The First 100 Days: How a New Chief Executive Buys the Right to Decide

I have taken over as chief executive of several companies in very different contexts: a subsidiary to turn round, an SME I had just bought, a pharmaceutical group present in more than a hundred and ten countries. Every time, the same temptation, and every time the same lesson.

The temptation is to want to show quickly what you are capable of. The lesson is that the first hundred days are not there to prove your worth. They are there to buy the right to decide.

A chief executive who has just arrived holds a very thin stock of trust and no credit at all for mistakes. The only resource he can build quickly is understanding. Everything he decides before he has understood, he pays for twice.

Days 1 to 30: listen until it becomes uncomfortable

The classic first mistake is to listen for three weeks and then announce. The right duration is longer than people think, and the right method is more systematic.

In practice: a one-hour individual meeting with every member of the executive committee and every manager one level below. Three questions, always the same ones, so that the answers can be compared:

• What works here that we must absolutely not break?
• What stops you doing your job properly?
• If you were in my chair, what would your first decision be?

Add to that the thing almost nobody does enough of: go and stand where the work happens. Two days on the production floor, a day out on the road with a salesperson, half a day in customer service listening to calls. You learn more in six hours there than any dashboard will ever show you.

And one exercise I recommend every single time: call five customers you have lost in the past eighteen months. Not the loyal ones, who will tell you everything is fine. The ones who left. They are the people who describe the company as it looks from the outside, without sparing you.

Through those thirty days, one rule only: announce nothing irreversible. The exception is a safety issue, a fraud or a critical cash position — in which case this is not a handover, it is crisis management, and the rules change.

Days 30 to 60: name what everyone already knows

By this stage you have a mass of observations. The work now is to formulate a diagnosis — and above all to share it.

The most powerful moment in any handover is the one where the new chief executive says out loud what the whole organisation knows but has never heard put into words. “Our legacy range loses two points of margin a year and we have no plan.” “We have three plants for a volume that justifies two.” “Our delivery times have become our main commercial problem.”

That moment is liberating, on three conditions. The diagnosis must be accurate — if it is wrong, you lose all your capital in one go. It must be factual, built on numbers, never on people. And it must be followed by a direction, otherwise it is just a demoralising observation.

This is also the period when the team questions arise. My principle, learned the hard way: never decide on a departure before day 45, and never postpone one beyond day 90. Too early and you deprive yourself of a capability you have not yet seen. Too late and you signal that problematic behaviour is tolerated — and that signal contaminates everything else.

Days 60 to 90: choose three battles

Then comes strategy, and with it the real difficulty: giving things up.

Every company I walk into has between twelve and twenty projects open. All of them are defensible. None of them is really moving. The value a new chief executive adds is not to open a twenty-first: it is to close fifteen.

I hold myself to a simple rule: three priorities, not four. Each with a named owner, a single indicator, and a deadline. If the list fits on one page, it will be executed. If it fits on a forty-slide deck, it will be discussed in committee and nothing will move.

The question that separates priorities is not “what is important?” — everything is. It is: “what will cost us ten times more in three years if we do not do it this year?”

And you have to announce what you are dropping as clearly as what you are prioritising. A project abandoned without being declared goes on consuming time in the shadows.

Days 90 to 100: install the rhythm

The last ten days serve one purpose: putting in place the machinery that will keep the plan alive once the novelty has worn off.

A short weekly executive meeting with a stable agenda. A monthly review of the three priorities, numbers in hand, where you talk about variances rather than intentions. A quarterly board or strategy committee with papers sent five days ahead — a board that discovers its documents in the room is of no use to anyone.

This rhythm looks bureaucratic to leaders who like to improvise. In reality it is what sets you free: when everyone knows where and when decisions get made, people stop making them in corridors.

The mistake I see most often

It is nearly always the same one: the new chief executive applies the plan from his previous job.

It is human. You arrive with what worked elsewhere and, under pressure to deliver quickly, you roll out the recipe before you have understood the ground. In a sufficiently similar environment, you get away with it. In a different one — different culture, different model, different ownership — it produces an organisation executing instructions it does not believe in.

In the mountains we call that setting off with the map of the next valley. The terrain looks familiar, right up to the moment it stops being familiar.

Why an outside pair of eyes helps

A chief executive taking up a post is surrounded by people who all have a stake in what he decides: his teams, his shareholder, sometimes his predecessor. Nobody around him is neutral.

That is precisely the role I play in these situations: a peer with no agenda, someone who has sat in the same chair, with whom you can think out loud before you commit, and who asks the questions nobody inside the organisation is in a position to ask.

A hundred days is short. It is also the only window in which an organisation willingly accepts being questioned.

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