Sydney Finkelstein, Strategy and Leadership Professor at Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, Talks about Ethical Leadership Skills and more
Q. With many students pursuing MBA, what scope does it have on completion?
There is a worldwide war for credentials going on among smart, upwardly mobile people. With India and China producing great talent and opening up their markets, there are huge opportunities. An MBA degree provides skills, connections and the mindset to succeed. But you can have all the credentials in the world and still be unsuccessful. It is critical to ethically apply what you know, learn from your own mistakes and take advantage of opportunities. There is no replacement for world-class education, but education by itself is insufficient for managerial success.
It is the combination of experience, training and ethical leadership.
Q. What advice do you have for youngsters wanting to pursue MBA?
An MBA is a powerful degree and I encourage young people to pursue it. The difference between a top school like Tuck and an average school is significant. At Tuck, we offer the full gamut of basic training in functional areas of business, and we also place a high value on developing leadership skills, involving students in realworld projects, developing team skills (Tuck School’s hallmark) and making effective ethical decisions. The environment at Tuck pushes people to raise their game while interacting effectively with diverse students.
Q. What does the research centre at Tuck School of Business foster?
Top executives today are often more qualified than in the past. The biggest reason for this is market globalisation for executive talent. I really do believe that the most important individual characteristic of great managers is the ability to adapt in real-time to change. The hallmark of the greatest managers is adaptability in the face of unexpected events.
Q. Tell us a little about the management courses and teaching styles at Tuck.
There are five different courses in the first year programme that are leadership or management related. Courses in Statistics, Microeconomics, and Operations address real-world problems from the viewpoint of managers, leaders, CEOs. Tuck is known for its general management excellence and is highly interactive in all its courses. As the first graduate business school in the world, Tuck has helped develop many leaders. As opposed to most business schools, full-time tenure-track faculty member teaches in the MBA program. We bring our best teachers to the classroom.
Q. What is the crux of your book Why Smart Executives Fail?
If we don’t carefully examine what goes wrong in organisations then we
are missing a huge opportunity to learn from those mistakes. I wrote the book to gain a deeper understanding of leadership and organisational breakdowns. The causes of failure are not executional errors or simple explanations that question executive qualities. We allow our personal biases to influence the decisions we make and ignore feedback. It is all these very personal weaknesses that lead to failure.
Prof Finkelstein’s Choice of the World’s Worst CEO’s and Their Blunders
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