Jason Jennings “Taking charge has never been easy.

New leaders are expected to diagnose correctly, land on a brilliant strategy, pull together a powerful team, and inspire everyone to execute. Unfortunately, long lead times are gone. The months that leaders used to get for pondering, debating, or hiring outside consultants has shrunk to days.

New leaders are expected stop the bleeding, decide who’s in and who’s out, make the strategic choices, and start racking up their wins right away. Shareholders, employees, customers, and communities believe that if you’re tapped to lead you’d better be able to hit the ground running from day one.

I started looking for a database of dos and don’ts for new leaders learned the hard way through years of trial and error and discovered there’s virtually no reliable data available. Ninety-three percent of executives admit that their organization has never kept any records of the steps that led to their best or worst management decisions.

So I started from scratch.”

About the author:
Jason Jennings is the bestselling author of the new book Hit The Ground Running: A Manual For New Leaders published by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA). He is also the author of Less Is More: How Great Companies Use Productivity, Think BIG, Act Small: How America’s Best Performing Companies Keep the Start-Up Spirit Alive and co-author, with Laurence Haughton, of It’s Not The Big That Eat The Small…It’s The Fast That Eat The Slow. USA Today has named Jennings one of the three most in-demand business speakers in the nation.