She believes we need to move from mentors to sponsors because a sponsor advocates on your behalf.

Sallie says, ‘All the important decisions about your career are made when you’re not in the room. People decide to hire you, fire you, promote you, fund you, send you on the overseas assignment, all when you’re not there. So how do you ensure that you have someone in the room fighting for you? I would strongly argue that you need to have in place your Personal Board of Directors. Those are your mentors, your sponsors, your confidants, the people you can turn to when you’re thinking about a career transition—for the kind of advice your boyfriend, your parents, and your best friend from college just can’t give you.

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.

In his first few weeks, he made appointments to talk with the top 20 percent of management - fifty people in all - for an hour each. “I’d start at seven in the morning and finish at eight, nine, ten o’clock at night,” he recalls. “I asked everyone the same question: ‘What do I need to know?’ Then I didn’t say a word the whole time, except to encourage them to keep going.

In fact, Lou Gerstner claims that his greatest ally in breaking free from the past was IBM’s own precipitous collapse. But he also knew that the task of shaking people out of their stupor and getting them “to think and act collaboratively, as hungry, curious self-starters,” would take at least five years - and even then, he confesses, he underestimated the time required.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you have an organization that’s generally working pretty well, you want to protect the part that’s working by going a little slow, as McNerney did.

When her pillar-of-the-community father left the family (no doubt in pursuit of his own love, safety, and belonging), she took on the burden of caring for her mother and brother. Yet another hallmark of the entrepreneur; yet another instance of premature promotion into adulthood.