Earlier this month we told you we’d be interviewing Michael Watkins, author of Your Next Move. We invited you to submit questions to Watkins, an expert in leadership transitions. Here, as promised, are his responses.

Let’s start with a turnaround question. The first things a new leader at a company with a turnaround challenge has to do is assess the external and internal environments. What happens if the two aren’t aligned? For instance, what if the external market for your products is good but your products are doing poorly?

It’s a bad news, good news situation. The bad news is that your products are not presently meeting customer needs. The good news is that your industry is healthy, even in your business is not. This obviously is much better than being in a dying industry where you would be forced to radically shift the focus of the business.

The challenge (and the opportunity) here is eliminate the external-internal misalignment by rapidly bringing more attractive products or services to market. It’s here that you need to focus and get some early wins. Are there some modest adjustments you can make quickly to buy you some time? Are there products already in the pipeline on which you can place bets and organize to accelerate? Are there opportunities to license or acquire products to help fill the gap?

The fact that you are in a turnaround situation also is quite helpful. It means there already is a sense of urgency that you can use to create momentum. People are unlikely to be in denial about the need to take action and that will help you to drive things forward.

How can an employee transition from a small company (<100 employees) to a large one? (submitted by "jijesh")

This is a tough transition. The bad news is that most small-to-large company transitions mean you have to accept positions with narrower scope, as well as adjust to more convoluted processes, e.g. for approvals, and increased organizational politics. This can be a very hard adjustment for someone who has thrived in the broader, more flexible environments that characterize most successful small businesses. The key is to be prepared to accept these shifts and not rail against them. You need to pledge to yourself never to utter the words, “things were so much easier when I was at…” At the same time, keep in mind that successful larger companies do offer significant advantages to talented people. These include more resources that can be devoted to “big” projects, as well as greater opportunity for advancement, and (potentially) greater recognition from colleagues, friends and family that you work for a leading company.

Would love Michael’s insight/suggestions on the 50+ year old’s transition from a long term relationship with one company to the “wild-wild” west of job search and potentially a new industry/company. (submitted by Deborah Exo)

The key here is to demonstrate to potential employers that you have the learning agility and drive to thrive in a new environment. Potential employers will be primed to worry that your long-term commitment to one company signals either an aversion to change or a lack of ambition or both. So you need to craft a convincing story about why this is not the case. If you can authentically point to a record of advancement and achievement in your old company, and can make the case that you stayed for good reasons, then that’s what you should do. As to drive, one way to signal that the fires still burn is to come into interviews with an aggressive plan for what you would do in the first 30/60/90 days. Undergirding all this, of course, is the experience and wisdom that you bring to the table, something no 30 or 40-something can match.

Finally, of the transitions you list in the book, which is the most difficult and why?

I think the realignment challenge is the most difficult. Realignment is about proactively changing an organization, and not responding to a crisis/turnaround. Turnarounds are easier because the problem teaches the people; the severity of the issues facing the organization virtually guarantees that a sense of urgency exists. People may be in despair, but they are not in denial. In realignment situations, however, the storm clouds are on the horizon, but the storm has not yet broken. You need to teach people that there is a problem. And this can be extremely challenging because people may have entrenched interests that they seek to protect, or be in denial of the need for change, or both. So success in realigning organizations required a nuance understanding of the alignments of interests in the organization, very strong persuasive skills, and a whole lot of patience.

Are you managing a career transition? Please let us know about it in the comments below.

Henry Mintzberg, the management scholar and professor at McGill University, is someone we pay a good deal of attention to here. Our editor Martha Mangelsdorf interviewed him on debunking management myths and let’s not forget that he was one of the people who predicted the economic meltdown. And now you can view him talking to The Economist about “the paltry nature of oaths, phoney leadership, and nobility that ends in the classroom.”

UPDATE: And don’t forget Minztberg’s talk on “Managers Not MBAs: Debating the Merits of Business Education” at MIT World:

Next week we’re going to be interviewing Michael Watkins. He’s a cofounder of Genesis Advisors and he’s best-known for The First 90 Days, a primer for making sure that your first three months in a new position work out as well as possible. (We’ve all seen what happens when someone starts a new job and finds himself or herself adrift.)

Watkins has a new book, Your Next Move, which considers how best to handle all sorts of career transitions: promotions, international moves, and more. What do you do, for example, when people who were your peers last week are now reporting to you?

When I write we’ll be interviewing Watkins next week, I really mean we. You have plenty you’d like to know about making the right moves. Here’s a chance to find out from an expert in leadership transitions. Put your questions for Watkins in the comments box below and he’ll answer the best of them. Career transitions are moments of great risk and opportunity. Here’s a chance to ask an expert how best to transition into your next role.

With its reporting of how political power is wielded in Washington, the only leadership lessons you’re likely to get from The Washington Post most of the time are case studies of what not to do. But the website’s video interviews with business leaders occasionally offer some positive models, too.

When we reported on the BIF-5 Collaboration Innovation Summit earlier this month, we noted how struck we were by a comment from Saul Kaplan, the event’s “founder and chief catalyst,” who said “innovation requires a vulnerability most people are not comfortable with.” Vulnerability, the willingness to fail and to do so openly, should be a core competency for many leaders, but it is often taken as a sign of weakness.

That’s where the Washington Post video comes in. In it, Paul Schmitz, CEO of the nonprofit Public Allies, discusses how admitting to failings makes you a better leader, not a weaker one. (Warning: there is a brief ad at the beginning of the video.)

What do you think? How vulnerable should a leader be?

(Follow all of MIT Sloan Management Review’s coverage of TED.)

Where do new management ideas come from? At TED, they come from the most surprising sources. For example, yesterday there was a brief presentation (from the Palm Springs simulcast) by comic and actress Christen Sussin, who shared her four rules of improvisation:

1. Say yes to everything.
2. Follow and see where it goes.
3. Make eye contact.
4. Choose what you want to know.

She’s clearly talking about comedic improvisation, but at least some of those lessons seem to apply to management improvisation as well. And her first rule, about being open to everything, seems to be one of the best ways to generate new management ideas, too.

While it’s probably not healthy to consider everything in your life as the source of a new management idea, it’s fascinating how so many of the talks here have management implications if you consider them in a certain way. Architect Daniel Libeskind talked about how he tried to make his work expressive rather than neutral, unexpected rather than habitual, memorable rather than forgettable, communicative rather than mute, democratic rather than authoritarian. And Rosamund Zander, reading from an upcoming book about personal fulfillment, delivered some rules — “take responsibility for everything,” “embrace different patterns” — that are just as applicable in the office as at home.

The day’s talked ranged from Evan Williams (that’s him to the right) telling the story of Twitter (so far) to Evan Schwartz revealing a mystery behind The Wizard of Oz; Jennifer Mather revealing the intelligence the octopus to an unveiling (by yet another member of the MIT Media Lab) of a fascinating new children’s toy. More on all that later (the first morning session begins shortly). Sustainability has been an enormous theme at this year’s TED; we’ll be covering some of those talks on MIT Sloan Management Review’s Beyond Green blog.

The day ended, of course, with a lavish party. You know it’s going to be a good party when you’re met at the front door by a flowered rendering of a large green elephant.

That’s all for now. I’m about to step into a panel on a topic we covered in the most recent print issue of the magazine: predicting (see What People Want and How To Predict It and The Prediction Lover’s Handbook). I’ll report tonight.

This is our second daily post covering this week’s TED conference. You can follow all our TED coverage.

For a conference that’s supposed to be about long-term ideas, those ideas sure get spread at record speed. Thanks to blogs and especially Twitter, reports from the first day of this year’s TED conference (here’s a TED primer for managers, if you need one) began flowing within seconds after a speaker noted something particularly noteworthy. As I write this post before dawn the following morning, I see that there is plenty of good, almost-instant coverage, particularly from Ethan Zuckerman, BoingBoing, and the official TED blog. Rather than deliver a blow-by-blow list of everything that happens, which can get tedious quickly and allows for hardly any reflection, the idea here is to identify the most important parts of the long day and night (with 48 speakers or performers, events started at 8:30 a.m. and ran past 11 p.m. — and that’s just the official events) and give a sense of what it is like to be here.

The two stars of the big morning session were Juan Enriquezand Bill Gates. Enriquez is the sort of polymath made for a diverse conference like TED: he’s done everything from run the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School to serve as a member of the peace commission in Mexico that negotiated the cease-fire in Chiapas’ Zapatista rebellion. He’s best-known, perhaps, as a presenter: I’ve witnessed him speak engagingly on everything from why schools in the Arabic world used to be the best in the planet but aren’t anymore to why being knowledgeable about genetics is just as important as being digitally literate.

Back in October, just as the political and business leaders were starting to understand the ramifications of the financial crisis, Enriquez delivered a raw, whirlwind presentation at the Pop!Tech conference that focused on what the then-yet-to-be-elected new president needed to do, with an emphasis on austerity. I don’t know how long it will be until Enriquez’s talk yesterday is posted to TED.com, but those who want a taste of it can see an earlier iteration from Pop!Tech:

Juan Enriquez (2008) Pop!Tech Pop!Cast from PopTech on Vimeo.

Enriquez started his talk and the conference by jumping straight into the economy. TED is 25 years old this year, and Enriquez was the first of many speakers the first day to couch his analysis in terms of a 25-year cycle. He’s updated the talk substantially since its October debut; its tone is now more optimistic than its shell-shocked counterpart at Pop!Tech, with a persuasive argument that, in the long term, technology is more powerful than the current financial catastrophe. He identified our ability to engineer cells, tissues, and robots as the economic engines that will outlast the downturn. Among his most compelling examples was a realistic robot from Boston Dynamics that comes astonishingly close to moving like a human:

In a later presentation, coincidentally, another speaker cited the same robot in a talk about the future of war: most technology is neither inherently good nor evil. It’s all in how it’s used.

Bill Gates needs no introduction: he’s the most successful capitalist and philanthropist of his time. And, in keeping with the theme of the event, he stated “I am an optimist” (why shouldn’t he be?) and spoke fluently and passionately about two of the big questions his foundation is trying to answer: how do you stop deadly diseases spread by mosquitos?” and “how do you make a teacher great?” He spoke with both anger (”there’s more money put into treating baldness than malaria”) and disbelief (in some school districts, teacher contracts require that a principal can only enter a classroom once a year, with advance notice). But the blogosphere and twittersphere (there has to be a better word than this) were, er, buzzing with a stunt Gates pulled while discussing malaria, the deadly disease spread by mosquitos:

“Not only poor people should experience this,” Gates said as he opened the jar and let a pair of (malaria-free) mosquitoes into the room. Several prominent blogs referred to Gates “unleashing a swarm of mosquitoes on his audience” but I don’t think two counts as a swarm. The move did lead TED curator Chris Anderson, who’s got a background in publishing, to crack that a good headline for the talk would be “Bill Gates Releases More Bugs Into the World.” Anderson also said that Gates’s talk will be posted to the TED website later today. We’ll point to it.

The pick of the afternoon sessions included talks by co-chairman of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani, filmmaker Jake Eberts, MIT’s own Pattie Maes, and Interface CEO Ray Anderson. The morning sessions start soon, after a breakfast appointment, so for now let me offer some highlights (more detail coming later in the day):

• Nandan Nilekani spoke about his upcoming book, Imagining India, in which he endeavors to consider the wild disparities of India in terms of four types of ideas: ideas that have arrived, ideas in progress, ideas in conflict, and ideas in anticipation.
• Filmmaker Jake Eberts showed a nine-minute rough set of excerpts from Oceans, a new film from the team that made Winged Migration about the underwater world. It was jaw-droppingly beautiful and earned a standing ovation for its thrilling shots of jumping whales, forests of jellyfish, and (apparently) friendly sharks. There’s no link available yet for the video; the film isn’t coming out in the U.S. until April 2010.
• Pattie Maes, who runs the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab, showed off an early version of “Where Ur World,” a multitouch system developed with Pranav Mistry that seeks to combine online information with real-world interaction in surprising ways. The example that left the audience smiling was one in which Pranav shook hands with someone and a tag cloud relating to that person was projected onto that person’s shirt. The website for the project is still under construction.
• Almost-president Al Gore offered an update of his Inconvenient Truth talk (summary: things are getting worse), but more compelling was Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface, who spoke of how he’s turning the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpet into a model of sustainability. Anderson had plenty of useful nuts-and-bolts information about how companies should think about sustainability, which we’ll spell out later, but his money quote came from Amory Lovins: “If something exists, it must be possible.”

The sun is up, the day is beginning. I have much more to pass on about Day 1 of TED (yes, I waited on line for food with stars; yes, the Long Beach experience is different from Monterey) and I will as the day progresses. But right now I’m interested in learning more from Ray Anderson, which is why I’m signing off and going to interview him.

Much more to come …

(Housekeeping note: someone has asked what the “#TED” in the headline means. It’s a hash tag, intended to make it easier for people to search for, in this case, blog and Twitter posts about TED.)

Here at MIT Sloan Management Review we’re big fans of the folks at 37 Signals. We use some of their software and we try to follow their ideas about simplicity in everything from product to process. Indeed, their notions about underengineering dovetail nicely with Clayton Christensen’s much-repeated but still timely theory of disruptive innovation.

In a recent post on the 37Signals company blog, entitled Hire managers of one, CJ Curtis writes that businesses should try to bring on board

…someone who comes up with their own goals and executes them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do — set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done, etc. — but they do it by themselves and for themselves.

These people free you from oversight. They set their own direction. When you leave them alone, they surprise you with how much they’ve gotten done. They don’t need a lot of handholding or supervision.

Particularly at a time when organizations must be particularly careful about who they bring on board, that’s excellent advice.