Leadership Wise

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.

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