my expense when we’re out, I hate those jokes.” VS. “But you always laugh, how would I know you don’t like it?”

The most important thing when joining a new team is undoubtedly building reputation and trust, and as I’ve written in the post of “About Trust and Credit”, managing expectations is very helpful in trusting people. Sometimes I even feel that 80% of problems come from mutual misunderstanding of expectations.

“It also is important to understand and factor in the expectations of key constituencies other than your new boss—for example, key people in finance at corporate headquarters if you’re working in a business unit.”

I think what’s probably hardest to understand when first entering society is grasping the company atmosphere. What resonates with me in this quote is that front-line business units may seem to often have conflicting positions with the finance unit on the surface, but in reality, they are units that need to understand each other even more. Newcomers can easily misunderstand why the atmosphere in meetings is bad, while the relationship between two senior executives doesn’t seem bad offstage. It’s all because high-level executives can identify key important figures and discuss matters objectively.

Closing Warning — This Book Is Not Meant to Manipulate You

My notes of the book are all above. This book is worth referencing in various aspects, and the content is very constructive. However, I have to say that during my last eight months of work, this book was haunting me, thoroughly becoming a tool to constrain me.

When I spent several days completing user research and data analysis to make a complete proposal report, the boss would post excerpts from this book, saying this was an “unrealistic expectation” to end the discussion. When I privately gave him feedback saying I hoped he wouldn’t use incorrect assumptions to evaluate subordinates’ thoughts and make inappropriate comments on public platforms, he would evade the issue, saying my feedback was negatively facing work instructions.

“You should learn to accept feedback,” “You should actively adapt to the culture as The First 90 Days says.” These words make sense when they appear alone, but the context in which they appear doesn’t seem so appropriate all the time, especially the following sentence.

“Adapt to Your Boss’s Style assume that the job of building a positive relationship with your new boss is 100 percent your responsibility. In short, this means adapting to his style. If your boss hates voice messages, don’t leave them. If he wants to know in detail what is going on, overcommunicate.”

When the boss suddenly dismissed the supervisor who had been inserted above me just two months ago, he would use the Negotiate Success passage from the book to blame me for wasting all the efforts I had made with the new supervisor during this period, blaming me for not Negotiating Success, and saying that I should have confirmed his desired goals with him early on.

Even though his reasons for inserting a new supervisor were only because he “always stays up late and lacks sleep” and “has too many employees to manage directly,” which had nothing to do with my work performance or company goals, I still adapted well to the new supervisor’s working style in just a few weeks, cooperating with both the boss’s and the new supervisor’s requests.

Unexpectedly, less than two months later, the boss suddenly announced that he needed to dismiss the new supervisor. When I expressed that this approach made me feel pressured and shocked, and hoped he could restate the work standards, I only heard him repeatedly saying: “You need to follow the content of The First 90 Days, adapt to changes quickly, this is your responsibility.”

Indeed, I was too good at adapting to new cultures. In my past career, changing supervisors had happened countless times, and I had always handled it well. But this time, the situation was clear: this was no longer a problem of adapting to culture, but rather the boss intentionally or unintentionally using the content of this book for psychological manipulation.

Yes, this article is actually a reminder for readers of this book.
The book mentions:

it’s wise to negotiate success. It’s well worth investing time in this critical relationship up front, because your new boss sets your benchmarks, interprets your actions for other key players, and controls access to resources you need. He will have more impact than any other individual on how quickly you reach the break-even point, and on your eventual success or failure. Negotiating success means proactively engaging with your new boss to shape the game so that you have a fighting chance of achieving desired goals.

This content makes sense in a normal company, but in a company with only one boss and no other investors or directors, this passage entirely becomes a tool for the boss’s emotional blackmail and psychological manipulation. The implicit meaning behind it is that the boss can ignore that there are different ways of working, arbitrarily evaluate employees from his own perspective, and even sow discord within the team, ultimately establishing a work environment where only those who agree with him can survive.

It took me a long time to realize that this is a kind of “confirmation bias,” referring to a person insisting on their own preconceptions and seeking information to support their biased approach. Even if the data and references they find are correct, it doesn’t mean that the way they use or interpret them is correct.

I realized belatedly, not until after three months of work, what that employee who was about to leave was talking about initially. While actively facing challenges and adapting to the environment when first starting a job certainly has many benefits, the onboarding process and meeting expectations are not solely the employee’s responsibility. Employees can also have choices, and even more so, in the formation of company culture, the boss’s responsibility definitely outweighs that of the employees.

The former boss often despondently said in public channels how heavy his responsibilities were, how much he cared about mutual success, yet couldn’t find people as proactive and productive as him. However, he didn’t realize that the main reason why everyone in the company couldn’t trust each other was because his various behaviors were demotivating and driving a wedge among colleagues. No matter how much he valued employees’ enthusiasm and personality during recruitment, everyone recruited would ultimately become passive, because being proactive simply didn’t lead to good results.

I often think of my MBA classmate’s words and regret. The interaction between people is not just a person’s responsibility. A person full of energy, under constant suppression, will only lose enthusiasm for work. This shouldn’t be entirely blamed on newcomers.
– I am the kind of person who, when the boss says “Have you read this book?”, first criticizes myself for not having read these books as a product manager. In this process of self-reflection, I often lose the opportunity to defend myself on the spot. It’s just that I’ve read all the books he mentioned, and later discovered various confirmation biases. He seems to me like some people writing papers who get excited when they see a keyword in the abstract of a reference paper that matches their preferences, only to open the full text and find that the content discussed is completely different.

Many colleagues don’t want to play this game with him, either choosing to comply or to resign. I had things I wanted to achieve in this company, and indeed reshaped my skills, officially transitioning from a Business-oriented Product Manager to a solid software Product Manager. But eight months is too long. The mental abuse received during these months is worth sharing in another article later.

Finally, I write this sentence in advance: When I publish this article, I must have already left my current job. Today is July 26th, I really hope to publish this article in early August.

Final Update

The words I wrote in advance in July have come true. In early August, I officially resigned, and now in September, I have already received a new job offer. Although it’s a bit late, I hope this article can still give some encouragement to people who are being manipulated by their bosses. Also, I’m writing to readers who are still reading. Although I promised to maintain weekly updates this year, I have been in a state of panic and anxiety for several months and really couldn’t organize long articles.

Although these conditions have improved considerably with the resignation, I can only produce this kind of content when I return. I’m still very sorry about that.