Kikkan Randall: How to Win an Olympic Gold Medal

Episode Summary

In this final episode of Season 4, I bring you Rob Kapilow. A musical savant, innovator, and global presence, listening to Rob is like taking a master class in music, and in life. From Duke Ellington to Joseph Campbell, from Beethoven to the Beatles, and from Yale to Paris to Native American reservations, Rob Kapilow will take you on the classic Sydcast journey of discovery, creativity, and learning.

Sydney Finkelstein 

Sydney Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 100 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, as well as a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world. His latest projects include the leading podcast, The Sydcast, that uncovers and shares the stories of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life, as well as a new series of online courses based on his life’s work available at Coursera.

Rob Kapilow

For over 30 years, Rob Kapilow has brought the joy and wonder of classical music – and unraveled some of its mysteries – to audiences of all ages and backgrounds. Characterized by his unique ability to create an “aha” moment for his audiences and collaborators, whatever their musical sophistication or naiveté, Kapilow’s work brings music into people’s lives: opening new ears to musical experiences and helping people to listen actively rather than just hear.

Kapilow’s range of activities is astonishingly broad, including his What Makes It Great?® presentations (now for over 20 seasons in New York and Boston), his family compositions and Family Musik® events, his Citypieces, corporate programs, and residencies with institutions as diverse as the National Gallery of Canada and Stanford University. The reach of his interactive events and activities is wide, from Native American tribal communities in Montana and inner-city high school students in Louisiana to audiences in Kyoto and Kuala Lumpur and tots barely out of diapers to musicologists in Ivy League programs.

Insights from this episode: 

• Where Rob’s love for music came from
• Learning about different genres of music
• Growing his skills in music
• Getting the right skills for music
• What makes a great song
• What is creativity, and how to tap into it
• The importance of listening
• Insights into American music
• How music connects us

Quotes from the show:

• “To me, really, I didn’t know there was any difference between The Beatles, jazz, and piano music. To me, there was just music. Only later did I learn that you are in separate niches, separate categories” —Rob Kapilow [7:22]
• “One of my favorite quotes is from Joseph Campbell, the brilliant writer on mythology, and he says ‘The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are’” —Rob Kapilow [8:42]
• “Aside from taking apart what actually makes a song like She Loves You by The Beatles great musically, which I can certainly do, there’s also the sense that it often is part of someone’s life experience” —Rob Kapilow [18:34]
• “At the heart of all great creators, is the kind of ability to pay attention, but not only to just pay attention to what’s happening but to listen for possibilities” —Rob Kapilow [23:17]
• “I realized that listening is such a larger thing than just hearing” —Rob Kapilow [28:46]
• “You cannot hate immigrants when you’ve heard their stories. Let's not politicize this, but humanize it” —Rob Kapilow [45:45]
• ​​“The whole purpose of a piece of music is to show that we are all connected. That beneath our surface differences, we are all connected” —Rob Kapilow [58:00]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Rob Kapilow

Website: https://robkapilow.com

Twitter: Rob Kapilow

Facebook: Rob Kapilow 

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.

Episode Summary

How does it happen that an English teacher and sports coach becomes a renowned actor? Ben Koldyke – who played Don Frank on How I Met Your Mother and many other roles – tells us, along with cameo insights about Aaron Sorkin, Second City, and Dartmouth College.

Sydney 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.

Ben Koldyke

Ben Koldyke has worked on some of the most renowned comedy series, including THE GOOD PLACE, SILICON VALLEY, and CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM. He starred in the NBC comedy series MR. ROBINSON with Craig Robinson was featured in a series-long arc on MASTERS OF SEX with Michael Sheen. Before that, Koldyke was in Craig Gillespie’s THE FINEST HOURS for Disney opposite Chris Pine. He most recently appeared in Peacock’s RUTHERFORD FALLS opposite Ed Helms. He is based in LA.

Insights from this episode: 

• Ben Koldyke’s early days
• Challenges Ben has faced transitioning from an athletic aspect to the arts
• The ups and downs of an acting career
• Why he made the shift from sports to acting
• Learning how to act
• Using his sports background as an advantage in acting
• What it takes to be a good actor

Quotes from the show:

• “What’s interesting to me about sports and acting, when you are trained as an athlete, it’s challenging to take on an artistic sort of way of life” —Ben Koldyke [6:09]
• “This (acting) is an incredibly competitive environment, but if you are on the creative side there just has to be a temperance, there just has to be an understanding that this is not an all or nothing sort of thing; that opportunities will come and go and you just have keep a sort of middle ground, almost a meditative middle ground, that allows you to deal with the whims of what is a very up and down business” —Ben Koldyke [8:13]
• “At age 30, much my parents chagrin and utter confusion, I said I was going to go to California and teach at the Kipp School, in Inglewood and I was going to study how to be an actor and a writer; and that’s what I did!” —Ben Koldyke [13:08]
• “Instead of it being a hindrance (sports background), instead of it being something that I needed to overcome, he taught me to incorporate it, to use it, (…) I was taught to really celebrate it and utilize it which I thought was really insightful and helpful for me” —Ben Koldyke [17:08]
• “To get a pilot having never acted before is very very rare: it seemed normal to me for about a second, and then I came down to earth” —Ben Koldyke [33:46]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Ben Koldyke

Website: Ben Koldyke

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.

Episode Summary

What is it like being on the radio? In New Hampshire, that means interviewing would-be Presidents, but for Mike Morin it also means being curious, open-minded, and occasionally even pulling crazy stunts that upset half of his listeners. A life in radio in the “Live Free or Die” state.

Sydney 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.

Mike Morin

All-around media man Mike Morin began his writing career in 2004 with his first humor column in the Nashua Telegraph. Since then, his list of publications includes this magazine, The Boston Globe, the New Hampshire Business Review, Clean Eating, and more. He’s also the author of several books, including “50 Shades of Radio” and his most recent, “Lunch With Tommy and Stasia,” about the glory days of candlepin bowling (for which he was a TV announcer once upon a time). He spent more than four decades in radio, with a memorable stint on WZID’s morning show. He took some time off from broadcasting but has since returned to the early morning radio waves – you can find him on 106.3 FM, Monday to Friday, from 6-9 a.m. 

Insights from this episode: 

• When Mike discovered he wanted to be on radio
• Mike’s life growing up
• How Mike got on radio
• What makes a good talk show host
• Maintaining a bond with your listeners
• Interesting guests Mike has interviewed
• Being on air after 9/11
• Life after vocal cord surgery

Quotes from the show:

• “Within a year, I actually had my first professional radio job while I was still in college. So I was driven, and I was determined i’m not gonna wait till my degree to get my first job” —Mike Morin [11:20]
• “Everybody has a story, you just have to know how to get it out of them. So to get people to talk to me, you have to know the kind of buttons to push” —Mike Morin [14:08]
• “At some point you have to come terms with the fact that there’s someone that is just larger than ordinary, and ideally embrace it and love it, respect it and admire it, but not let it get you kind of in a funk, or down ” —Syd Finkelstein [32:49]
• “This is one of the tricks I have learned over the years, is when you interview people, you give them one or two kind of soft ball questions and let them get comfortable with you” —Mike Morin [38:34]
• “Thinking out of the box is what you gotta do sometime, doesn’t always work. When you take a chance and bet on yourself, good things do happen” —Mike Morin [42:25]
• “First of all, no matter who you have on, you’re gonna upset your half your audience (…) People don’t accept you for your views these days, they just accept you if they like you, or not” —Mike Morin [46:59]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Mike Morin

Website: Mike Morin

Facebook: Mike Morin 

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.

Episode Summary

Laurie Wallmark is a pioneer – one of the first women at Princeton, a software engineer, a computer science professor, an entrepreneur who created an online bookstore before Amazon ever did, and now, an award-winning writer of picture book biographies of women in STEM, for kids. Passionate about science, writing, teaching, and learning, Laurie shares her story, on this episode of The Sydcast.

Sydney 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.

Laurie Wallmark 

Award-winning author Laurie Wallmark writes picture book biographies of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) as well as fiction. Her books have earned five starred trade reviews, been chosen as Junior Library Guild Selections, and received awards such as Outstanding Science Trade Book, Best STEM Book, Cook Prize Honor Book, Crystal Kite Award, Mathical Honor Book, and Parents’ Choice Gold Medal. Her titles include Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine, Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code, Hedy Lamarr’s Double Life, Numbers In Motion, Code Breaker, Spy Hunter, and her debut fiction picture book, Dino Pajama Party. Laurie has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a former software engineer and computer science professor. 

Insights from this episode: 

• How Laurie ended up writing books
• Laurie’s supportive parents while pursuing STEM courses
• Teaching kids about failure
• Insights on Laurie being an outlier 
• What it feels like to represent a minority group
• Building her own company
• Insights into Laurie’s e-commerce business
• Insights into illustrations in books
• What makes a successful picture book
• Lessons she has learned from being a children’s book author

Quotes from the show:

• “The key to writing is rewriting and editing” —Syd Finkelstein [6:15]
• “When you first start writing like that and you are not coming from this whole background where you’ve been writing all your life, you don’t tell people because what if it doesn’t sell? what if it’s no good?” —Laurie Wallmark [9:59]
• “One of the things that we are trying to show kids, especially in the sciences, is that failure is a part of the process. That it really is part of the process of advancing science” —Laurie Wallmark [10:58]
• “An individual has that inner strength and support, family support, friendship support, to be able to show that YES, she can do it, in spite of the naysayers” —Laurie Wallmark [14:08]
• “That stereotyping is so common and it’s something that is being recognized in business, in schools, in society, way more than ever before, but it’s still there” —Syd Finkelstein [14:56]
• “I started a mail order company that sold books about adoption and infertility (…) I had a bookstore on the web before Amazon did!” —Laurie Wallmark [25:16]
• “What makes a good picture book? That one is easy. A good picture book is one that kids are going to want to read or be read to over and over again. You know it’s not a one and done” —Laurie Wallmark [38:42]
• “I started way before this current wave of picture book biographies, and especially picture book biographies of underrepresented women in STEM. I like to think that I started the wave and then people just followed right behind me” —Laurie Wallmark [45:59]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Laurie Wallmark 

Website: Laurie Wallmark

Twitter: Laurie Wallmark

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.

Episode Summary

How do we make it easier for people around the world to learn and get the tools to innovate and become entrepreneurs? In this episode, founder Alejandro Juárez Crawford shares his answer: RebelBase, a company that is helping people understand problems and launch experiments that can become solutions. Erudite and articulate, Alejandro is that unique leader who can share his philosophy about innovation and purpose while grounded in the everyday reality of what works and what doesn’t.

Sydney 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.

Alejandro Juárez Crawford

Alejandro Juárez Crawford, co-founder & CEO, leads RebelBase, the SaaS equipping students, employees, and citizens to build solutions of their own. He serves as a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Bard MBA in Sustainability. Previously, he led the boutique consultancy Acceleration Group. He earned his BA at Cornell and his MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Crawford led RebelBase as it built and successfully commercialized its library of educational modules, cloud-based interactive tools, and state-of-the-art methodology. In 2020-2021, his research has expanded to university systems from Bangladesh to Kyrgyzstan, through Bard’s new course sequence for changemakers supported by the Open Society University Network. He writes and speaks widely on expanding access to innovation, and keynotes events such as Erasmus+ ISYEC and Europe’s Towards Collaborative Practice. Recent publications include “An Ecosystem Framework for Credentialing Entrepreneurs,” from the Research Triangle Institute, and a chapter in the Federal Reserve’s Investing in America’s Workforce (Upjohn, 2018). In 2020 he co-won the Roddenberry Award to create a documentary about game-changing initiatives developed using the RebelBase platform.

Insights from this episode: 

• Details about RebelBase
• What RebelBase does
• How to deal with pessimists
• Solving problems with people who understand the problem
• Details on the bottom-up approach to solving problems
• How to build a culture of experimentation
• How to maintain a culture of experimentation as the company grows bigger
• The importance of constructive criticism when building a product

Quotes from the show:

• “Up until now, it’s been very difficult for regular people to think that they could launch an experiment and how to make it work better, and RebelBase makes that possible. RebelBase democratizes and accelerates bottom-up innovation by enabling people who understand problems to launch experiments that could become solutions” —Alejandro Juárez Crawford [7:00]
• “When you give folks the tools to create these experiments, something dramatic happens (…) suddenly you’ve actually asked the person who understands the problem what needs to be solved” —Alejandro Juárez Crawford [17:25]
• “We do a lot of work on researching skills and mindset change by users on this platform because not every solution, not every experiment is going to succeed” —Alejandro Juárez Crawford [27:43]
• “Often, actually the experimentation that most people do is taking things we already know work and figuring out how to do them in new places and new ways” —Alejandro Juárez Crawford [35:50]
• “Comfort with failure is itself a trainable mentality” —Alejandro Juárez Crawford [41:02]
• “We are not just trying to encourage risk-taking, we are trying to encourage calculated experimentation where the point of our experiments is to learn what works, to learn from your users what to adopt, to learn how you could then move to a larger group of users and get them to existing channels” —Alejandro Juárez Crawford [46:45]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Alejandro Juárez Crawford

LinkedIn: Alejandro Crawford 

Website: https://rebelbase.co

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.

Episode Summary

Hannah Kearney is an Olympic Gold Medal Winner in freestyle skiing. She’s won 46 World Cup races. And now she’s retired, and ready to reflect on what it’s like to be the best in the world and how you come down from that high to live a productive, and energizing, life.

Sydney 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.

Hannah Kearney 

Hannah grew up in Norwich, Vermont, and was introduced to Freestyle skiing through the Ford Sayre after-school program at the Dartmouth Skiway. She went on to win Olympic gold in 20210 and a bronze in 2014 in mogul skiing. She also won 46 World Cup competitions and 6 World Cup Overall Mogul titles during 13 years on the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Team. Hannah completed her freshman year at Dartmouth by attending each spring trimester during the last few years of her athletic career.  Upon retiring in 2015, she moved to Park City and graduated from Westminster College with a Marketing degree. Hannah now works in development for the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Foundation; she trains young athletes in the gym and founded Fitness From Afar to teach virtual workout challenges.

Insights from this episode: 

• The Beijing Olympics
• What determines a score in skiing
• Skills and techniques in skiing 
• How Hannah learned skiing
• What she loves about skiing
• When she knew she was good at skiing
• The role of role models in Hannah’s skiing
• Hannah’s failure in skiing and bouncing back
• Mental health issues in athletes
• What happens leading up to the race

Quotes from the show:

• “I enjoyed that adrenaline, and I think it allowed me to perform better. You know adrenaline can be a pressure that paralyzes you or can allow you to perform better. And just like being an athlete, I sort of embraced it, and I think it made the experience more interesting” —Hannah Kearney [8:01]
• “I was 16 years old; I was a sophomore at Hanover High School when I both made the U.S ski team and when back flips were permitted in the sport” —Hannah Kearney [19:06]
• “One of the things I love about skiing is it's one of the few Olympic sports that’s also a lifelong sport, and not just a lifelong sport; tennis and golf would fall under this category, but its a family sport” —Hannah Kearney [22:11]
• “I do think there’s some belief by the people around me, my parents and my coaches, that helped me excel cause they thought I could be good, so they gave me the attention. I, in turn, also took that, and I wanted to work really hard” —Hannah Kearney [26:31]
• “Even the best athletes in the world, Mikaela Shiffrin is certainly one of those; nobody has a 100% winning percentage. So, inevitably, there’s going to be stumbling blocks along the way” —Hannah Kearney [32:59]
• “If you are in these sports that are so acrobatic and skill-based, that pressure then creates physical symptoms where you are unable to perform your best” —Hannah Kearney [37:25]
• “Whether it’s because it’s like the nature of the sport or it’s whether the way that I was driven, I was very self-centered, I suppose, and I say that hopefully not in a bad way, but just, I was so focused on what I needed to do to improve week after week, especially towards the end of my career where I was winning fairly consistently” —Hannah Kearney [49:46]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Hannah Kearney

Instagram: Hannah Kearney (@hannahakearney) 

Twitter: Hannah Kearney (@HK_Ski) 

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.

Episode Summary

How’s life growing up in a neighborhood where no one looks like you? In this episode, I talk to a former student, Wendy Pease, who grew up overseas and learned to adapt to life where she was the one who stood out. Now, many years later, perhaps unsurprisingly, she runs a business focused on managing cultural and language barriers. From melting pots to immigration, on this episode of The Sydcast a deep dive into an entrepreneurial life set in motion long ago. 

Sydney 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.

Wendy Pease 

Wendy MacKenzie Pease is the owner and president of Rapport International, a translation and interpretation services company specializing in marketing, legal, and medical/life sciences translation. Throughout her career, she has worked with hundreds of companies to help them communicate across more than 200 languages and cultures. She is the author of the book, "The Language of Global Marketing," and the podcast host of the "Global Marketing Show."

Wendy has an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and a BA in Foreign Service & International Politics from Penn State. 

She is passionate about connecting people, especially across languages and cultures. She lived in Mexico, Taiwan, and the Philippines, where she fell in love with the richness of international cultures and understood that we are all human, no matter the language we speak. 

Insights from this episode: 

• Wendy’s life growing up 
• Growing up in a culturally different neighborhood 
• Getting into business and buying her company
• Getting laid off while on maternity leave
• Lessons Wendy learned running her own company 
• Details about what her company does 
• Building a formidable workforce
• Details on her competitor, Google translate
• The beauty of different languages
• Advice for people going to other countries

Quotes from the show:

• “I am an off-the-scale extrovert: I always made friends wherever I went, and I think that’s what’s given me the love I have for what I do now” —Wendy Pease [14:24]
• “After two lay-offs on maternity leaves, I decided I was done with doing the corporate thing and wanted to own my own business again. So that’s how I ended up buying the company I run now” —Wendy Pease [22:22]
• “I think the hardest thing for me was work-life balance. When I owned my company before, I was single and young, and in my twenties with tons of energy and a lot of time went into work” —Wendy Pease [27:07]
• “What we do: our mission is clear, communication for peaceful and prosperous worlds. So what that boils down to is that we do written translations, and spoken interpretation in over 200 languages” —Wendy Pease [28:12]
• “People used to come into the U.S and say, ‘I’m gonna get rid of my language and culture, and I’m gonna assimilate, and I’m gonna be American’ that’s not happening anymore. People are keeping their language” —Wendy Pease [35:17]
• “My biggest advice is if you are going somewhere to conduct business where English is not the native language (…), my advice is to get an interpreter who fully understands the two languages and two cultures, and then you use your interpreter as your cultural conduit“—Wendy Pease [43:44]
• “You can go out and hire them (in manufacturing), but if you don’t train them in their language, give them opportunities to promote and make them feel included, they are not gonna stay” —Wendy Pease [47:10]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Wendy Pease 

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/wendypease

LinkedIn: Wendy (MacKenzie) Pease 

Twitter: Wendy Pease (@RapportIntl)

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.

Episode Summary

John Carreyrou literally wrote the book on Theranos – the bestseller “Bad Blood,” which built on his earlier writing at the WSJ that broke the story. With Elizabeth Holmes scheduled to be sentenced this week, I sat down with John to get the inside scoop on how he uncovered the Theranos fraud, his take on Holmes, what went wrong and why, and what her sentence is likely to be.

Sydney 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.

John Carreyrou

John Carreyrou is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. In his reporting for The Wall Street Journal, he was the first to break the scandal surrounding the failed biomedical startup Theranos and the disturbing lies of its wunderkind founder, Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes. A compelling speaker, Carreyrou discusses the ethical lapses, the credulous media coverage, and the lax oversight that allowed Theranos to achieve a “unicorn” valuation of $9 billion and shares with audiences the lessons that can be learned from its fall.

Bad Blood was also named the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. The HBO documentary based on the Theranos story, The Inventor, was directed by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney and premiered at Sundance. A graduate of Duke University, Carreyrou lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three children.

Insights from this episode: 

• Details about John’s book
• Theranos scandal and how John discovered it
• The intimidation, threats, and stonewalling John experienced when covering the scandal
• Details about Elizabeth Holmes's trial
• Confidential informants being stalked during the trial
• What Elizabeth Holmes did wrong and how she was able to build credibility

Quotes from the show:

• “I had done a lot of reporting about health care medicine by then and enough to know that that’s not usually how things happen (Theranos scandal). Usually, people who make advances in medical fields are trained and then do decades of research before they add value” —John Carreyrou [9:14]
• “It wasn’t until late April/May of 2015 that I began approaching the company and letting them know that I was doing a story and could they answer these questions. At that point they tried to stonewall me, they gave me the silent treatment for about a month, but then I think it dawned on them that I wasn’t going away” —John Carreyrou [20:21]
• “They knew that those three employees (Adam Rosendorff, Tyler Shultz, and Erika Cheung) had left with objections and raising doubts, and their suspicions immediately gravitated toward them” —John Carreyrou [24:39]
• “That’s what you call affinity fraud. You surround yourself with people who have a lot of credibility and prestigious names, and you borrow their credibility. That is very much what took place. In this case, Elizabeth was able to do that” —John Carreyrou [40:23]
• “She was convicted of defrauding investors. To me, that isn’t the worst part of the scandal. What I consider to be the worst part is the fact she went live with a medical product that didn’t work. She had a machine called the Edison, it was very limited and its capabilities could only do a handful of blood tests, and it didn’t perform it accurately” —John Carreyrou [29:23]
• “To me, her biggest crime is that she knowingly commercialized a medical product that she knew was deficient, that she knew was flawed, that she knew didn’t work. She put patients in harm's way, she endangered the public health” —John Carreyrou [30:30]
• “[About cutting corners] Elizabeth Holmes is someone who was well aware of this history, of this lure. She knew that people like Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs had cut corners earlier in their careers and she felt entitled to do the same” —John Carreyrou [33:21]
• “The Theranos scandal is a reminder that fine, bring your new ideas and your money to the problems in healthcare but, you got to remember it’s not the same world as software and that the stakes are much higher. If you don’t bear that in mind then what happened to Elizabeth Holmes will happen to you” —John Carreyrou [37:07]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

John Carreyrou

LinkedIn: John Carreyrou 

Twitter: John Carreyrou

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.

Episode Summary

What’s it like to work at the top levels of marketing in major companies? Kenny Mitchell – an Emmy Award nominated leader who combines creativity with business smarts – describes his move to Big Tech, life at Snapchat (he's the CMO there), augmented reality, and what he wished he knew when he was 20 years old that he knows now.

Sydney 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.

Kenny Mitchell

Kenny Mitchell is the Chief Marketing Officer of Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat. He guides the brand and business marketing efforts, focusing on driving the growth of the global Snapchat community and the base of advertising and developer partners. Previously, Mitchell was an accomplished leader at McDonald's U.S., Gatorade, and NASCAR, where he oversaw the marketing efforts related to key consumer touch-points – creative, digital, design, retail and experiential. Over his 20-year career, Mitchell has received numerous awards and recognitions, including being named one of “The Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company, Forbes CMO NEXT, AdWeek 50, Business Insider: 25 Most Innovative CMOs, and Campaign Power 100. He has also won numerous creative awards, including multiple Cannes Lions, film festival selections, Tribeca, and two Emmy nominations. Mitchell also is a Member of the Board of Directors for e.l.f. Beauty. Mitchell holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.B.A. from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. He was inducted into Dartmouth’s Sports Hall of Fame as a men’s basketball team member. He and his wife, Heather, live in Los Angeles and have a daughter, Carter.

Insights from this episode: 

• Details about Snap
• Kenny’s career journey
• Developing new apps
• Kenny’s biggest competitor
• Details about augmented reality and the metaverse
• The future of the metaverse
• The role of AR in the real world
• The role of marketing in an organization
• Kenny’s nomination for an Emmy Award
• Kenny’s hiring process

Quotes from the show:

• “At its core, Snapchat is a kind of visual communication app or platform that helps to enhance relationships between your friends and family and give you a connection to the world with augmented reality (AR)” —Kenny Mitchell [5:53]
• “What a lot of new apps and businesses find is that it can be tricky to quickly build a dependable and honorable business against platforms in many cases that already have the audience that you are looking to build” —Kenny Mitchell [8:53]
• “Our focus is really building out more and more advanced AR experiences and looking to establishing an ecosystem around augmented reality, that’s what we believe is the true next computing platform” —Kenny Mitchell [19:36]
• “We think that unlocking computing all over the world through hardware that is connected to the real world is probably what the future looks like, and we have a little bit of confidence because we are seeing the way that AR is being used in our platform so much right now” —Kenny Mitchell [22:34]
• “The center of gravity really sits with the marketing of an organization” —Kenny Mitchell [28:35]
• “Personally, I’ve always had a proclivity towards innovation. That’s probably more the reason that when they (Snap Inc) circled around a few years later looking for a CMO they wanted someone who understood the Snapchat audience, understood product and platform really well, and was great from the innovation, creativity, and storytelling perspective” —Kenny Mitchell [36:48]
• “The other thing that is pretty unique and special about Snap is that its culture is underpinned by these three core values of kind, creative and smart” —Kenny Mitchell [43:03]
• “The thing that is very specific to marketing is that we make stuff that goes out into the world. There is something incredibly gratifying about that” —Kenny Mitchell [46:46]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Kenny Mitchell

LinkedIn: Kenneth Mitchell 

Twitter: Kenny Mitchell (@kmitch) 

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.

Episode Summary

Dave Johnson is a Silicon Valley attorney and climate change activist whose attention to design thinking suggests a less well-traveled approach to dealing with global threats.

Sydney 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.

Dave Johnson

Dave Johnson is a lawyer, teacher, and writer. Over the last twenty years, he has served as general counsel for several tech companies in Silicon Valley. For the last decade, he has held teaching and research posts at Stanford Law School and the Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He is currently working on a book titled Climate Activism by Design, bringing design principles to bear on citizen activists responding to corporate and government inaction on this immediate, existential crisis facing all of humankind.

Insights from this episode: 

• What design thinking is
• Empathy in business
• Buzzwords in leadership 
• Differences between empathy and sympathy
• Importance of criticism
• Design thinking for legal systems
• Application of design thinking to social systems
• Details about the content in his book

Quotes from the show:

• “My take on this is that design thinking in its most core form was always somewhere inside the sphere of design work” —Dave Johnson [11:20]
• “I think empathy can be categorized as yet another buzzword, which is a term that has some inherent meaning, but it gets lost on a larger crowd because it's more about saying the most current idea that is coming out of the business schools or engineering schools” —Dave Johnson [18:00]
• “Empathy is a sort of innate skill that oftentimes sociopaths are very adept at using. It’s important to understand that it’s a powerful tool and has to be used with quite a bit of care” —Dave Johnson [22:19]
• “Some of that criticism is healthy and useful for furthering, both restraining and honing the idea as it moves forward and some of it is just, for lack of a better phrase, complaining” —Dave Johnson [23:31]
• “Steve Jobs is famous for, I’m going to paraphrase him, ‘People think that design is how the product looks. We don’t think that at all, design is how the product works’” —Dave Johnson [26:09]
• “Design is going from the idea, the concept, to actually creating the service or product. Virtually none of which has anything to do with the marketing department” —Dave Johnson [26:17]
• “It's in human nature, it’s deep in our brain DNA: We respond to critical threats, and we do not respond well to chronic threats. We respond to the acute and not the chronic, and climate change is the chronic” —Dave Johnson [40:46]
• “We are waiting for, in America, too long, for some kind of trigger spark that gets everybody to take the step from outside of the circle to inside the circle, and that then develops its own momentum” —Dave Johnson [48:30]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Maron Greenleaf

LinkedIn: Dave Johnson 

Website: David Johnson

Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify.

This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.