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 fromLearning about different genres of musicGrowing his skills in musicGetting the right skills for musicWhat makes a great songWhat is creativity, and how to tap into itThe importance of listeningInsights into American musicHow 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.

How does it happen that an English teacher and sports coach becomes a renowned actor?

A life in radio in the “Live Free or Die” state.

Laurie Wallmark, one of the first women at Princeton, has been a software engineer, a computer science professor, and now, an award-winning writer of picture book biographies of women in STEM, for kids.

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.

Hannah Kearney - Olympic Gold Medalist – reflects 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.

From melting pots to immigration, on this episode of The Sydcast a deep dive into an entrepreneurial life set in motion long ago.

What happens when you discover a multi-billion fraud that affects the lives of thousands of people? The story of Theranos, by the man who broke the story for the WSJ.

Kenny Mitchell – an Emmy Award nominated leader who combines creativity with business smarts – describes his move to Big Tech, life at Snapchat, augmented reality, and what he wished he knew when he was 20 years old that he knows now.

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.

An in-depth look at the economics, science, and politics that underpin the battle for global sustainability, with Professor Maron Greenleaf.

Two women – one studying economics with her own fashion line (Avalux) and a member of the US 2020 Olympic team in rugby, the other a first-generation low-income Latina college student in bioengineering looking to increase representation in academia.

An African-American scholar-athlete at Brown University fighting to preserve his sport in a diminished resource environment during Covid.

Unequal pay between men and women, transparency at work, and imposter syndrome – what can be done to help women in the workforce break through these barriers.

The cannabis industry is booming - what happened ... and what comes next?

What do you get when you assemble a team of diverse talents in music and science to explore how music makes us human?

Who is Gina Bianchini, what is Mighty Networks, and what’s it like to be a female entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in the age of Elizabeth Holmes?

Episode Summary Boarding school. Enrichment and personal growth experiences. A supportive community. Natalie Tung is creating all of this … for black and brown high school girls in Trenton. The idea took shape while Natalie was at Princeton and reflected on her own experience growing up in Hong Kong. Now, just a few years later, she’s hit the tipping point. Meet the budding “Sal Kahn” for minority high-school girls. 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. Natalie Tung Natalie is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of HomeWorks Trenton, a free community-based after-school boarding program. Growing up in a numbers-driven public school system in Hong Kong, Natalie had an unhealthy relationship with learning. This relationship changed when she had the opportunity to attend a boarding school in New Jersey. More importantly, living with 40 girls at such a young age empowered her to become more empathetic and confident, and these women are still her support system today. While earning her teaching certificate as a sophomore at Princeton University, Natalie started HomeWorks with the idea of replicating this experience for girls in marginalized communities around the world. Since 2016, she has run five programs with 50 participants, raised over $1.9 million in cash and in-kind donations, and built a diverse team of 6 full-time and five part-time staff, board members, interns, and volunteers. Natalie and HomeWorks have been recognized by McKinsey & Company, Camelback Ventures, Barclays, Comcast, Hollister, TRESemmé, Echoing Green, Vital Voices, Penn Graduate School of Education, Princeton University, and more. Insights from this episode: Details about HomeWorks Trenton programThe problem HomeWorks Trenton is seeking to solveHow Natalie’s school experience shaped herNatalie’s conviction to help women of colorHow HomeWorks Trenton program is aligned to Natalie’s missionPartners she has worked with to equip her scholars and make them ready for collegeNatalie’s challenges running the programNatalie’s aspiration for HomeWorks Quotes from the show:“What we are doing here is not only replicating a boarding school and bringing it to public schools and with all the benefits of the wrap-around learning and all that, but also doing so in a way that reverses the narrative that our kids need to leave their communities to be successful.”–Natalie Tung [6:29]“At the core of what we are doing, we are creating a community specifically for our black and brown girls here in Trenton to reclaim power over their cultures, identities, and experiences.“ –Natalie Tung [6:41]“I truly believe in the power of women. I believe that when women come together and when we really are at the forefront of things, magic happens” –Natalie Tung [17:39]“I was in a community of women who were my age, and just being able to live with so many different kinds of girls and to be vulnerable with each other at the age of 13/14, it was such a unique experience. It did make me more confident” –Natalie Tung [18:40]“Our values are intentionality, empathy, and community. Something that we are trying to do is making sure that we are being intentional about every single thing we do at HomeWorks, every decision, every policy we have” –Natalie Tung [22:48]“We want to build a culture where our kids feel safe, where they are here to grow. We all make mistakes but we are here to learn and just feel like we have each other's backs” –Natalie Tung [23:03]“I very much believe in the power of women and I very much believe in the power of community, and I know a lot of other who people believe in it too” –Natalie Tung [33:24]“I think the beauty about HomeWorks and about our team is that we have a really diverse group of people within our staff” –Natalie Tung [43:28] Stay connected: Sydney Finkelstein Website: http://thesydcast.com LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein Twitter: @sydfinkelstein Facebook: The Sydcast Instagram: The Sydcast Natalie Tung LinkedIn: Natalie Tung  Instagram: Natalie Tung  HomeWorks Trenton Website: https://www.homeworkstrenton.org/ HomeWorks Trenton Brochure: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/62642925/homeworks-trenton-pamphlet HomeWorks Trenton Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOjhQRJT7Vg Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify. This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.

Hispanic culture in America and how one women figured out how to connect the dots.

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 innovationInsights into what his upcoming book, Picking Presidents, is aboutInsights into Theranos and Elizabeth HolmesThe dark side of successful businessesEffects of the 2008 financial crisis on the economyMukunda’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] Stay connected: Sydney Finkelstein Website: http://thesydcast.com LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein Twitter: @sydfinkelstein Facebook: The Sydcast Instagram: The Sydcast Gautam Mukunda Website: Gautam Mukunda LinkedIn: Gautam Mukunda  Facebook: Gautam Mukunda Twitter: Gautam Mukunda Instagram: Gautam Mukunda  Subscribe to our podcast + download each episode on Stitcher, iTunes, and Spotify. This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.