I've read The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. Twice. It's solid—the STARS model for diagnosing situations, the five conversations with your boss, the breakeven point concept.

But every time I finished it, I had the same problem: I knew what I was supposed to achieve. I didn't know how to actually do it.

"Identify stakeholders." Which ones? In what order?

"Accelerate your learning." About what first?

"Secure early wins." Before I understand what winning means here?

The book gives you ten strategies running in parallel. Real transitions don't work that way. You can't do everything at once. The sequence matters—because each phase makes the next one possible.

This is what I've pieced together across multiple transitions: Amazon, BCG, startups. I should be upfront—I screwed up most of those transitions. This framework is what I wish I'd known earlier. It's not wisdom I arrived with. It's lessons I paid for.

P — People (Month 1) G — Goals (Month 2) D — Design (Month 2-3) M — Mechanisms (Month 3+)

The sequence is the point. Each phase unlocks the next. Skip one and you'll pay for it—usually around month 3, when you need something and realize you don't have the foundation.

This is where most people fail. Not because they skip it—but because they draw the circle too small.

The obvious objection: "This sounds like a lot of relationship work for someone hired to deliver results."

At the mid and senior level, the only way you deliver results is through relationships. The only way you deliver results is by getting people to work. Your judgment on whether the work is good—that comes after work is being delivered. If you can't get people to move, you don't do much. All senior jobs are primarily people management in terms of execution.

P isn't a distraction from results. P is how results happen.

Now, the mistake most people make:

When I joined Amazon Pay, I did what most new leaders do. I met my direct reports. I met my boss. I met my immediate peers. I thought I was doing the "people" work.

I missed the outer circle entirely.

Three months later, I needed something from a peer's #2. We'd never had a real conversation. I wasn't asking a colleague for help—I was a stranger asking for a favor. The dynamic was completely different.

The insight: Your direct stakeholders—reports, boss, immediate peers—are the obvious circle. But the people who determine your success are often one layer out: your peers' direct reports, adjacent teams, the informal influencers who shape opinion.

Why the first 30 days matter: This is the only window where relationship-building is free. You're new. You can say "I'm just getting to know people" without an agenda. After month one, every conversation is transactional. You're "the person who needs something."

What Wide P gives you:

Cooperation capital. When you need help in month 3, you're not a stranger.

A quasi-mentor network. You can't go to your direct stakeholders and say "I don't understand this" or "Is this normal?"—they're evaluating you. But someone one circle out? They can be a sounding board without stakes.

Organizational intelligence. The outer circle knows things about your inner circle that your inner circle will never tell you. Your boss's patterns. Your team's reputation. What's been tried before and failed. The informal read on who delivers versus who's just visible.

The prescription: First month, P is your P0. Not the only thing you do—but the priority. When something has to give, P wins.

You'll still attend meetings. You'll still respond to emails. You'll still have 1:1s with your team. But when there's a conflict—when you have to choose between a deep-dive session on processes versus coffee with someone from the outer circle—P wins.

"But my boss wants something delivered in week 2." Fine, get on with it. You can't push back on real deliverables. But after that urgent thing is done—what else do you do? That's where P comes in. Your boss might not be the best person to help you settle in. 90% of the time, they're not conscious about it themselves. You don't need to explain PGDM to them. Just do your work, deliver what's needed, and use every remaining slot for P.

I spent 30 days prioritizing this in my most recent transition. It felt slow. It felt like I wasn't "doing" anything visible. It was the highest-leverage investment I made.

I should be honest: this is the first time I've actually done a transition well. When I left BCG, I really screwed it up. At Amazon, I learned the hard way—made the mistakes, paid the price, slowly figured out what I should have done.

Only after you have the people foundation do you try to figure out your goals.

And not just your goals. Everyone's goals.

What is the company actually trying to achieve? How does your function fit into that? What are your peers trying to accomplish? Where do your goals intersect or conflict? If you were to frame your goals more ambitiously, what would that look like?

This takes time to marinate. If you can articulate your goals in five minutes of being asked, they're half-baked.

Why this sequence? Without the people foundation, you're getting goals from documents and town halls. With it, you're getting context, history, and subtext. You understand why certain goals exist. You know what's been tried before. You can read between the lines of what's written versus what's actually prioritized.

The conversations you had in month one now pay dividends. You can ask someone from the outer circle: "Help me understand—why is this goal framed this way? What happened last year?"

Now—and only now—do you dive into understanding how things actually work.

Process. Systems. Workflows. Reporting structures. Decision rights.

Most new leaders start here. They want to understand the machinery. It feels productive. But without P, you're learning from documents and org charts—not from the people who actually know where things break. And without G, you don't know what questions to ask. You're learning everything, which means you're learning nothing deeply.

With P and G in place, your design understanding is sharp. You know which processes matter most for your goals. You know who to ask about the real constraints versus the official ones. You've heard the history, so you understand why things evolved the way they did.

By month 2-3, you walk into meetings with familiarity. You know people. You have context. You're not just sitting there absorbing—you're connecting dots, asking informed questions, contributing. Your boss sees this. Your peers see this. The room treats you like an insider, not an observer. That shift happened because you invested in P before you tried to understand D.

Mechanisms are the processes, meetings, and systems you use to drive outcomes. Most new leaders want to build them immediately. Resist.

The rule: Leverage existing mechanisms first. Understand what they deliver and what they don't. Don't change anything until you understand why it evolved to where it is.

Change is expensive. Not just in effort—in political capital and team disruption. When you change a mechanism, you're asking people to rewire their habits. You're implicitly saying "what you were doing was wrong." And you're spending credibility before you've built it.

If you've done P, G, and D properly, you now have the foundation to make smart mechanism changes: You know the people, so you can anticipate who will resist and why. You know the goals, so you can explain how the change serves them. You know the design, so you understand the second-order effects.

Make changes slowly. One at a time. With clear rationale tied to goals everyone understands.

Each phase unlocks the next:

Without P, G is shallow. You're learning goals from documents, not from people who can give you context and history.

Without G, D is unfocused. You're trying to understand everything instead of understanding what matters.

Without D, M is dangerous. You're importing mechanisms from your old context into a system you don't understand. This is where new leaders get blowback.

The worst failure mode I've seen: jumping straight to M without P, G, or D. You walk in with solutions from your previous company. You start changing things before you understand why they exist. You frustrate everyone. The organization's immune system kicks in.

The timeboxes aren't rigid, but they're directional. Month 1: P dominates, some G starts toward the end. Month 2: G crystallizes, D begins in earnest. Month 3: D deepens, M begins—slowly. Month 4+: M ramps up as you've earned the right to make changes.

Adjust for your context. A turnaround might compress this. A sustaining-success situation might extend it. But the sequence stays the same.

So yeah, some of you may shrewdly realise — I ended up doing the PGDM course twice. The first was a Post Graduate Diploma in Management, taught by professors, earned at IIMC. The second was People, Goals, Design, Mechanisms in that specific sequence — learnt in practice, earned in the theatre of life.

Not the only way. Probably not even the best way. Just one practitioner's version that worked.

~Discovering Turiya@work@life