More than eight in ten new managers get no real training. This is the training: a step-by-step playbook for the transition that makes or breaks a career.
Free Get the Starter Kit: five tools from the book, no purchase needed →
Same book, same 40+ tools. Take the paperback if you want to write in it, the Kindle if you want it on you in every meeting.
Print edition, built to sit open on your desk through the whole six months.
Buy on AmazonSearchable, syncs across your phone and tablet, in your hands in under a minute.
Buy on KindleBuying for a team? See the cohort program.
The book turns the anxious, sink-or-swim first months into a guided sequence of small, deliberate moves, each backed by a tool you can use that week.
Land well: clarify your role, find what matters, and start without stumbling.
Learn the terrain: yourself, your boss, and how the place really works.
Make your mark: build the team and set a direction people will follow.
Make it stick: deepen the relationships that carry you and measure your progress.
Every tool from the book, rebuilt as one working document.
The book gives you the plan. The workbook is where you run it. All 40+ tools, checklists, and worksheets from The Emergent Manager, assembled into a single editable workbook you can fill in on screen in Word or Google Docs.
Instead of scribbling in margins or rebuilding tables from scratch, you work through your first six months in one connected document: your objectives, your stakeholder map, your team assessment, your vision. It pairs with the print book or the ebook, and by month six it has become something no book can be: the written record of your transition, in your own words.
An editable file you open in Word or Google Docs and fill in as you go. Join the list and we'll send it the day it's ready, with launch pricing.
Tell me when it's readyPairs with either edition of the book.
A private coach that knows the whole method, on call whenever you need it.
The book and workbook give you the plan. The AI Coach is the voice in your corner as you run it. Trained on The Emergent Manager, it walks with you through the real moments of your first six months.
Ask it how to open your first one-on-one, pressure-test a decision before you make it, prep for a hard conversation, or think through a stakeholder who's giving you trouble. You get grounded, practical guidance drawn straight from the book, any hour of the day, without wading back through the chapters. It's an optional add-on for readers who want a thinking partner alongside the book.
Your first six months, with a coach who has read every page and remembers where you are.
Try the AI CoachBest used alongside the book and workbook.
Not ready to buy? Take five of the marquee tools from the book, free and editable in Word or Google Docs: your Key Few Objectives, Role Charter, Personal Advisory Board, Stakeholder Map, and First Moves action plan.
The book, run as a facilitated program inside your company.
Most companies promote their best individual contributors and hope for the best. The Cohort Program replaces the hoping. A group of your newly promoted managers works through the full method together, led by Emergent, applying every tool to the real role they are sitting in right now. It is built for people in a live transition: roughly six months into a first management role, or newly stepped into a materially bigger one.
The format is built for people with day jobs: a live intensive of short weekly working sessions, followed by a sustain window of monthly group coaching while the new habits set. A few hours a week, with the live program designed to fit inside a single quarter.
Every participant gets the printed book, the Editable Workbook, and the AI Coach. Cohorts stay small and managers work in fixed peer pods, so the network outlasts the program. And because we measure capability before and after, and ask each participant's own manager what changed, you finish with evidence, not just good feelings.
We're taking on a small number of cohorts to start, so the first companies in get our full attention. Tell us where to reach you and we'll send the program overview.
Want the detail first? Read the full program page.
Jesse is the founder of Emergent, a firm that helps leaders and organizations navigate change and transition. For more than twenty years he has advised managers and executives at Fortune 500 companies, mid-sized firms, and startups on the moments that define a career, first among them the leap into management.
The difference is rarely talent. It's having a plan for the weeks that decide it.