How do you describe a corporate leader like Elon Musk? His actions and utterances often leave us speechless. So we ask Dr Bhaskar Das for his view on the man and his doings. Here’s the December 13 edition of Das ka Dum. Read on…
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Q. It’s been a few weeks since Elon Musk took charge at Twitter. Your view on his style of management?
A. Mr Elon Mask has a very unique and interesting style of management that is apparently contradictory. There is no denying the fact Musk is a visionary, dreamer, transformational, ahead of time, path-breaker, audaciously ambitious, aggressive target-setter, maverick, iconoclastic, antagonist to bureaucratic systems and all that represent anything typical of corporate cobwebs.
Actually one may get exhausted of finding possible adjectives to describe Musk. At the same time, if one goes by his operating management style, as is known from various public domain descriptions, he could be a huge micromanager, much against any bureaucratic corporate ladders, a great advocate of Theory X, a no-nonsense, hard taskmaster and someone who can set highly ambitious targets for mediocre employees to survive.
Hence, I find it difficult to pigeonhole Mr Mask’s style of management to a specific adjective: Brilliant, idiosyncratic, maverick or whatever. But one fact is clear: his style is not taught in Harvard Business School. And if he is successful in transforming Twitter, as he wants to with his unique style, present and future MBAs might have to add a new chapter in their management pedagogy. And why not? Nothing succeeds like success.