I was also told that a brand-new CEO shouldn’t be trying to make huge acquisitions. I was “crazy,” as one of our investment bankers put it, because the numbers would never work out and this was an impossible “sale” to the street.

The banker had a point. It’s true that on paper the deal didn’t make obvious sense. But I felt certain that this level of ingenuity was worth more than any of us understood or could calculate at the time. It’s perhaps not the most responsible advice in a book like this to say that leaders should just go out there and trust their gut, because it might be interpreted as endorsing impulsivity over thoughtfulness, gambling rather than careful study. As with everything, the key is awareness, taking it all in and weighing every factor—your own motivations, what the people you trust are saying, what careful study and analysis tell you, and then what analysis can’t tell you. You carefully consider all of these factors, understanding that no two circumstances are alike, and then, if you’re in charge, it still ultimately comes down to instinct. Is this right or isn’t it? Nothing is a sure thing, but you need at the very least to be willing to take big risks. You can’t have big wins without them.

Practicing sober selling from the beginning of your tenure will stand you in good stead if a honeymoon lift gives way to a slump. The market will always make its own judgements. But if you’ve noted possible headwinds before they are widely apparent, your credibility will grow all the stronger.

The other key takeaway about honeymoon enthusiasm is the importance of being wary about tailwinds of support that may be short-lived. Working intensively in your first year to build a strong foundation of trust with the board and key stakeholders inside and outside of the company is vital. A good first step is demonstrating that you know you have a great deal to learn.

We’ve found that appraising boards of our findings about the common honeymoon-to-slump pattern has also been helpful. In one instance, we were advising the board of a Fortune 50 company. The freshman-year CEO was enjoying a huge spike in share value. The board had selected her because of her long experience in executive roles in the company’s industry, and the market agreed with the board’s enthusiasm. The board was over the moon about the response. But having seen the high likelihood of a honeymoon-to-slump pattern in our modeling for this firm, we advised the board that they should expect a correction. When, sure enough, the share price dropped precipitously starting early in her year two, the board credited it to the predicted swing back from a honeymoon lift and didn’t turn up the heat on her as they might have. She’s gone on to thrive for five more years in the role, and counting.

As former Intel CEO Andy Grove wrote in his influential book Only the Paranoid Survive, “Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.” CEOs who make it to the Complacency Trap stage have navigated the rough-and-tumble of the Launch, Calibration, and Reinvention stages of the first few years. One unintended consequence of leading their firms adroitly can be an overly assured attitude about the course they’ve set and the organizational improvements they’ve made.

Another factor at work here, though, is the status quo bias, a powerful and widespread psychological force in business. The concept was introduced by researchers William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, who showed in studies with many kinds of decision-makers, including managers, that “when making an important choice, people are more likely to pick the option that maintains things as they are currently.” When you’re enjoying success, your status quo bias is reinforced, which might be just fine. But given that after five, six, or seven years, market conditions will surely have evolved, it usually won't be fine to stick with the status quo later. When responding to those changes would involve making a substantial alteration to or even reversal of a winning strategy or to operational engineering you have orchestrated, the status quo bias makes recognizing the need for change and making the case for it to your team and board a good deal more challenging.