Sink or swim. A new person is put in the water and must find a way to stay up. Nobody holds them.
Hit the ground running. Be productive from the first day, without a period of settling in.
Learn on the fly. Learn the work while already doing it.
Figure it out. A common answer when a new employee asks how something is done.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” The line is often attributed to Charles Darwin. Darwin did not write it. The Darwin Correspondence Project traces it to an American business professor.
The professor was Leon C. Megginson, at Louisiana State University. In a speech to the Southwestern Social Science Association in San Antonio on April 12, 1963, he summarized Darwin in his own words: “the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment.” Later writers shortened his words and gave them to Darwin.
In February 2016, AT&T’s chief executive Randall Stephenson told The New York Times what he expected of his employees as the company moved to new technology. “There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop.”
Employees who did not spend five to ten hours a week learning online, he said, “will obsolete themselves with technology.”
A saying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology goes: “Getting an education from MIT is like taking a drink from a firehose.” In December 1991, MIT hackers made it real. They connected a fire hydrant and a fire hose to a drinking fountain in Building 16.
The hydrant is now in the MIT Museum. Americans use the phrase for any start where far too much arrives at once.
In 2018, Gallup reported a figure about onboarding. “Only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job of onboarding.”
Wendy Kopp developed Teach For America from her senior thesis at Princeton, where she graduated in 1989. Since 1990 its corps of college graduates has served as teachers.
New corps members trained in a summer institute before they took their own classes. In 2009 its training page said: “Five weeks is a short time to prepare corps members for the rigors of the classroom.” Later programs have divided the summer training differently.
“Improvise, adapt, overcome” is an unofficial motto of the US Marines. The earliest record that the word researcher Barry Popik found is the 1986 film Heartbreak Ridge. Clint Eastwood plays a Marine gunnery sergeant. He tells his men: “You’re Marines now. You adapt. You overcome. You improvise.”
Some writers say Marines used the words long before the film. Popik found no printed evidence for that. By April 1988 Jack Clark was quoting it: “It’s like Clint Eastwood said, ‘You’ve got to improvise, adapt and overcome.'”
Michael Watkins’s The First 90 Days was published by Harvard Business School Press in 2003 as a guide for managers starting a new job. It advises them to pursue small-scale “early wins” to build credibility.
Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. This business fable is about adapting quickly to change. The characters who succeed are those who make fast decisions and act, rather than waiting for perfect information or circumstances. The story is widely used in American business to encourage employees to embrace quick, adaptive decision-making.