Why do so many business books feel useless the moment they come in contact with your day job?
Business books often contradict one another, each providing advice that's only helpful some of the time, and exhaustingly, your boss is going to cherry pick only the books that suit their way of working.
Additionally, too often leadership books push fundamentally changing your personality to look like some idealized leader, often some dude. That dude may not even be a business leader! They might be a marine, a mountain climber, or a politician. Their stories might inspire you to summit Everest, but they're not going to help you figure out the looming company merger or what to do with that struggling manager
In Leadership Wise, Chief Product Officer at Podium, John Foreman, delivers a different and refreshingly practical take on business leadership. The author moves beyond what a leader should look like, to discuss how you can make better decisions over time to help your organization accomplish its goals. Regardless of a reader's personality and background, John provides practical advice for how anyone can become a great leader just as they are by making more effective decisions over and over again. It's not about becoming a 5-star general or a mythical titan of industry, it's about making better decisions more often. In the book you'll find:
- A structure for understanding and becoming comfortable with the unending contradictions of leading in business
- Strategies for defining priorities, sourcing options, and choosing the best decision
- Advice for channeling your emotions and company culture to more effectively solve problems
An engaging and hands-on exploration of how to lead real people in real companies by making the best decisions possible with the information you have, Leadership Wise belongs on the desks of managers, executives, directors, entrepreneurs, and founders everywhere.
Table of Contents
A Few Things Up Front xv
Chapter 1 Business Books Suck 1
Context Is Everything: Do Things That [Don’t?] Scale 6
What If I Said That Bad Leaders Are Too Consistent? 11
Introducing Wisdom Literature 12
The Facebook Uncle Dilemma 14
Chapter 2 Let’s Warm Up! Ten Business Choices Where One Option and Its Opposite Both Have Merit 19
Let’s Take a “Walk Around the Business” 22
People 24
A Players vs. B Players 25
Accountability vs. Blamelessness 30
Inputs vs. Outputs 34
Far vs. Fast 36
Process 39
Speed vs. Order 40
Specialization vs. Generalization 41
Top Down vs. Bottom Up 45
Product 49
Good vs. Great 50
Bundling vs. Unbundling 52
Build vs. Buy 55
I Didn’t Give You Answers; I Gave You Options 57
Let’s Do a Little Exercise 59
Chapter 3 Generating Options 61
Let’s Get This Out of the Way: Consult Yourself 64
Consult Your Co- workers and Customers 66
Set Expectations in These Conversations: You’re Just Gathering Input 67
Consult Your Network 69
Go Ahead, Read the Business Books! 70
Management by Metaphor 71
What Are My Levers? Chart Options Against Your Decision Levers 79
Using All the Parts of the Animal 81
Pull a “10th Man Rule” 82
Checking In on Our Exercise 84
Wisdom Literature Would Suggest None of These Options Is “Wrong” 84
Isn’t This Overkill? “Paralysis by Analysis” 85
Over- confidently Incorrect 86
This Needn’t Take Long 86
Analysis Paralysis Is All About Objectives, Not Options 87
Chapter 4 What’s Your Objective? 89
A Problem Isn’t a Priority 91
Two Words to Know and Love: Minimize and Maximize 93
Is It Possible to Love Two Objectives at the Same Time? 96
Turn Priorities Into Constraints 100
Chapter 5a A Brief Interlude 103
There’s Plenty of Book Left! 104
Chapter 5 Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself 107
Going Deeper with Data 108
Is an Anecdote Data? 109
Quantitative vs. Qualitative Who Wants Pretty Good Pizza? 110
Priorities and Constraints Come First 112
You Know What They Say About Assumptions 112
Default to Learning Fast and Iterating 113
Not All Who Wander Are Lost 114
One- way vs. Two- Way Doors or Are They Streets? Two- Way Things 117
Do a Premortem 121
Blazing Through Covering Your Ass 127
Chapter 6 Making the Most of Execution 129
Make Your Decisions “Fully Loaded” 131
“Use All the Parts of the Animal” 133
Establish Success and Failure Criteria Up Front 135
Be Transparent, But Commit to the Bit! 139
Transparency Costs You Nothing 140
What’s “My Part of Our Whole?” 142
Commit to the Bit 143
There Is No Separation of Mind and Body 144
Chapter 7 “Keeping It Real” 147
Emotions Are Shortcuts 148
Diving a Little Deeper into My Knee- Jerk Reactions 150
All Feelings Are Valid. Always Acting Out of Them Is Neither Authentic nor Beneficial 155
A Process for Becoming Increasingly Authentic 157
Start with Post Facto Reflection 160
Positive Reinforcement Is the Feedback Loop That May in Fact Change You 163
That’s Cool. But It Doesn’t Apply to Me 164
Enough with This Woo- Woo Feelings Stuff 166
Chapter 8 Shaping the Company for Success 167
Company Culture and Values 168
Culture Is a Sum of Our Values, Explicit and Implicit 169
Good Leaders Actively Check On and Shape Their Culture to Produce Better Decisions 171
Culture Eats Decision- Making for Breakfast 173
So How Do We Eat Culture for Breakfast? 175
Making Implicit Values Explicit 179
People: Hiring, Managing, Promoting, and Firing 183
Hire People Who’ve Read and Like This Book 183
Give Less Responsibility to Those Who Make Poor Decisions. Give More to Those Who Make Great Decisions 185
Scale Your Impact 188
Conclusion 189
Acknowledgments 195
About the Author 197
Index 199
