By Sydney Finkelstein. Sydney is a professor of strategy and leadership, and Dean for Executive Education, at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and the author of 16 books, including Why Smart Executives Fail.
It’s graduation season, with many young people leaving the friendly confines of university life to enter the mysterious world of work. I’ve never given a speech at a graduation but if I did I’d talk about paradox, a governing feature of life whose power sometimes takes years to fully appreciate.