Companies that purposefully set out to excel are remarkably few and far between. The number of those who have a strong, well-thought out strategy for success are even fewer. Based on five years of research and field-testing, Breakout Strategy gives you a “fast track” strategic vision that can push your company to incredible new rates of growth and expansion. Strategy and leadership experts Sydney Finkelstein, Charles Harvey, and Thomas Lawton show how to craft a strategy that fits your business, whether you're a small start-up or an established national or international company. They also give you the tools to adapt that strategy as you grow and expand. Their system features five key initiatives:  Create a workable vision by understanding the needs and aspirations of a company Face customers with a value proposition that covers all the important bases Align what a business does with what the customer truly desires Balance the people and process sides of business to deliver on promises Liberate the energies of any strategy's toughest critic-those who work within the business  Breakout Strategy puts these initiatives in context by examining how diverse companies achieved breakout growth, including jetBlue, Harley Davidson, and Starbucks. It also sheds light on how a poor strategy can topple a once-successful company off the pedestal of market dominance, such as Krispy Kreme's overly ambitious expansion strategy that stretched the company and the brand too thin. With the systematic approach in Breakout Strategy, you'll be able to travel the fast track to market triumph, leaving your competitors struggling to catch up. 

Breakout Strategy: Meeting the Challenge of Double-Digit Growth

A thorough, in-depth treatment of strategic leadership that highlights knowledge creation and practical insight. The authors have been at the forefront of research and writing in this field; this book represents a compilation and creative extension of their own and others research on top executives. This brief one-color text is appropriate for MBA strategy courses or as a supplement to various upper-division managerial texts. Strategic Leadership is part of the Wests Strategic Management Series edited by Michael A. Hitt, R. Duane Ireland, and Robert E. Hoskisson, authors of Strategic Management: Competitiveness and Globalization, 2nd.

Strategic Leadership: Top Executives and Their Effects on Organizations (Hornbooks)

Why do smart and experienced leaders make flawed, even catastrophic, decisions? Why do people keep believing they have made the right choice, even with the disastrous result staring them in the face? And how can you be sure you're making the right decision--without the benefit of hindsight?Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell show how the usually beneficial processes of the human mind can become traps when we face big decisions. The authors show how the shortcuts our brains have learned to take over millennia of evolution can derail our decision making. Think Again offers a powerful model for making better decisions, describing the key red flags to watch for and detailing the decision-making safeguards we need.Using examples from business, politics, and history, Think Again deconstructs bad decisions, as they unfolded in real time, to show how you can avoid the same fate.

Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You

It’s an all too common scenario: A great company breaks from the pack; the analysts are in love, the smiling CEO appears on the cover of BusinessWeek and Fortune, the stock soars. Two years later, the company is in flames, the CEO is under attack, and the stock has tanked.   Why does this sort of thing keep happening at respectable companies like Motorola, Quaker, and Sony, all of which have very smart, hard-working senior executives? And how can you tell if it’s about to happen at your own company?   Why Smart Executives Fail answers these and many more crucial questions. Sydney Finkelstein, a distinguished professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, carried out a six-year study of leadership failure, the largest of its kind. After hundreds of interviews with insiders at top companies that got into major troublesuch as GM, Mattel, and RiteAidFinkelstein figured out the common causes behind failures in wildly different types of companies. He explains "the seven habits of spectacularly unsuccessful people" that drive smart managers to make catastrophic mistakes.   As much about psychology as it is about business, Why Smart Executives Fail tells the stories of more than fifty great business disasters and includes exclusive interviews with many of their leaders, in which they explain what really led to their disastrous decisions.

Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes

This book integrates and assesses the vast and rapidly growing literature on strategic leadership, which is the study of top executives and their effects on organizations. The basic premise is that in order to understand why organizations do the things they do, or perform the way they do, we need to deeply comprehend the people at the top-- their experiences, abilities, values, social connections, aspirations, and other human features. The actions--or inactions--of a relatively small number of key people at the apex of an organization can dramatically affect organizational outcomes.The scope of strategic leadership includes individual executives, especially chief executive officers (CEOs), groups of executives (top management teams, or TMTs); and governing bodies (particularly boards of directors). Accordingly, the book addresses an array of topics regarding CEOs (e.g., values, personality, motives, demography, succession, and compensation); TMTs (including composition, processes, and dynamics); and boards of directors (why boards look and behave the way they do, and the consequences of board profiles and behaviors).Strategic Leadership synthesizes what is known about strategic leadership and indicates new research directions. The book is meant primarily for scholars who strive to assess and understand the phenomena of strategic leadership. It offers a considerable foundation on which professionals involved in executive search, compensation, appraisal and staffing, as well as board members who evaluate executive performance and potential, might build their tools and perspectives.

Strategic Leadership: Theory and Research on Executives, Top Management Teams, and Boards (Strategic Management (Oxford University Press))

Tuck Executive Education at Dartmouth designs and delivers learning initiatives that transform individuals and organizations…that help executives improve their performance as leaders so they deliver stronger results…that better equip them to drive growth, innovation, and change for their organizations. 

We do this by providing personalized attention to both our participants and our clients. We will work with you to meet your needs whether you are an individual looking to attend an open enrolment program or an executive looking to co-create a custom learning initiative.  

Our executive education programs are characterized by passionate teaching, personalized service, and a collaborative approach to learning with peers and faculty. Tuck faculty combine their research-based insights with real world knowledge and global experience to create exceptional learning experiences. Tuck’s renowned approach is characterized by a general management perspective on responsible leadership, integrated across disciplines. Tuck’s culture of teaching and learning focuses on meeting your needs and delivering game-changing results from your investment in executive education. 

Tuck Executive Education

Professor Finkelstein has published 17 books and 75 articles, including the #1 bestseller in the U.S. and Japan Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes (Portfolio, 2003). 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 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 the Fortune list of Best Business Books, it has also been featured in the Financial Times, BusinessWeek, The Times of London, Toronto Globe and Mail, Fast Company, Across the Board, and Entrepreneurship, and has been translated into 11 languages. In Professor Finkelstein’s follow-up book Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It from Happening to You (Harvard Business Press, 2009), he turned 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 offer solutions that reduce our vulnerability to falling into the traps that lead to bad decisions. 

Professor Finkelstein is a recognized thought leader on leadership, strategy, and corporate governance and listed in the “World’s Top 25 Leadership Gurus.” and on the “Thinkers 50.” He is known for his keynote speeches and television appearances,  and as a columnist for the BBC. He has served as a consultant and speaker for major companies around the world, including, Aetna, American Express, Bank of Montreal, Barclays, Boeing, Cerberus, Chevron, Comcast, Deloitte, Deutsche Bank, Eaton, Freddie Mac, General Dynamics, General Electric, Glaxo, Heinz, Hitachi, ING, ITT, Johnson & Johnson, JP Morgan Chase, Korn-Ferry, Mayo Clinic, McGraw-Hill, McKinsey, Monsanto, Morgan Stanley, Novartis, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Raytheon, Roche, Rollins, Russell Reynolds, UBS, and United Technologies.

Corporate Strategy

Strategic Leadership

Mergers & Acquisitions

Executive Talent

Board Effectiveness

Developing Leadership Talent

Executive Failure

American Apparel’s Dov Charney One of the Worst CEOs - Bloomberg TV

Personal Website

BBC "Syd Weighs In"

Forbes Blog

The Syd Blog

Associate Dean for Executive Education; Steven Roth Professor of Management

Failure Works: Just Make Sure to Take it the Right Way As we seek success in the digital revolution, we need to understand failure. For budding entrepreneurs...

Sydney Finkelstein

Tuck Alumni for Lifelong Learning (TALL) presents Reunion Weekend 2009 Sydney Finkelstein Steven Roth Professor of Management "Think Again: Why Good Leaders ...

Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it from Happening to You

Mickey Drexler, CEO of J. Crew, shares his thoughts on leadership, greatest mistakes, and J. Crew's competitive landscape in an interview with Professor Sydn...

Leadership Insights with Sydney Finkelstein: Mickey Drexler, CEO of J. Crew

Tuck School of Business Professor Sydney Finkelstein discusses the top CEO blunders of 2010. Finkelstein outlines the major blunders of former BP Chief Execu...

Top CEO Blunders of 2010

Sydney Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School at Dartmouth College, where he teaches courses on Leadership and Strategy. P...

Sydney Finkelstein: Renowned Thought Leader on Strategy, Dartmouth Professor, Keynote Speaker

Eike Batista, CEO of the Brazilian conglomerate OGX, OSX, and multiple interlocking companies, is Professor Finkelstein's worst CEO of 2013. Batista blazed o...

Professor Finkelstein's Worst CEO of 2013

Professor Sydney Finkelstein, Steven Roth Professor of Management at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, spoke at Simon for the 4th Sands Leadership Lectur...

4th Sands Leadership Lecture

Tuck School of Business Professor Sydney Finkelstein gives his predictions for business and politics in 2011. Check out what Finkelstein predicts in the year...

CEO Challenges for 2011

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is Professor Finkelstein's best CEO of 2013. In other hands, Amazon might seem to be a company with an identity crisis—is it UPS? ...

Professor Finkelstein's Best CEO of 2013

Web Tv www.labourseetlavie.com has interviewed Sydney Finkelstein Professor of Strategy and Leadership Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He is ta...

Interview Sydney Finkelstein Professor of Strategy and Leadership

July 27 (Bloomberg) -- Sydney Finkelstein, a management professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, discusses BP Plc's selection of Robert Dudl...

Select Inquiry Type