Sydney Finkelstein ’88 researched successful, high-profile managers to understand how they helped their businesses flourish. Here’s what he learned.

Ever since publishing Why Smart Executives Fail in 2003, Sydney Finkelstein ’88 has been asked the same question again and again by eager up-and-coming managers: “‘How do I avoid being in your sequel?’”

So Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, and faculty director for both the Tuck Center for Leadership and the Tuck Executive Program, decided to find an answer to that question. He researched various successful, high-profile managers and looked for clues as to how they helped their businesses flourish. “Over time, I came to realize that … the only way to survive as an organization, to thrive in the long term, is to generate and regenerate talent on a continuous basis,” Finkelstein says. “In one industry…