Leadership Wise: Why Business Books Suck, But Wise Leaders Succeed

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.

JOHN W. FOREMAN is the Chief Product Officer for Podium, a Google Ventures and Y Combinator backed tech startup that’s reshaping how local businesses operate and grow. Prior to Podium, John Foreman was Chief Product Officer of Mailchimp, which ultimately sold to Intuit for twelve billion dollars. John has built software to help millions of businesses succeed for over a decade.

While John’s work is in leading R&D for tech companies, his background is in data science and artificial intelligence. His first book, Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight, helped professionals around the world learn how to apply artificial intelligence techniques in their own fields.