Welcome to the course. My name is Sydney Finkelstein. I'm a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. I'm really thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to you and share with you and give you a bunch of ideas about how to become better, better at business, better as a leader, maybe even better as a person, believe it or not. I've been working with executives and managers and coaching for three decades, and I've written a bunch of books that have had an impact, I'm happy to say, on how a lot of leaders think about their business and think about themselves as well. In this course and actually in the four courses that make up the entire specialization, I'm going to have a chance to share with you what I've done literally over my entire career. What you'll see here right away and all the way through is a real focus on making this practical, relevant, and usable for you. This is not going to be an academic course, it's not going to be an abstract course. There'll be a lot of ideas, but you'll see especially with the application exercises that I built into the course many opportunities for you to start applying the ideas to yourself. Look, management is not easy. We know that. Not only are there a lot of possible pitfalls and challenges to watch out for when you're a manager, but there are many different ways to fall into these traps. It's true at a personal level and it's true whether you're a manager or an individual contributor in an organization at a company level as well. Sometimes we don't talk about these things. We don't talk about mistakes and failures, but there's so much to be learned. One of the things we're going to be doing in this first course is spending a lot of time looking at what goes wrong in organizations, why leaders make mistakes, and especially thinking about what you can do to avoid falling into those same traps. Consider this. You see what this is? What does it look like? Anyone have one of these anymore? Maybe a lot of you are nodding your heads. You used to have one because it's a Blackberry, isn't it? Blackberry was this dominant brand for a long, long time. If you don't have a BlackBerry in your purse, or in your bag, or in your in your suitcase, why is that? Well, here's the answer. It's the iPhone. Apple blew the BlackBerry out of the water. It's a classic example of disruption, of change, of how winning yesterday's game is not enough to win today's game, and how today's game is not enough to win tomorrow's game because of the constant degree of change that keeps on going. Change is continuous. Learning how to recognize that, deal with it, and even take advantage of change is particularly important given the nature of business in the 21st century. I have a few other examples just to set the table for you. How about this one? Is this how you watch TV today? I love the photo because it shows this family gathered around the TV. It's all in black and white because a TV is black and white, and you see how they're all dressed up. The man of the house got his suit and tie a little kerchief here in the pocket and use the joke. Why do you think they used to get so dressed up to watch television? Well, because in the early days of TV, when they were watching, they weren't sure whether the TV was watching them at the same time. Of course, today we know that the TV is tracking everything that we do, with every metric under the sun. It's interesting. But this is not the way we watch TV. This is not the way your kids watch TV. It's not the way you watch TV. Because what are you doing? You're streaming in all kinds of different ways. Mobile has become a dominant, dominant way of not only watching TV, but distributing content. The rise of Netflix and Amazon, Prime and Hulu and all the rest has totally transformed television. I've actually gone off the cable grid for the first time in my life just recently and I stream everything. If I could do it, I suspect a lot of other people are doing it as well. Imagine you're in these industries, you got to change. You got to adapt. You have to avoid failure. Of course, in the last few years, COVID has become a unfortunate and real part of life and we've learned to get onto Zoom and other methods of communicating via video and it's become a normal thing. Working from home has been started really, or at least accelerated with COVID. We can see that that's going to be part of the world that we're in as well. The number of major companies that have struggled, that have had problems, it's a long list. I'm giving you a few here on the screen that you can look at, from blockbuster Theranos, which we're going to talk about in Module 4 of this course in detail. Quibi, if you remember Quibi, that was the mobile delivery of video content and it failed. How did that happen? We'll talk about WeWork and Adam Neumann as well and some of the famous stories as well. The only thing I want you to remember when you look at a slide like this is look how many companies are vulnerable. Nobody is safe in the modern economy. In fact, I looked at the Fortune 100 in the first year that Fortune magazine was publishing their top Fortune 500 ranking and listening. I looked at it and took the top 100, and then every 10 years I went back to Fortune's list and I wanted to know, well, are the companies still there? You can see the chart. It goes down to something like a dozen or so companies that are left in 2015, and that number is not going to be going up and might very well have gone down as we move forward. Imagine that, these are the strongest biggest companies in America, and certainly when you go back to 1955, given the global economy, probably the world. You could see what happened over or around 90 percent of companies have actually struggled, have gone out of business, have lost lost their way. What makes any of us safe? By the way, if you're curious about the amazing 13 at least so far and when you're watching this, who knows if one of them is going to be gone again. This is them. These are the companies that survived from 1955 into 2015 and onward. It's one thing to make a mistake and quite another to learn from that mistake. That's something I've really figured out along the way having studied so many leaders and having had a chance to work with so many companies. When you learn from a mistake, you can actually get a return on that investment, a pay off. I mean, you didn't want to make that mistake. You didn't want to stumble. But we all make mistakes, but we don't all learn from them. That's something that I think we need to pay a lot of attention to, and this module in particular is going to focus on the most recognizable of those pitfalls, those traps. It turns out they follow a pattern. I'll be able to share with you some of the most common traps in your managerial journey, and especially the ones that can derail your career and set you back. These common mistakes are recognizable in advance, if you have an opportunity to know what to look for it. Our goals in this course and especially in this module, we're going to learn about the most common mistakes and traps that you might face, maybe already have faced in your job and in your career. We're going to spend some time thinking about early warning signs, what should you do, how should you pay attention, what could you do ahead of time to hopefully avoid them or at least not make them as serious. We want to learn how to avoid them entirely, hopefully, and we're going to do all this by studying the mistakes other managers make and other leaders make so you don't have to make them yourself.
