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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.

When it comes to leadership, coercion is the first refuge of the lazy.

Last week’s column put forth this modest little aphorism, and its proof:

  • In healthy organizations, excellent employees, individually and working in teams, presented with a terrific idea and a well-thought-out plan for implementing it, will want to make it real and will work hard to do so.
  • Therefore, in healthy organizations, coercion, threats, and punishments are, at best, superfluous.
  • Therefore, if employees who are presented with an idea and a plan don’t want to make it real and/or aren’t willing to work hard to do so … if, in other words, coercion, threats, and punishments are necessary … then the organization is unhealthy in one or more of these respects:

Last week I enjoyed my freedom from political correctness by ridiculing New Jersey for the state of its roads (D+ grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers), its correlatively low gas tax, and the consensus among its governor, legislature and citizens that tax increases are off the table.

Who to ridicule this week? I know … most of the private sector, because if you think this sort of behavior is limited to public governance, you aren’t paying attention to your own backyard.

For example …

I know of an insurance company that’s grown through acquisition to the point that it now has eleven functionally equivalent underwriting/policy administration systems. And no, it isn’t run as a holding company.

Whenever there’s a change to business logic, it has to make that change eleven different times in eleven different ways.

From all reports, the company’s IT department has become quite good at coordinating and implementing business logic changes. As it should, because when it comes to deciding what capabilities your organization needs it’s good to concentrate on what the business is likely to need from you.

The only choice that would be better would be to retire ten of the eleven systems.

Except that by just about every reasonable measure, the company in question is extraordinarily successful.

This is the sort of thing that keeps management consultants awake at night. If you’re metaphorically inclined, it’s as if, by policy, a state limited road maintenance to dumping asphalt into potholes and still became one of the nation’s primary transportation hubs.

But that isn’t what this week’s column is about. This week it’s about planning for the obvious and how organizational dynamics so easily prevents it.

Planning for the obvious first: If you add something to your fund of stuff, whether it’s a house or car for your household, or a machine, information system or facility if you’re a business, you’re going to have to spend money in the future to maintain it.

Otherwise your fund of stuff (from here on in, FoS) will deteriorate, losing its value or performance over time.

It’s a simple, inarguable equation: FoS increases, maintenance costs increase too, or else FoS value steadily decreases.

As a nation, during the Eisenhower administration we built our interstate highway system, and, in 1956, created the Highway Trust Fund, supported by a penny per gallon federal gas tax increase (to 3 cents, which, in case you care, is equivalent to 24 cents today, compared to the current federal gas tax rate of 18.4 cents).

Meanwhile, I’d bet good money (enough to pay five gallons worth of New Jersey gas tax) most KJR readers work in companies that, when they implement new information systems, don’t increase the IT budget by enough to cover the easily predicted need for ongoing maintenance.

Why not, given that any meteorologist would kill to be able to make predictions with this level of confidence?

Based on my exposure to and experience in quite a few businesses over the course of my career, it’s because of:

  • ROI computation: Proposed projects are usually evaluated on their financials. Include the cost of maintenance and the financials look worse, making the business case less attractive. Better to conveniently forget about them.
  • Tradition: This isn’t just the opening number for Fiddler on the Roof. If nobody else had to include maintenance costs in the past, why should my pet project be burdened with them now?
  • No good deed going unpunished: We haven’t increased the IT budget to support maintenance yet, and yet IT has managed to maintain everything so far. What’s changed?
  • Wishful thinking: Maintenance is a separate spending bucket. If IT needs to maintain a system, the maintenance will have to be cost-justified on its own merits.
  • Baumal’s Cost Disease: Everyone else is expected to continuously improve. Instead of increasing IT’s budget, IT should continuously improve enough to cover the difference.
  • Reality Distortion Fields: We can’t increase IT’s maintenance budget because we’re going to need this money to invest in new strategic initiatives.
  • Distrust: If we increase IT’s budget by enough to cover maintenance of this system, how do we know IT will actually spend the money on this system? (Several correspondents from New Jersey explained their anti-gas-tax-increase position on this basis.)
  • Siloes: If we increase IT’s budget by x to cover the cost of maintenance for someone else’s system, that will leave less on the table to cover the cost of the new systems and system enhancements I’m going to want.

Against these forces, the CIO is armed with nothing beyond logic and maybe a Gartner study or two.

It’s time to buy more asphalt.