Musk Moves Defy Corporate Gurus

"In the days since Elon Musk closed a $44 billion takeover of Twitter Inc., he has worked to rapidly overhaul the social network.

He fired many of the company's top leaders, including its general counsel, chief financial officer and chief executive officer. He conducted sweeping layoffs, eliminating roughly half of Twitter's workforce on Friday. Along the way, he floated new product ideas, mocked internal management training, publicly disclosed a decline in revenue and hinted that other changes could be on the way.

The billionaire's swift actions stand in contrast to those of many new leaders, who often use the first 90 days to meet with employees, listen to concerns and assess how to improve a company's products before embarking on strategy shifts, executives and corporate advisers say.

"At a minimum, this is an untraditional approach," said Joel Peterson, the former chairman of JetBlue Airways Corp., who has served on dozens of corporate boards and advised chief executives across industries. "It's iconoclastic, it's unusual, it's not what everybody would do -- but I don't really fault him for it."

Mr. Musk -- who once described himself to The Wall Street Journal as a "nano manager" steeped in the smallest details -- appears to be employing many of the management tactics he deployed in building his other companies, Tesla Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., executives and advisers say. 

Those include a hands-on obsession over product decisions, a distaste for corporate structures and a focus on speed. 

Tesla is the world's most-valuable car company, and SpaceX is the world's busiest rocket-launch operation.

Management specialists have long said the first few months of an executive's tenure are critical, a time when corporate chiefs can plot their agenda and begin to reset a corporate culture. Well-known books on the subject, such as "You're in Charge -- Now What?" say new leaders should strike a balance, setting expectations internally and shaping their management team, while learning about the organization, too.

Peter Crist, chairman of Crist Kolder Associates, an executive-search firm, said new leaders typically spend the initial months looking to understand the talent within a company, learning employees' strengths and weaknesses before making changes to staffing.

"Normally, a CEO from the outside coming in isn't going to wipe the slate clean on the first day," Mr. Crist said, adding that swift personnel changes can create uncertainty for the workers that remain. "There has to be both a stabilization of the enterprise model and importantly a stabilization of the talent, and it's got to get done relatively soon," he said.

Mr. Musk is hardly the first corporate iconoclast. He is also more than familiar with Twitter, having more than 100 million followers.

On top of that, he is acquiring a company that for years lagged behind its rivals in attracting users and generating revenue, and the industry is facing a slowdown in growth and other challenges that have slashed the valuations of companies such as Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc.

Hubert Joly, former CEO of retailer Best Buy Co., said listening tours with customers and employees can be helpful in the initial period of engineering a turnaround. When Mr. Joly took the reins of Best Buy in 2012, he spent days in retail stores observing customer behavior and holding pizza meetings with staffers. In those gatherings, he asked three questions to employees: "'What's working? What's not working? What do you need?'" Mr. Joly said." [1]

1.  Musk Moves Defy Corporate Gurus
Cutter, Chip. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 07 Nov 2022: B.4.