Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Beijing, Nov. 7 (Xinhua) in his first week at the helm of Twitter, Elon Musk put behind most of the advice that management gurus have put forward for decades.

▲ Musk is changing Twitter quickly. he is so anxious to change Twitter that he immediately fired a number of executives and laid off about half of his employees. He also came up with a new product idea to charge ordinary users a license fee.

Anti-traditional management, however, industry executives and corporate advisers say Mr Musk's swift action stands in stark contrast to many new company leaders, who usually meet employees 90 days before taking office before starting a strategic change. listen to their concerns and assess how to improve the company's products.

"at the very least, it's an unconventional approach," says Joel Peterson, former chairman of JetBlue, who has served on dozens of company boards and advises CEO in various industries. "it's unconventional, unusual, and not everyone will do it, but I really don't blame him for it."

Mr Musk once claimed to be a "micro manager" who focused on the smallest details. Industry executives and consultants point out that he appears to be adopting many of the management strategies he used when he founded Tesla and SpaceX, including hands-on product decisions, dislike of the company's structure and a focus on speed. Tesla is now the world's most valuable car company, and SpaceX is the world's busiest rocket launch company.

▲ Twitter management experts have long said that the first few months of an executive's tenure are critical, during which time a company's CEO can plan their agenda and begin to reset the corporate culture. There are many famous books in this area, such as "it's up to you-- what's the next step?" They point out that new leaders need to strike a balance between understanding the company while setting expectations internally and shaping the management team.

Peter Crist, chairman of Crist Kolder Associates, an executive search firm, points out that new leaders usually learn about people within the company in the first few months, their strengths and weaknesses, and then make personnel changes.

"normally, outside CEO don't settle old accounts on the first day," Crist said, adding that rapid personnel changes can create uncertainty for remaining employees. "the corporate model has to stabilize, and the important thing is that talent must stabilize, which must be done relatively quickly."

Hubert Joly, a former CEO of retailer Best Buy, says it helps to start a listening journey for customers and employees in the early stages of planning the company's transformation. When Jolly took the helm of Best Buy in 2012, he spent days watching customer behavior in retail stores and holding pizza meetings with employees. At those parties, he would ask employees three questions: "'what works? what doesn't work? what do you need?" Jolie said.

▲ Maskjoli says that while he also wants to act quickly, he has resisted the temptation of some people to close stores or lay off staff quickly, as well as the temptation to impose his ideas on the company without knowing what's going on. "my job is simple: show up, ask these questions, listen carefully, take notes, and do what they tell me, because they know all the answers." That's what he said about his employees.

Lessons from startup failures Musk treats Twitter like a startup, but the problem with startups is that most of them fail.

He is making or promising to make a lot of changes to Twitter quickly, which is common in tech startups. This makes a lot of sense when a company is small and consumes investor money. Few people in the tech world are as familiar with such platitudes as Musk. No entrepreneur can compete with him in terms of the total market capitalization of companies such as SpaceX, Tesla and PayPal, which he has led or helped to build.

However, Twitter is not a startup, it is a mature company. If Musk moves too fast and destroys too many things at once, he may lose a lot. Even after the massive layoffs announced on Friday, Twitter still has thousands of employees, a lot of code and technical debt (programs that need to be improved), annual revenue of about $5 billion and nearly 240 million daily active users. Unlike startups, Twitter pays more than $1 billion a year in interest, among other expenses, because of the money Musk borrowed to buy Twitter.

Although Musk has accomplished tasks that many consider impossible in the past, Twitter is completely different from the challenges he has dealt with in the past. The "first principle" thinking he often touts is useful for creating new material products, but running social networks requires extremely tricky diplomacy, and he shows the opposite. In social networks, leaders must balance the needs and aspirations of advertisers and users, not to mention regulators and politicians. At the same time, he has to supervise editorial decisions on what is allowed and what is not allowed.

Mark Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, once compared the experience of running a large social network to waking up every day with a "punch in the stomach". Musk's style has always been cheerful and aggressive, and his response to reality is to fight back on Twitter. His actions frightened advertisers, who correctly recognized that the actions of the head of a social network implied what others were allowed to do on the site.

Musk said Twitter lost more than $4 million a day, so he was in a hurry and had to lay off staff. However, there is an old saying that you can't eat hot tofu in a hurry.

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