Printable Biography of Dr. Sydney Finkelstein

Sydney Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. He is widely known as one of the top authorities on strategy and leadership. His group is one of the highest rated at Tuck, and it has helped to propel Dartmouth's Tuck School to somewhere near the top of recent business school ratings-including the number one spot in the most recent Wall Street Journal ranking.

Sydney Finkelstein is Director of the Tuck Executive Program and a leading figure in worldwide executive education. He created the highly successful Strategic Leadership program for senior executives at the Australian Graduate School of Management. He has taught in executive education programs in Mexico, Finland, England, France, Italy, Poland, China, and Vietnam, as well as throughout the United States.

Articles by Sydney Finkelstein have been published in the Harvard Business Review, Strategic Management Journal, Organizational Dynamics, Journal of Business Strategy, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, and other leading business journals. He received the Academy of Management Executive Award for Best Article of the Year (1997), and an award from McKinsey for an article on boards of directors (2002).

Sydney Finkelstein has carried out the largest research program ever devoted to corporate mistakes and failures. In Why Smart Executives Fail (published by Portfolio June, 2003), he and his research team uncover - with startling clarity and unassailable documentation - the causes regularly responsible for major business breakdowns. Why Smart Executives Fail relates the stories of great business disasters and demonstrates that there are specific, identifiable ways in which many businesses regularly make themselves vulnerable to failure. The result is a truly indispensable, practical, must-read book that explains the mechanics of business failure, how to avoid them, and what to do if they happen.

Every year Sydney Finkelstein gives talks throughout America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He is able to address a wide range of audiences in an entertaining fashion, but is prized, above all, for the depth and authority he brings to the subject of learning from corporate mistakes and failures.

Most Requested Topics:

Why Smart Executives Fail and What to Do About It: One of the most remarkable findings from Sydney Finkelstein’s book, Why Smart Executives Fail  is that the underlying reasons for failure in many of the mid-1990s business breakdowns—whether it was Motorola’s inability to shift from analog to digital technology or Rubbermaid’s apparent refusal to respond to the increasing power of big-box retailers like Wal-Mart— even the recent corporate scandals. In this speech, which is also the basis for a one-or-two-day workshop with special applicability to an individual client, Sydney identifies the four destructive syndromes behind these disasters and outlines a series of steps that companies can take to avoid the same fate.

Irrational Strategies and How to Fix Them: In the late 1940s and 1950s, major league baseball opened their doors to African-American ballplayers, yet one team refused to adapt. The Boston Red Sox were the last major league team to integrate, despite the fact that almost all of their competitors improved their won-loss record immediately after adding black players. Remarkably, Sydney found exactly the same pattern of adopting “irrational” strategies and failing to adapt in dozens of companies he studied. Key decision makers knew exactly what was happening in their industries, among competitors, in customer circles, yet they failed to respond. This speech brings together a wealth of research evidence and literally dozens of real-world examples to demonstrate how irrational strategies emerge and how to fix them.

The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful People: Is it possible to pinpoint just what makes smart, previously successful people go wrong? The answer is yes! Again and again, whether CEOs, senior executives or mid-level managers, the same bad habits kept appearing in the failing companies he studied. These spectacularly unsuccessful habits included such seemingly positive leadership characteristics as a belief that you can dominate your environment, total commitment to the goals of the company, and stunning decisiveness in the face of uncertainty. In this speech, Sydney demonstrates how such apparently beneficial habits are actually destructive when left unchecked and offers an alternative view of leadership that has applicability up and down the management hierarchy.

Early Warning Signs for Management Meltdowns: Wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow know in advance when something bad was going to happen? Of course, we can never know with complete certainty, but in the course of studying more than fifty business failures, some of the same activities and attitudes seemed to predate business disaster. Sydney summarizes what these markers for failure are, how to observe them and what to do to derail the train before it crashes.

Making Mergers and Acquisitions Work: While smart executives failed during many different business activities, if there was one area that was fraught with the greatest dangers, it would be mergers and acquisitions. This is a topic Sydney has been studying and consulting on for more than ten years and he brings a wealth of experience to the table. This speech, which he also offers as a one-day workshop, gives audiences a roadmap of what to consider and how to do it from the point of first considering what a potential acquisition candidate should look like all the way through to the fine points of integration.