The Emergence of Charismatic Business Leadership

Richard S. Tedlow

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780795353109
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

The author of Giants of Enterprise examines the evolving role of business leaders in the 21st century—with essential lessons from today's trailblazers. In The Emergence of Charismatic Business Leadership, Harvard Business School Emeritus professor Richard S. Tedlow reveals how a handful of individuals have transformed modern-day leadership, making charisma essential to the role. He looks at leaders like Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs: three pioneers who found success by innovating their management style and using their charisma to champion their vision. Through Tedlow's in-depth accounts of modern business history, we see how former outsiders attain power and influence, and how charismatic leadership enables the creation of revolutionary products like the battery electric vehicle and the smart phone. But Tedlow also considers the careers of people who used their charisma to mislead, such as Jeff Skilling of Enron and Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos.In this thorough examination, Tedlow shows how charisma, when combined with genuine character, can get you far.

PART I

The Great Transformation

In the years following World War II, the biggest American businesses were faceless bureaucracies. This characteristic is captured by their names: General Motors, Standard Oil, United States Steel, and so forth. If I told you the names of the chief executive officers of these firms in, say, 1955, you would not recognize them. Indeed, few people in 1955 knew who they were. I choose 1955 because Time magazine selected the CEO of General Motors as its “Man of the Year” then. He was chosen because of the position he held, not because of the person he was. The job had a man rather than the man having a job.

In 1956, William H. Whyte published a brilliant book entitled The Organization Man. According to Whyte, the key to success in the large American company was “fitting in.” He cites, for example, a documentary about the research laboratory of a major chemical corporation in which the narrator proudly observes, “No geniuses here; just a bunch of average Americans working together.”1

The contrast to our world today could not be more striking. The names of large companies now often have personality: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, etc. The names of the people who are leading or who have recently led these corporations are known all over the country and indeed the world: Bezos, Jobs, Zuckerberg. The shunning of genius and the celebration of the average are inconceivable at these companies.

This great transformation has been essential in order to sustain the vibrancy of the American business world. Why has it taken place? What made it possible? An important part of the answer to these questions is the rise of charismatic business leadership.

There were charismatic business leaders in the 1950s and 1960s, just as there are CEOs today who are not charismatic. We are describing a general tendency away from the CEO as the chief mechanic of the business who kept the wheels of the company turning while working out of the public gaze to the CEO as a man or woman with a mixture of charm, guile, brilliance, and cruelty who remakes the industry and in some cases society as a whole and in the process becomes a celebrity.

What is charisma? It is a mercurial word for a mercurial concept. By looking at leaders who have it and those who do not, we will try to encapsulate its meaning. We will begin with Steve Jobs, who is invariably described as charismatic without that adjective ever being defined.

Chapter 1

Steve Jobs, a Life in Three Acts Act One: End and Beginning

When Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, Apple was inundated with condolence messages from all over the United States and from around the world. Some of them were touching. Others probably were also, but one could not be certain because they arrived in such a variety of languages that it was difficult to find people who could translate them. Yet more problematic were the notes we (I worked at Apple from 2010 to 2018) received in alphabets no one could recognize.

These notes were sent not only to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, but to Apple retail stores around the world. The stores posted them on their windows. In addition, some people left bouquets of flowers in front of the stores. Pause to consider this. People left flowers at stores because of the death of a CEO.

No one knows how many notes were received. According to the “Remembering Steve” page on apple.com, “Over a million people from all over the world have shared their memories, thoughts, and feelings about Steve.”1 As he was dying, people made a pilgrimage to his home in Palo Alto. One of his daughters has written that “A few people he didn’t know came to the doors wanting to see him… wandering into the garden or empty-handed. A stranger in a sari begged to talk with him. A man came in through the gate and said he had flown in from Bulgaria just to see my father.”2

After his death, California governor Jerry Brown declared October 16 to be Steve Jobs Day. The president of the United States and the first lady, Barack and Michelle Obama, posted a condolence note.3

Jobs’s death had been long anticipated. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October of 2003. He postponed surgery until July 31, 2004. The following day he sent a blast email to Apple employees informing them of the surgery and declaring that he would have a full recovery. In the meantime, Tim Cook would manage the company, “so we shouldn’t miss a beat.”4

On June 12, 2005, Jobs delivered the commencement address at Stanford. Saying anything worth hearing on such occasions is next to impossible. Jobs succeeded. “I want to tell you three stories from my life,” he began. One of these was the story of his cancer and his brush with death. The heart of his advice was “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” As of this writing, the address has been viewed almost thirty-eight million times on YouTube.5

Much has been said and written about Jobs. No one has questioned whether he could tell a story. He was a great storyteller that day at Stanford. Not everything he said was quite true, but charismatic people often get away with walking the border between reality and fantasy.

By early 2008, it was clear that his cancer had metastasized. This was a truth that could not be finessed. Jobs lost weight and was in pain much of the time. On August 24, 2011, he informed Apple’s board of directors that the day had come when he “could no longer meet my duties and expectations as CEO.”6 It was all over except the waiting. And that came to an end on October 5.

Dying from cancer is dreadful beyond words. In more than one instance, there is a denial of death until the last breath is drawn. Was this really the end? This disease had afflicted Jobs in 2003. He kept coming back.

As recently as January of 2010, he had delivered the keynote introducing yet another transformative product, the iPad. Would there be any more such products? What would happen to Apple? The company had fired Jobs on September 17, 1985. Twelve years less one day thereafter—September 16, 1997—he came back to save Apple when it was a month or two away from bankruptcy. Only he could have done it. How would the world go on without him?

Why was the death of Jobs an event of global import? Only a tiny handful of the millions of people who sent those notes had ever met him. And although there is a legion of legends about Jobs dating back to Apple’s birth, he was not thought of by those who knew him or only knew of him as either nice or particularly kind. Why did all those people feel close enough to him to project their own feelings onto him? Why did they feel that he belonged to them… that he was theirs?

Is it because Jobs touched so many people through his products? Is it because the products were designed with pride and beauty, thereby in a sense honoring the purchaser, in a way that the products of competitors were not? Is it because he left behind a beautiful family? Is it because he reached the height of success when his life was taken from him? Is it because he succeeded despite starting with no advantages?

Jobs was born on February 24, 1955. His parents were Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian immigrant, and Joanne Schieble, who grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. He was Muslim; she was Roman Catholic. They met at the University of Wisconsin, where he was a teaching assistant for a course she was taking in graduate school in political science. They were both twenty-three, and they were unmarried.7

Jandali has said that he wanted to marry Schieble, but her parents disapproved. Her father was dying, and she did not want to upset him. Schieble was living for a time with Jandali (the son of a wealthy man) in Homs, Syria. She left Syria for San Francisco, took up residence in a home for unwed mothers, and put her son up for adoption immediately after his birth without consulting Jandali.

The couple who ad...