The Sydcast is all about intimate and informative conversations with fascinating people you may not know. Until now. Because everyone has a story.
Listen in as Syd talks to entrepreneurs, community leaders, professional athletes, politicians, academics, authors, musicians, and many more about who they are and how they got there.
Sydney Finkelstein is an award winning professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and a best-selling author of Superbosses and 25 other books. He’s written for the Harvard Business Review, the BBC, Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and more academic journals than you’d care to know about. He spends his time asking questions, and sometimes, even answering them.
Episode Summary
Rachel Feintzeig, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal who writes about work and life, has a knack for asking great questions that resonate. Whether it’s how it feels to have a partner on the front lines of COVID to how to get noticed and promoted when working remotely, her writing gets to what people are experiencing, right now. On this episode of The Sydcast, it’s Rachel that answers the questions, about her journey as a reporter, how to make people mad, and the effects of COVID on the workplace.
Syd Finkelstein
Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the Global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.
Rachel Feintzeig
Rachel Feintzeig is the Work & Life columnist at the Wall Street Journal, writing about the intersection of jobs and everything else. From 2013 to 2020, she covered management and career trends as a reporter for the paper’s management bureau, writing about everything from the changing role of executive assistants to people who get tattoos of their company logo. She has a particular interest in stories about families and has written personal essays exploring her own experiences with pregnancy, parenthood and marriage. Rachel joined Dow Jones as a reporting assistant in 2008, covering bankruptcy and restructuring during the financial crisis and its aftermath. She’s a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was managing editor of the student newspaper the Daily Pennsylvanian.
Insights from this episode:
- Details on why Rachel went into journalism, how she ended up writing for the Wall Street Journal, and her process for research and reporting.
- Benefits an editor provides beyond grammar and how a good editor helps shape a good reporter.
- Differences between editorial writing and reporting and why a newspaper would publish both.
- Details on Rachel’s favorite article she wrote, why she wrote it and the writing process, and how she felt about writing a personal story.
- Difficulties that COVID presented personally and professionally, how it influenced her articles, and her thoughts on the long-lasting effects of COVID on the workplace and metropolitan areas.
Quotes from the show:
- On working in different fields of journalism: “I really do believe that if you’re just curious and bright and a good writer you can tackle anything as a reporter.” – Rachel Feintzeig
- “The best case scenario is that everyone is mad at you; that’s how you know you’ve done a good job.” – Rachel Feintzeig
- On being a good reporter: “A lot of it is about confidence and trusting your own intuition and it also takes time.” – Rachel Feintzeig
- “Great editors make you concise. They cut through a lot of the bullshit in your writing.” – Rachel Feintzeig
- “The truth is that most academics don’t teach what they do research on.” – Syd Finkelstein
- On writing of her own personal experience: “I’m a millennial, I’m like a natural over-sharer, and I write for a living. I’m a professional journalist, how hard could this be? It was incredibly hard.” – Rachel Feintzeig
- On working during COVID: “I felt like writing was giving me purpose and that what I was doing was really important.” – Rachel Feintzeig
- On the expectation of experts having all the answers: “I wonder if, as a society, we’ve over-relied on experts.” – Syd Finkelstein
- On the effects of COVID on the workplace: “My hope is that this empathetic style of leadership and doling out of benefits will be here to stay.” – Rachel Feintzeig
Stay Connected:
Syd Finkelstein
Website: http://thesydcast.com
LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein
Twitter: @sydfinkelstein
Facebook: The Sydcast
Instagram: The Sydcast
Rachel Feintzeig
Website: wsj.com/news/author/rachel-feintzeig
LinkedIn: Rachel Feintzeig
Twitter: @RachelFeintzeig
Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.
This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry (www.podcastlaundry.com)
