What does Mr. Musk do wrong?
He ruins a fundamental principle
He ruins a fundamental principle
It is not the first case of this kind in history. Many years ago, Stephen Elop, a Microsoft executive who was sent to Finland to manage Nokia (which Microsoft had acquired not long before that), also sent Nokia’s employees an 1100-word message in which he said, “we are standing on a burning platform.” It was his way to get staff members to the massive shifts in the company’s strategy and to convey that he wanted them to work harder and be ready to make (or accept) painful decisions.
Elon Musk did it several times in Tesla in SpaceX, and it apparently worked. But I am afraid it won’t work in Twitter. And not because Tesla and SpaceX were startups, whereas Twitter is a company with history and culture.
Any relationship is an exchange, and working relations are no exception.
At home, we want to exchange love and warmth for love, warmth, and support.
At work, we would like to exchange our hard work and commitment for a decent incentive package, respect, career perspectives, etc.
And any relationship is stable only until both sides believe this exchange is fair. As soon as at least one of them feels that it is not, it tries to rebalance relations, but if it fails, the relationship is ruined.
In Tesla or SpaceX, Mr. Musk offered employees to betray their families or personal life in exchange for a dream — to revolutionize the industry, to do something nobody has done before. And it worked. Many people were ready to work 80 hours per week and tolerate Musk’s energetic personality to be a part of a legend.
But what did Stephen Elop do at Nokia, and what Elon Musk does on Twitter? They don’t offer a fair exchange. They ask a counterpart to sacrifice their life, but in exchange for what? Musk talks about Twitter 2.0, but he hasn’t specified it publicly, and there were no leaks about the details. It doesn’t look like a dream, and it definitely doesn’t look like “revolutionizing” the industry.
Telling employees that a company is in trouble means, maybe unintentionally, accusing them of these troubles. And a proposal to work harder looks not like a fair deal but like a punishment for the bad work. And it will never work.