You’ll drive everyone in the organization crazy if you implement all of these habits at one time. The key is focusing on one or two each quarter, giving everyone roughly 24 to 36 months to install these simple, yet powerful, routines. Then it’s a process of continually refreshing them as the company scales up.

The typical frustrated entrepreneur wants to fill every role as soon as possible. However, unless you have sufficient capital to cover the losses until sales catch up with salaries, this is a deadly move. Taking it slow is especially critical when adding highly paid senior leaders to the team. Add one key role at a time. Get profitable with that executive before you add the next one or add support personnel.

No matter what your present level of leadership, the first hundred days of a new job holds both a unique window of opportunity and a heightened state of risk. The opportunity comes from the fact that a leadership transition is a time of maximum uncertainty, when all assumptions are up in the air and open to change. As the new leader, you’re generally given the benefit of the doubt. “I think it’s you’re one chance to ask stupid questions,” says Robert Eckert, chief executive of Mattel, who had an exceptional first hundred days.

And while some of the specific do’s and don'ts for CEOs are unique to their role, most essential things like setting expectations, developing a vision, establishing a management process, creating priorities, building your management team, and doing an exceptional job on your earliest projects apply equally to anyone in a new leadership role.

When Ron Daniel was the managing partner of McKinsey & Company from 1976 to 1988, he sent a memo to new recruits when they started, entitled, “On Becoming an Associate.” His advice is still memorable all these years later: “Recognize the necessity of getting off to a good start in the firm. Your first few engagements are critical. During these studies, you can establish an internal clientele for yourself - that is, by performing in an outstanding way, your reputation will be quickly established in your office and even the firm.” (We’ve incorporated Ron’s memo in the Appendix of the book.)

This is especially important because whenever you assume a new role, you’re in what Max DePree, former CEO of furniture company Herman Miller and author of Leadership Is an Art, calls “a temporary state of incompetence.” Even if you think you know a company - or a department or a division - before you take over its leadership, think again. As GE’s Immelt reminisces, “I worked for this place for twenty-one years before I got the CEO job and there were still things that shocked me when I took over.”

The knowledge gap is even wider for outsiders. “Anyone coming into a new situation is faced with the fact that they often have to do the most at a point they know the least. You may have previous experience and you may be smart and have insight into how things work, but you know the least about the actual company you’re engaged in at the same time you have to set things in motion,” says AOL chairman and CEO Jonathan F. Miller, himself recruited into the company from the outside.

Let’s face it, no one, regardless of how experienced or talented, is equally adept at every aspect of a job. In any case, as Immelt points out, even if you are above average across the board, no leader has the time to concentrate on every aspect of the job, especially in the earliest days of a new position. Think about where your personal involvement will yield the most leverage and where someone else might do an even better job.