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.
Warwick Fairfax is the scion of a long-time family-controlled media empire in Australia once worth billions of dollars, that is no more. And he’s the one most directly responsible for the collapse of the business. Who is Warwick Fairfax, what did he do, and how has he lived his life since?
Have you ever had a bad day at the office? Maybe made a deal that didn’t work out? We all have, but not like our guest today: Warwick Fairfax, a reluctant media mogul if there ever was one, made a deal that changed his life and challenged everything he held dear. In the space of a very few short years Warwick Fairfax’s deal led to the demise of the Fairfax family name and literally hundreds of millions of dollars, forever. Warwick is 5th generation Fairfax, one of the leading media companies in Australia for more than a century, competing with Rupert Murdock. And when I say a leading company, I’m talking about a family that was worth billions of dollars. We’ll hear Warwick’s incredible, and honest, description of the events that led up to the disaster, and especially how he’s lived his life since then. Remarkably, Warwick has made it through to the other side, and now spends his time helping other people deal with failure, challenge, and leadership. Despite what happened to the Fairfax company and name, Warwick’s story is an inspirational and powerful one, chockfull of lessons for all of us.
