The Man With Ten Jobs, with Gautam Mukunda

The Sydcast

Episode Summary

A wide-ranging discussion with the multi-talented Gautam Mukunda. Leadership, Theranos, Failure and Learning, Luck, Russia and Ukraine, the Financial Crisis, Inequality, Innovation. Bezos, Jobs, Holmes, Neumann, Sackler, Putin.

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.

Gautam Mukunda

Gautam Mukunda is an internationally recognized expert in leadership and innovation. He often jokes that his life’s ambition is to have the world’s most confusing resume and that he’s most of the way there. He is a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership and the host of the Nasdaq podcast World Reimagined with Gautam Mukunda. Previously he was a professor at Harvard Business School and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. He is the author of two books: Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012) and Picking Presidents (University of California Press, forthcoming in August 2022). He has published articles in Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Security Studies, Slate, Fast Company, Parameters, Politics and the Life Sciences, and Systems and Synthetic Biology on leadership, reforming the financial sector, military innovation, network-centric warfare, the security and economic implications of synthetic biology, and the TV show Mad Men. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Economist, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and All Things Considered. He advises a variety of companies and organizations on leadership and strategy.

Gautam was a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program and Program on Emerging Technologies. He was a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow, an NSF IGERT Fellow, a Next Generation Fellow of The American Assembly, and a Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation’s Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center. He served on The Chief of Naval Operation’s Executive Advisory Panel and as a member of the New England Regional Selection Committee for the White House Fellowship and was a Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership. He was also a Jeopardy Champion.

At MIT, Gautam was the National Science Foundation Synthetic Biology ERC Postdoctoral Fellow resident at MIT’s Center for International Studies. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in political science focusing on International Relations and Security Studies, where he was a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow and an NSF IGERT Fellow. He received his AB in Government from Harvard, magna cum laude. Before his academic career, he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he focused on the pharmaceutical sector.

In addition to his current work as an academic, Gautam is a member of the board of directors and chair of the Mentorship Committee of The Upakar Foundation, a national non-profit devoted to providing college scholarships to underprivileged students of South Asian descent. He is on the Advisory Board of Bionic Solutions and Fount Bio. He is an Overseer of the Boston Ballet and a member of the Museum Council of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Insights from this episode:

• Mukunda’s thoughts on leadership and innovation
• Insights into what his upcoming book, Picking Presidents, is about
• Insights into Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes
• The dark side of successful businesses
• Effects of the 2008 financial crisis on the economy
• Mukunda’s thoughts on the Ukrainian war and the role of the West

Quotes from the show:

• “I do believe this, both as a matter of inclination and a matter of research, that in a world of specialists, there is a real advantage to being a generalist” –Gautam Mukunda [2:23]
• “I think it’s possible to be an extraordinarily successful leader, and obviously he [Duke of Wellington] was without being innovative” –Gautam Mukunda [10:04]
• “If you do the same thing as everyone else, it’s difficult or impossible to produce unique results” –Gautam Mukunda [10:24]
• “I think it’s really important to have people in senior executive positions who are capable of doing the job” –Gautam Mukunda [12:15]
• “Organizations that exist in domains of limited losses and unlimited gains have a tendency to become far too risk-averse” –Gautam Mukunda [19:32]
• “It’s not an experiment, whatever the project is if you know it’s gonna succeed” –Syd Finkelstein [22:00]
• “If you are not angry about this [economic crisis], you are not paying attention. Anger is an appropriate response to the scale of bad things that we saw” –Gautam Mukunda [39:00]
• “Much of the behavior that led to the financial crisis was criminal. And the federal system just chose not to prosecute it” –Gautam Mukunda [39:25]
• “We are on the forefront of a medical revolution to a scale of which baffles the mind” –Gautam Mukunda [53:56]

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Gautam Mukunda

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This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.