From Smart to Wise: Acting and Leading with Wisdom

The Pitfalls of Smart Leadership

Smart leaders are an eclectic bunch that includes brilliant strategists and functional experts as well as superefficient tacticians and gifted managers of people. They may be start-up entrepreneurs or high up in the ranks of large, global corporations. They can be quite diverse when it comes to their perspectives, actions, and motivations.

For the purposes of this book, we’ll divide smart leaders into two broad categories according to their primary area of strength, which we refer to as functional smart and business smart. To generalize, functional smart leaders excel in one field or function, such as R&D or operations, and tend to dig deep to establish their expertise in the domain that they have chosen. Effective ...