Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School at Dartmouth College; Faculty Director, Tuck Executive Program & author of Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn From Their Mistakes

He teaches executive education at the Tuck School (where he serves as the Faculty Director of the flagship Tuck Executive Program), and also has experience working with executives at Northwestern, Wharton, Duke, Bocconi, London Business School, Australian Graduate School of Management, Melbourne Business School, Hanoi School of Business, the Chalmers School (Sweden) and the Helsinki School of Economics.  He holds degrees from Concordia University and the London School of Economics, as well as a Ph.D. from Columbia University in strategic management.

Professor Finkelstein has published 11 books and over 60 articles, including the #1 bestseller in the U.S. and Japan, Why Smart Executives Fail.  Based on a six-year study of 51 companies and 200 interviews of business leaders, the book identifies the fundamental reasons why major mistakes happen, points out the early warning signals that are critical for investors and managers alike, and offers ideas on how organizations can develop a capability of learning from corporate mistakes.  On Fortune Magazine’s list of Best Business Books, the Wall Street Journal called it “a marvel – a jargon-free business book based on serious research that offers genuine insights with clarity and sometimes even wit … It should be required reading not just for executives but for investors as well.”  It has also been featured in such media as the Financial Times, Business Week, the London Times, the Toronto Globe and Mail, Fast Company, Across the Board, and Entrepreneurship, among others, and has been translated into 11 different languages. In Professor Finkelstein’s follow-up new book, Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You (Harvard Business Press), due out in early 2009, he turns his attention to such major strategic decisions as the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and numerous business cases to explain why decision-makers sometimes think they’re right when they are really wrong.  The book takes up recent research in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and management to not only document why things go wrong, but also to offer a series of solutions that reduce our vulnerability to falling into the traps that lead to bad decisions.   In light of the ongoing financial crisis, the lessons from this book are especially timely. 

Professor Finkelstein has conducted extensive research on strategic leadership and corporate governance, and published numerous articles in the major journals in his field.  He is an expert on mergers and acquisitions, executive compensation, boards of directors, and management ethics, and is an experienced executive coach.  His book, Strategic Leadership: Top Executives and Their Effects on Organizations, was a finalist for the Academy of Management’s Terry Book Award in 1998.  His article on power dynamics within top management teams was ranked as the number one publication by academicians in strategic leadership in the first half of the 1990s. 

Professor Finkelstein’s awards include Finalist for the Academy of Management Executive Best Paper Award (2004), the McKinsey & Company Strategic Management Society Best Conference Paper Prize Honorable Mention (2002), the Best Paper Award from the Academy of Management Executive for his article “Leveraging Intellect” (1997), two Citations of Excellence from ANBAR, the world’s leading guide to management journal literature (1997 & 1998), the Cenafoni Prize for research in Entrepreneurial Strategy (1991), and finalist for the A.T. Kearney award for the best research in strategic management (1988).  He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management.  He currently serves on the Editorial Review Boards of the Administrative Science Quarterly, and Strategic Organization. 

He has participated on numerous CEO forums, been interviewed or had his work appear in numerous leading media outlets, and served as consultant and speaker for major companies around the world, including Acciona, Aetna, American Express, Avaya, Bank of Montreal, Barclays, BASF, Boeing, Bose, Cerberus, Chevron, Constellation, Daikin, Deloitte, Deutsche Bank, Entergy, Flagstone Reinsurance, GE, Glaxo, Hasbro, ING, ITT, JP Morgan Chase, Mayo Clinic, MedImmune, Mentor, Korn-Ferry, Lafarge, McGraw-Hill, McKinsey, Monsanto, Morgan Stanley, Novartis, Omax de Mexico, PharMerica, Prudential, PwC, Raytheon, Roche, Russell Reynolds, The Hartford, UBS, and Wyeth. 

Topics in more detail

New Business Breakdowns
Organizations cannot exist without the act of creation, though the case histories we researched suggested an experience few would call immaculate. Naturally, there's a dot-com story—Webvan—that followed the now well-known script of pell-mell pursuit of first mover advantage while spending too much on a business plan that was not ready for prime time. What is less well known is how some of the same challenges Webvan experienced showed up in the considerably un-Internet world of Samsung, the giant Korean conglomerate. Rounding out the new business breakdowns we studied are General Magic, an Apple spin-off that went after the PDA market five years before anyone ever hear of Palm Pilots, and Iridium, the classic story of a telecom juggernaut that was never meant to be. All four of these companies are profiled in detail, but there are others that fell into the same category that make cameo appearances here, and in later chapters as well, such as Levi's, Schwinn, Rite Aid, Rhythms Net Connection, and Value America (and several other Internet cousins). Together, these companies stand as spectacular examples of great  corporate mistakes in creating new ventures, and offer critical lessons to all those enmeshed in, or soon to enter, the world of new business formation.

Mergers & Acquisitions
Companies often court disaster when they try to make other companies part of their business organization. The leading examples for illustrating what typically goes wrong are Quaker's acquisition of Snapple, Sony's acquisition of Columbia Pictures, and Saatchi & Saatchi's acquisition of numerous advertising agencies and consulting firms. But there are several other stories that are equally instructive. Daimler Benz, Conseco, Mattel, Vivendi, AOL Time Warner, First Union, AMP, and Firestone ended up destroying billions of dollars in value in a spasm of deals that offer terrific insights on how to do things differently. The expression "buying trouble" could have been coined for any of these examples. In fact, if it were necessary to choose only one type of example to illustrate every kind of business breakdown, it would have to be mergers and acquisitions. The stresses of trying to plan an acquisition and of integrating the acquired company seem to expose every area of weakness a company has developed.

New Competitive Threats
Why do strategies break down in the face of competitive pressures? How widespread are such breakdowns? Well, how about if we found the same pattern of mistakes in a computer company (Wang Labs), an automobile company (General Motors), a Japanese food company (Snow Brand Milk), and a professional sports franchise (the Boston Red Sox)? In retrospect, these stories are among the most fascinating, because the blindness of otherwise intelligent leaders seems so conspicuous. How could brilliant executives be so oblivious to the one thing their company most needed to do? These stories force us to consider why such basic ideas of strategy as competitive positioning and rational decision making break down in the heat of battle, leaving us with the challenge of explaining seemingly irrational behavior.

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