The Sweeney Agency

About Sydney Finkelstein - Expert on Business Management and Strategy:

Sydney Finkelstein is author of Why Smart Executives Fail and Director of the Executive Program at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University. He is widely known as one of the world's top authorities on strategy and leadership at the executive level. Sydney is also creator of the Strategic Leadership Program for Senior Executives at the Australian Graduate School of Management.

Sydney has served as a consultant and keynote presenter at numerous leading companies around the world, including Deutsche Bank, GlaxoSmithKline, American Express and Boeing.

What Sydney Finkelstein Talks About:

Sydney Finkelstein is one of the most dynamic and engaging speakers on the circuit today. He offers a rare combination of world class presentation skills and leading-edge content that leaves audiences both challenged and exhilarated. Participants in previous seminars have described his programs using terms like the best educational experience of my life and incredible examples and insights that opened my eyes in ways I had never considered.

Every year Sydney gives talks throughout America and Europe. 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 business breakdowns. His audiences are constantly clamoring for his latest discoveries.

Sydney Finkelstein's Topics Include:

Why Smart Executives Fail – and What to do About It
One of the most remarkable findings from Why Smart Executives Fail is that the underlying reasons for failure in many business breakdowns. In this speech, Sydney identifies four destructive syndromes, and outlines a series of steps companies can take to avoid them.

Irrational Strategies and How to Fix Them
Irrational strategies exist when key decision makers know exactly what is happening in their industries, among competitors, or in customer circles, yet they fail to respond. Instead, they often continue with the strategies of the past, or adopt even more inappropriate policies to address the challenges they faced. What are the different types of organization mindset failures that serve as guideposts for disaster? How can executives ensure that they don't fall into the same traps? 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 keep appearing in failing companies. 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 even if you are an outsider to a company (something of clear value for investors), and what to do to derail the train before it crashes.

Making Mergers and Acquisitions Work
If there is one area fraught with danger, 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 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.