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
In this episode of The Sydcast, Syd and Adam Gopnik recall the wonders and the tribulations of living in Paris in the pre-9/11 era, the drama of moving to New York City, and what makes these two cities the world capitals they are, no matter how different. Adam talks about writing books, being a writer for The New Yorker magazine, and how the art and writing industries have changed. In typical Adam Gopnik fashion, parenting, marriage, capitalism, education and more are also touched on throughout the episode.
Syd Finkelstein
Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Masters 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.
Adam Gopnik
A staff writer for the New Yorker since 1986, Adam Gopnik was born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal. He received his BA. in Art History from McGill University, before completing his graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His first essay in The New Yorker, "Quattrocento Baseball" appeared in May of 1986 and he served as the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995.
His 2006 book, Through The Children’s Gate: A Home In New York collected and expanded his essays from the previous five years about life in New York and about raising two children in the shadow of many kinds of sadness. It includes the much-anthologized essays “Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli,” about his daughter Olivia’s imaginary friend, who is always too busy to play with her, and “Last of the Metrozoids,” about the life and last year of Kirk Varnedoe. In 2009, Gopnik completed Angels And Ages: A Short Book About Lincoln, Darwin And Modern Life, which became a national best-seller and which the Telegraph in London called “the essay every essayist would like to have written.”
In addition to his work as a writer, Adam has been an active lecturer. He has given lectures and readings in almost every major American city, and some smaller ones, too, from Jackson, Mississippi to Seattle, Washington.
He lives in New York with his wife, filmmaker Martha Parker, and their two children, Luke Auden and Olivia Esme Claire.
Insights from this episode:
- Comparisons between business, bureaucracy, and life in America versus France.
- Opinions on capitalism’s effect on consumers and producers.
- How living and parenting changed in New York City after the September 11, 2001 terror attack.
- What led Adam to become a writer and what it is like to be a writer for The New Yorker magazine.
- Reasons why Adam writes about his life and family and why it resonates with readers.
Quotes from the show:
- On fake empathy in business: “At least the French experience is genuinely human, if grouchy.” – Adam Gopnik
- “The difficulties of starting a business in France are often overwhelming.” – Adam Gopnik
- “In every economy we have a role as both a consumer and producer. America tends to identify with the role of consumer … in France, everybody identifies as their roles as producers.” – Adam Gopnik
- “My wife has a beautiful capacity for connecting with people.” – Adam Gopnik
- On Amazon’s business model: “It is the capitalist system in place and it has lead to a tremendous amount of inequality, but, also, it has lead to the ability of an Amazon (style business) to innovate in untold ways. ” – Syd Finkelstein
- “The coming of digitization has not destroyed the book business. People still buy hardcover books.” – Adam Gopnik
- “Any capitalist economy, the American one in particular, is designed to favor the interests of consumers over the persistence of producers.” – Adam Gopnik
- Advice from his father: “Never underestimate the other person’s insecurity.” – Adam Gopnik
- On the reaction to the September 11, 2001 terror event: “The auto-immune reaction to that one terrorist event has done us infinitely more harm, most visibly and notably in the war in Iraq, than everything else.” – Adam Gopnik
- On living in New York City, New York after September 11, 2001: “We had to raise our kids in the shadow of that fear.” – Adam Gopnik
- On writing the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker magazine: “Learning how to listen, learning how to observe, that was the great bootcamp of my life as a writer.” – Adam Gopnik
- On writing about his children now that they are adults: “Their story belongs to them now; the only story I can really write is about missing them.” – Adam Gopnik
Stay Connected:
Syd Finkelstein
Website: http://thesydcast.com
LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein
Twitter: @sydfinkelstein
Facebook: The Sydcast
Instagram: The Sydcast
Adam Gopnik
Website: adamgopnik.com
Twitter: @adamgopnik
Lucky! Music by David Shire/Lyrics by Adam Gopnik. From the musical comedy "Table". Sung by Liz Callaway & Alice Ripley
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