A hundred days is roughly a semester: long enough to tempt distraction, and short enough to pivot fast. In a cavernous MIT Sloan classroom, this was taught to us over a cluster of folding tables littered with poker chips and order slips. The setup for the Beer Game. Your role is one of four along a fragile supply chain: retailer, wholesaler, distributor, factory. Demand arrives as a thin stack of index cards but each player may see only the orders on their own clipboard. Beer cases crawl from station to station in slow motion, lagged by ‘shipping delays’ and the clumsy arithmetic of teammates whispering, “Do we over-order now or risk a stock-out later?”
The simulation, devised in the 1960s to expose the bullwhip effect (small shifts in demand that swell into wild upstream swings), unfurls similar to the way a new job does. Early inputs feel harmless. Yet by round four the board is a yard sale of cardboard and regret. One hasty decision at the retailer ricochets upstream until the factory groans under mountains of phantom inventory, while the storefront sits empty and confused. The lesson stings because it is immediate. Information delays breed anxiety, anxiety breeds over-correction, and over-correction cements a cycle of waste.
For a freshly hired CEO, those first moves arrive in unassuming calendar blocks labeled “listening tour” or “strategy refresh.” Investors and employees scan every gesture like auditors, searching for clues that signal discipline or drift. McKinsey once tallied the data and found that companies led by CEOs who nail early priorities deliver a twenty-five percent higher total shareholder return over their first three years. A new CFO’s credibility with lenders lives or dies in the first quarter, when forecasting rigor meets the gray fog of inherited assumptions. A new COO takes over supply lines no less twitchy than our beer game chain, except the currency is real cash and the scoreboard is public.
Two weeks after taking the helm of Citigroup in 2021, Jane Fraser declared “Zoom-free Fridays” and a hybrid work pilot, signaling that employee wellness was now table stakes for performance. By day sixty she announced Citi would exit consumer banking in thirteen Asia-Pacific markets, redeploying roughly $7 billion of capital into wealth management and U.S. cards. The early clarity reset investor expectations and let Citi absorb a $3.8 billion restructuring charge without a share-price nosedive.
Why does the window close so fast? Because organizations, like cardboard counters, develop memory. By day thirty, hallway gossip begins to calcify. By day sixty, budgets and head-count requests point back to the priorities declared in week one. By day ninety-nine, habits morph into culture and any reversal can feel like trying to erase ink with a damp napkin. Ignore that clock and future staff meetings can stagnate with polite silence and without meaningful progress.
It can happen outside the corner office, too. Move to a new neighborhood and the equivalent of a week-one order slip is the grocery store route mandated by Google Maps. If you avoid challenging these assumptions you might find yourself using pale tomatoes and microwaving take-out because the farmer’s market stayed out of sight. Start a novel and the first thousand words dictate a voice that will either invite exploration or box you in. Skip those starter habits and by day one-hundred-one the half-finished chapter haunts your desktop like that audiobook you never finished.
The plan matters, yet the order in which you place your bets matters more. A hundred days is enough time to watch small inputs compound into culture, balance sheets, or manuscripts. Watch those first slips on the table and insist on clarity. Whether it’s classrooms or boardrooms, that is how you keep the cardboard supply chain from buckling, and how you give a new chapter the stable footing it deserves.