Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of Twitter. This seems to be the unspoken command of the social media platform’s new owner, Elon Musk. He is promising an “amnesty” for some formerly banned users of the web site, who will be free once again to potentially spread their noxious views. Musk claims to be a free speech absolutist, but there are limits to his tolerance, especially when it comes to criticism from Twitter employees, who tend to become former employees very quickly once they express their views.
But, you may object, the site has not fallen over, yet. New users are signing up to join. We can still tweet and read other people’s tweets. Sure, the energy may have slipped a bit, there is less engagement, it is more clunky and there are a few more trolls already trolling, but Twitter looks and feels roughly the same as it always did. You see: the guy knows what he is doing. Who cares about the loss of staff, and advertisers? Could Musk really have miscalculated? He is a multi-billionaire, worth nearly $200bn, the world’s richest man… a Great Man!
This last claim lies at the heart of the arguments made by Musk’s loudest defenders. Didn’t he turn Tesla into the most valuable car company ever? Won’t his SpaceX rockets help take man to Mars? (The answers to those questions, by the way, are “not on his own and not without state subsidy” and “almost certainly not”.)
And yet—look on his works, ye mighty, and despair! “The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” declared the 19th century essayist Thomas Carlyle, and it is a view that is still quite widely shared. Surely we should acknowledge that Musk is the next great business titan to be worshipped.
At the recent Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna, an annual conference for managers and those interested in management, I spoke to two US business leaders who could not quite believe that Musk might have screwed up over Twitter. “The guy gets rockets to land on their tail!”, one said to me. Another observed, less assertively, that those who had bet against Musk had lost money, while those who had kept faith in him had made loads. It was inconceivable to them that someone like Musk could have spent $44bn on Twitter out of vanity or a childish desire to own a shiny thing that seemed to be so important.
Perhaps Musk has done the most dangerous thing of all: he has believed his own hype. If his genius approach to building cars and spaceships has been so successful, why wouldn’t it work on a simple thing like Twitter? Why not slash and burn and let feeble-minded people complain while he waits for his latest triumph to be recognised?
The mythology of the heroic, maverick business leader who conquers all while lesser figures whinge and groan remains powerful. The archetypal tech version of this story is the one involving Steve Jobs and Apple. Originally sacked for failing to deliver, Jobs returned to the company and triumphed, making it one of the most valuable and influential tech firms ever. But, of course, while Jobs’s formidable and relentless personality played a crucial part in this, Apple’s success is also down to the technologists and designers, the marketers and sales teams, and the hard-working manufacturers of Apple products, as well as Jobs’s leadership.
This notion that a swaggering and charismatic leader who breaks the rules and pushes back boundaries must be a winner is a dangerous misconception. Things are not looking so great right now for Messrs Putin, Xi, Bolsonaro, Trump and, er, Johnson. Falling for this myth has just cost some people billions of dollars in the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, under its former chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried.
And yet many investors (and some employees/voters) still seem to place huge faith in having one great figure, one dominant leader to come to the rescue. Bob Iger, the former and highly regarded chief executive of the Disney corporation, has just returned to his old job to help the company recover from a bad patch. When his re-appointment was announced the company’s share price shot up by almost 10 per cent.
In the 1930s Bertolt Brecht wrote a comic poem, “Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters” (“Questions from a worker who reads”), in which he considers great events from history and wonders what the whole story was (a few lines in translation follow here):
“Young Alexander conquered India.”
On his own?
“Caesar beat the Gauls.”
Did he not even have a cook with him?
“Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed.” Did nobody else cry?
“Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.”
Who triumphed with him?
You get the point. Very few of us achieve anything on our own, even if we are (or think we are) great. Leadership is very important, clearly, but it is not everything, and it is not a solo sport.
Also at the Drucker conference in Vienna I heard from Frauke von Polier, who is Chief People Officer at Viessmann, a German industrial company (they make heating and refrigeration equipment) which is over 100 years old and now employs more than 13,000 people in 74 countries, with revenue of around £3bn a year.
Von Polier said she was not terribly impressed by the currently fashionable talk of “top talent” at work and the stress on having a few exceptional leaders. “Teams are what matter most,” she said. “We get things done in teams.”
Maybe I’ll tweet Elon and tell him that.
