All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Recent events have demonstrated, conclusively, that Elon Musk is a lousy leader. Understanding why can help you improve your own leadership skills.

We’ll get there. But we need to prepare:

Older readers will remember the Gabor sisters who were, it was said, famous for being famous.

Twitter is like that too: The only reason to pay attention to it is that many people pay attention to it.

Even before the takeover Twitter was a statistically questionable straw poll combined with a Dumb-Ass Statement of the Day competition. Its accelerating descent into a free-speech absolutist utopia is an excellent argument for ignoring it altogether.

Which leads to this: You’re known by the company you keep. Twitter depends entirely on advertising revenue. Expect quite a few of its advertisers to care that their good names are being tarred by Twitter’s metaphorical brush. They’ll shift their marketing to other, less unsavory platforms, just as Adidas had the good sense to sever its association with the intellectually barren entity known as “Ye.”

And oh, by the way Mr. Ye, Prince did the “formerly known as” thing earlier and better. Just sayin’.

Another thought:

Immediately upon Musk completing its takeover, Twitter’s vermin population demonstrated its ability to quickly and efficiently scale up.

Many well-intentioned but short-sighted progressive tribespeople were horrified. To them I must quote Blazing Saddles’ Hedley Lamarr: Please rest your sphincters. Those tweeting bigotry are already bigots. So are those who read and agree with them. It’s like blowing oxygen at already flaming gasoline, without adding more gas. Nobody’s convincing anyone.

But … isn’t hate speech a problem? “Hate speech” is a phrase chosen by the predictably inept Progressive messaging machine as its rallying cry. It’s a mistake: Hate speech has been protected speech since National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie.

What isn’t and shouldn’t be protected is incitement. To the extent Twitter becomes an incitement free-for-all, it will become one of the biggest litigation targets of all time.

One more point on the free-speech front: Yes, Twitter will likely restore POTUS #45’s access to the platform, but if you don’t like him – especially if you don’t like him – this is brilliant. POTUS #45 now has two alternatives, and it’s Hobson’s choice. He can either continue to post his “thoughts” on TruthSocial, at which point never mind, or he can resume posting on Twitter, thereby damaging his investment in TruthSocial.

More context: In the late 19th century wealthy patrons like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer bought distressed newspapers to ensure their financial stability. (Yes, this grossly oversimplifies the history of the journalism industry. What do you want in a one-sentence summary?)

It’s déjà vu all over again. Rich Guy Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, providing financial stability. Likewise Rich Guy Glen Taylor, who acquired the local Minneapolis/St. Paul newspaper, the Star Tribune, in 2014.

So now, Elon Musk owns Twitter, social media’s financial Wile E. Coyote. Isn’t this just another Rich Guy subsidizing a news outlet?

Not entirely. WashPo and the Strib are, unambiguously, content providers. The Muskian Twitter, in contrast, is a publishing platform, a very different bird.

Bob’s last word: Getting back to you and what out of all this is applicable to you in your role as a leader, it’s how Elon Musk has demonstrated that he’s a lousy leader that you should pay attention to.

How so?

When someone takes over management of an organization the worst thing they can do is make decisions.

Any decisions.

Ignorance is a poor foundation for choosing a course of action. Deciding anything before getting a handle on What’s Going On In There pretty much guarantees bad outcomes.

Like Twitter being abandoned by many of its advertisers, as explained above. Musk driving customers away because he hasn’t fully thought through Twitter’s business model? Not smart.

Add this: Twitter, like all organizations, depends on the dedication and good will of talented staff. Announcing draconian layoffs before getting even the slightest whiff of a hint as to who is worth retaining pretty much ensures that those most worth retaining will be the first to bail.

It’s a problem for leaders who think they’re the smartest person in the room – they figure they’re the only one in the room smart enough to be worth listening to. And so they listen only to themselves, failing to understand that just because they’re smarter than anyone else, that doesn’t mean they’re smarter than everyone else.

On CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “The successful CIO’s trick to mastering politics.” As long-time KJR readers know, relationships outlive transactions. Here’s a fresh take on the subject.

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|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

Just for giggles, take a few minutes to google the contents of your average MBA curriculum.

I’m not going to quibble about what’s in them. My quibble is with what isn’t. High on the missing courseware list: project management. Curiously, this, the practice needed to make tomorrow different from yesterday isn’t important enough to be a mandatory business management skill.

Then there’s this week’s missing subject: epistemology.

Yes, epistemology. It sounds abstruse and esoteric. But one of the eight tasks of leadership is making decisions, and decision-makers can’t make good ones if they don’t know what they know and how much they should trust it.

Read about epistemological thinking and you’ll bump into Karl Popper, the pre-eminent philosopher of science. His key insight: Science never proves anything. Scientific research fails to disprove – to falsify. Fail to falsify an idea enough times and scientists start to have confidence in it.

Or, more accurately, they have more confidence in it than in any of the competing ideas floating around in the meme-o-sphere.

Which leads to the business response to COVID-19.

Most of the decisions your average business leader must make might be scientific in a metaphorical sense, but they’re rarely about scientific issues. Quantum electrodynamics, for example, has little impact on compensation policy.

COVID-19 changed that, calling for business decisions about a scientific issue. And so, decision-makers were advised to “follow the science” – advice I made myself and still endorse.

With this caveat: As pointed out in Michael Lewis’s excellent The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus appeared there was no science to follow. Epidemiologists had few established facts about it – too few to formulate high-confidence policy recommendations. Even such fundamentals as the virus’s lethality and contagion had large error bars.

Nor did economists have a body of knowledge to guide how to go about putting the economy in an induced coma … necessary given the millions of lives that were at stake … and then, when the situation was safer, to resuscitate it.

To everyone’s credit, most leaders endorsed the idea of “following the science” in their decision-making. What became blurred, though, was that the science being followed wasn’t yet actual science. Our ability to forecast how the virus would behave in real-world populations hadn’t yet been tested by multiple Popperian falsification loops.

What we did have were seasoned, dedicated, brilliant researchers who extrapolated from their knowledge of coronaviruses, viral propagation, and economics to the situation at hand.

Recall that even the prosaic idea of taking maximum advantage of the tools and practices associated with employees working remotely was an extrapolation from far too little data to accurately predict where it would lead.

“Follow the science,” that is, didn’t, and couldn’t, mean what the plain words signaled. It meant that, given the choice, we should take the current scientific consensus about the virus as the best alternative available – in the phrase made famous in Argo we followed, for the most part, the best bad plan we had.

Bob’s last words: In the early 1990s, Al Gore sponsored the legislation that, combined with Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of HTML, led to the modern internet.

Imagine what today’s world would be like had he not provided this leadership. And yet, as his reward, he was widely ridiculed for a claim he never made … that he’d “invented the Internet.”

Culminating on January 2, 2000, an army of dedicated and hard-working technologists successfully prevented world economic collapse through their response to the Y2K problem. Instead of throwing a parade for the IT professionals who had just saved the world, the world griped ignorantly about the so-called Y2K hoax.

And so, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the level of appreciation we as a society have been expressing for the dedication and hard work aimed at deflecting the worst of the pandemic is somewhat lacking in enthusiasm.

Which gets us to takeaways in the leadership and management principles we apply every day to do the work of the businesses we support:

There will come a time when you have to formulate a response to a difficult, complicated, and high-impact challenge. It won’t be the kind of challenge that comes with a well-defined, packaged solution you can follow with confidence.

The best you’ll be able to do is to pull your best experts together to figure it out, knowing they won’t achieve perfection.

Please – when this happens, apply the lessons of recent world history. Thank the team for the successes they do achieve; don’t grouse about what they missed. They did their best … and, very possibly, did the best possible. That they failed to predict the future with precision won’t have been a failing.

It’s the nature of the future.

On CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “The successful CIO’s trick to mastering politics,” about the basic principle that relationships outlive transactions, and what happens when a CIO fails to embrace this fact of organizational dynamics.

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