Releasing January 2027
Stop Holding It Together
A Strategic Roadmap for Recently Promoted Executives
John Taylor McEntire. Foreword by Jack Canfield.
Two years into the job, McKinsey's synthesis of executive transition research finds that between twenty-seven and forty-six percent of new leaders are regarded as failures or disappointments. Almost none of them arrived unqualified. They were selected carefully, often by people who had every reason to get the decision right. They were qualified for the job they were hired to do, and unprepared for the system they walked into.
This book is written for that leader. Not the one who needs to be told to move fast and make a mark, but the one who has already discovered that force can keep a system moving and cannot make it coherent. A company you have to hold together is not yet a company anyone can hand off.
Who it is for
- 01
The executive in the first 6 to 18 months of a new senior role
- 02
The leader inheriting a team two years after an acquisition nobody finished integrating
- 03
The founder who has stopped being the one who decides and has not yet built how decisions get made
- 04
The sponsor, board member, or CHRO who wants the leader they backed to have something better than a 90-day checklist
What is inside
Five Routes. Twenty-five Stops. Each one ends with a single practice you can run with ten minutes on a flight.
Synchronize.
Read the system you walked into before you start changing it.
Yourself.
Lead from who you actually are rather than the armor you arrived in.
Naturalize.
Become part of the organization instead of a visitor with authority.
Communitize.
Build the trust the work will need in month fourteen, during the months when nothing seems to demand it.
Democratize.
Leave behind architecture rather than personality, so what you built keeps running without you.
The 60-Day Listening Tour
Start before the book does.
A free one-page guide with the four questions to ask every person on your team when you step into a new seat, how to run the conversations, and what to listen for in the answers. Send it to me and I will also let you know when the book releases in January 2027.
About the author
Thirty-five years spent building what most organizations say they want and rarely know how to build: systems that hold without anyone holding them. Sixteen of those years lived outside the United States, across Asia and the Gulf. After thirty-five years of watching capable people carry organizations on their own back, he wrote down what it costs and what to build instead.
Bestselling anthology work
If the transition is already underway.
The book is the clearest way to understand how this work thinks. If you are responsible for a leader who is in that window right now, the practice itself is the faster path.
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