10 books like The First 90 Days

In June 1983 I just graduated from college, did not have a full-time job, and was living in my mother’s spare room. While I contemplated my next move, I scoured the help wanted ads and went to my local bookstore to get guidance. Luckily, I bought a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute.

The approach I read in this book started with “who am I,” not what job I wanted. The book helped me identify my goals, interests, skills, and preferred work environment.

Katharine Brooks has updated the information and content of the book while maintaining the spirit and intentions of the late Richard Bolles. If you are just starting your career journey, start with the most popular and bestselling career handbook.

I remember vividly the moment, while researching change, when I read an article by Jeffrey Pfeffer on power in organisations. It was an ah-ha moment for me in making sense of some of the behaviours I was witnessing at work. Marie McIntyre, who studied with Pfeffer, wrote Secrets to Winning at Office Politics and writes in a much more accessible and practical way on understanding and working with these politics, while maintaining your own integrity. Many a mentee has said to me, ‘I’m not interested in the politics, I just want to do my job.' And my response to that is that if you want to be successful in your career, then you need to not just understand but work with the politics. But there are ways to do this, while still being you. And this book helps with how.

Susan David coined the term emotional agility to help crystallize the importance in today’s world of emotional regulation and the cognitive agility it affords. In the face of constant change, being able to learn from – but not be held hostage by – our emotions affords us a competitive advantage and will advance our well-being. 

I’ve been fortunate to know and learn from David over the years. Her insights unlock our hearts and minds to truths otherwise hard to face. Her prose is emotive and her stories are well-chosen. The book is full of essential lessons for today’s worker.

Like most people, my brain can let me down at times with the endless chatter or ‘classroom inside my head’ as I like to call it. There was an amazing moment on a McKinsey course I did, where we all had to share our deepest darkest secret internal chatter about ourselves, and it was all versions of ‘I am inadequate.’ I love this book for how it normalises that chatter, but also provides practical, relatable strategies to use to help harness it. It explores what we can do ourselves, how we can change our environment to help us, what we can ask of our ‘board of advisors,’ and also how we can return the favour in helping others, when that voice of doubt gets too loud. 

While we would love to think we are always rational, we are hard-wired for story not the rational data (albeit key data can be a strong anchor in a story). I started my career far more in the assumption of rational data trumps all, but recognised, through bumps and bruises, how stories can overtake decision-making. When I learned how to tell a better story, I learned how to get the results I needed. Gabrielle is such a down-to-earth, energising speaker and writer, and this book provided me with such a practical, relatable framework for always having a good story or two in my back pocket.  

I am a huge fan of financial guru Dave Ramsey. Why mention finance in a list of career recommendations? Because an excellent job is the best wealth builder! I listen to one of Dave Ramsey’s podcasts weekly, and that is where I learned about Ken Coleman, his books and career show.  

If What Color is Your Parachute helps you understand who you are and what type of work you want, Coleman’s The Proximity Principle offers a plan for landing that job. Coleman says the best jobs are at the intersection of your talents, passions, and mission. We become who we hang around. If we hang with readers, we will read. Coleman provides advice for getting around the right people and being in the right places to land your ideal job. 

Beverly Kaye is a training and development icon who received the "Distinguished Contribution" award from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) for her impact on workplace learning over the past three decades.

Most career development and mobility books focus on getting a promotion or new job. But career mobility can also mean growing, stretching, learning, and transforming, without ever changing your job title, company, or location.

Kaye, Williams, and Cowart do an expert job of helping readers analyze their current situation and make good choices by balancing money and meaning. Whether it is time for you to grow right where you are by enriching your skills, making a lateral move, or stepping back and realigning your objectives - this book will guide you through it.

Burnett and Evans are innovators and Stanford University design educators who created a hugely successful course, Designing Your Life. They have helped thousands of people change the way they think and live.  

As the head of talent development for a Fortune 5 company, I would take leaders on immersion site visits to companies like Google, Apple, and HP and universities like Stanford and MIT to learn how to think like a designer. This helped my leaders develop products and services that customers craved. Designing Your Life shows you how to apply design thinking principles to career development.

Use this book to design your ideal life by learning how to adopt the mindsets of curiosity, bias to action, reframing, and radical collaboration.

Julie Zhuo has a Silicon Valley and technology background and writes about management in a very straightforward way that lets the reader both identify with the content and learn from it. The new manager is targeted in this book but the discussion and anecdotes are valuable for anyone. My experience is that managers, even those who have held the people manager role for many years, need to refresh their view and skills on a continuous basis. Organizations frequently don’t train managers as often or as deeply as is needed. Starting with a good foundation that talks about “people, purpose and process” as Zhuo discusses, is not only a good foundation, but a good refresher as well. 

One of the best-known business books of our time is Good To Great by Jim Collins. The book has sold millions of copies and is quoted in classrooms and workplaces all over the world all the time. But far fewer people know about Collin’s Good To Great and the Social Sector. It’s a critical work by one of the great business minds about the profound differences between for-profit and non-profit worlds. Every board member needs a copy.