Management Style and Decisions: A Test of Elon Musk's Approaches after Twitter Takeover

 

Management Style and Decisions

 A Test of Elon Musk's Approaches after Twitter Takeover  

I Lead in.

A.   Can you give an example of a successful and influential CEO (chief executive officer, the highest-ranking person in a company)? What industries or companies do they work for?

B.   In your opinion what qualities do successful CEOs have?

C.   How do successful and influential CEOs treat their employees?

 II Match the words to their definitions. Use four words in your sentences.

1.	policy	A.	a public area in the center of a town where people gather and socialize
2.	acquisition	B.	all the people who work in a certain company
3.	countercultural	C.	showing sympathy and caring for people
4.	futurist	D.	to be important
5.	workforce	E.	having a modest personality and not trying to make yourself seem important
6.	template	F.	a plan or decision made by a company
7.	my-way-or-the-highway	G.	a pre-made design
8.	low-ego	H.	a person who predicts what will happen in the future, especially in technology, society, and culture
9.	compassionate	I.	relating to a way of life  that is different from the norm
10.	to matter	J.	the ability to understand and share someone else's feelings
11.	empathy	K.	an attitude where someone is not willing to consider other opinions or options
12.	town square	L.	the act of getting something, usually by buying it or taking control of it

III Read the text and fill in the gaps with the words and phrases from the list. You need to use all the words.

 workforce; free speech; remote work; style of management; vehicles; methods; business model; richest man

 Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter raises questions of policy: is it right for the world’s 1)______  to own such an important forum for public debate? It raises issues of law: is his decision to get rid of so many workers within days of completing the acquisition above board? And it raises questions of strategy: can Twitter make money by moving from a 2)______  based on advertising to one based on subscription? But it is also an extremely public test of a particular 3)______  . In the way he thinks about work, decision-making and the role of the CEO, Mr Musk is swimming against the tide.

His attitude to employees is an obvious example of his countercultural approach. For a futurist, Mr Musk is a very old-fashioned boss. He doesn’t like 4)______  . Earlier this year he sent an email to employees at Tesla demanding that they come to the office for at least 40 hours a week. Anyone who thought this was archaic could “pretend to work somewhere else”, he tweeted.

Whatever the legality of his decision to fire so many Twitter workers, his 5)______  are brutal: people locked out of corporate IT accounts, careers ended with an impersonal email, half the 6)______  gone at a stroke. It is as if Thanos had decided to try his hand at business. For those who remain, hard work is the expectation; insiders say that one of Mr Musk’s first acts at the firm was to cancel monthly firm-wide “days of rest”. The template for the modern manager tends to be a low-ego, compassionate boss who gives people autonomy. Someone didn’t get the memo.

 His critics have to accept that the my-way-or-the-highway approach has worked before. At his other firms, like Tesla and SpaceX, Mr Musk may not have offered empathy but he has provided a planet-sized sense of purpose, from popularising electric 7)______  to colonising Mars. Whether this can work for him at Twitter is less clear. His vision for the product as a “digital town square” where 8)______  flourishes is a typically grand one. This time, however, he is not taking on unproductive staff, but fixing an existing business where judgment and politics matter as much as engineering.

 IV Match the words from two columns to make collocations used in the text. Use four collocations in your sentences. 

1.	to raise	A.	work
2.	forum	B.	against the tide
3.	to get	C.	money
4.	to swim	D.	vehicle
5.	remote	E.	rid of
6.	sense	F.	hand at business
7.	electric	G.	speech
8.	free	H.	on unproductive staff
9.	to make	I.	a question
10.	business	J.	for public debate
11.	to try	K.	of purpose
12.	to take	L.	model

 V. Comprehension check. Mark the sentences as True (T) or False (F). Correct the false statements.

 1.    There are questions whether it is right for the world’s richest man to own Twitter because it is will increase the amount of spam on the platform. 

2.    Elon Musk decided to get rid of many Twitter workers within days of completing the acquisition of the company. 

3.    Twitter is going to move from a business model based on subscription to based one on advertising. 

4.    Mr Musk’s style of decision-making is similar to that of CEOs in other companies.  

5.    Mr Musk seems to have an old-fashioned approach to managing employees and does not support remote work. 

6.    Mr Musk’s tweets suggest that he believes that many employees who  come to the office for at least 40 hours a week only pretend to work. 

7.    When Elon Musk decided to fire Twitter workers, he communicated it openly in a series of face-to-face conversations with the employees. 

8.    Remaining Twitter employees will no longer have firm-wide “days of rest”.  

9.    Modern managers are supposed to be compassionate and give people autonomy. 

10.The article implies that Mr Musk is an example of a contemporary compassionate manager. 

11.Mr Musk’s approach to managing workforce proved to be ineffective in the past.   

12.At his other firms, like Tesla and SpaceX, Mr Musk’s approach worked because employees had a sense of purpose and could feel part of innovation and world-changing ideas. 

13.Mr Musk’s approach to managing employees will work at Twitter too. 

14.Mr Musk wants to turn Twitter into the platform that supports free speech. 

15.The problem with Mr Musk’s approach to managing Twitter employees is that it is a different type of business where engineering is as important as judgment and politics. 

 VI Match the words to their definitions. Use four words in your sentences.

1.	alumni	A.	so closely connected that it cannot be separated
2.	gut instinct	B.	happening only once, unique
3.	causality	C.	former students of a school or university
4.	to surface	D.	a new business activity that involves taking risks
5.	unorthodox	E.	not having any significance, unimportant
6.	irrelevant	F.	the relationship between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is a result of the first
7.	inextricably	G.	a strong instinctive feeling or reaction based on intuition or personal experience rather than rational thought
8.	pundit	H.	to not do something that you usually do or that you should do
9.	one-off	I.	to become known
10.	to wriggle out of (something)	J.	different  from traditional ideas or methods
11.	venture	K.	an expert in a particular field who gives opinions or commentary
12.	to skip	L.	to avoid doing something by using clever excuses

VII Look through the text. Seven sentences and sentence fragments have been removed. Read the text and choose from the sentence fragments (A-I) the one which fits each gap (1-7). There are sentence fragments that you do not need to use.

A.    users, ex-employees, the people who founded the firm, policymakers and pundits

B.    has publicly and privately clashed with Twitter employees over his approach to running the company

C.    succeed in an increasingly competitive world

D.    who bridges the outside world and the inner workings of the company

E.     not because of an economic rationale

F.     in a different camp: fast, informal and aggressive

G.   if Mr Musk makes another success of his latest venture by being brutal to his workforce

H.    real-time commentary on how things are going

I.      they went about making strategy

 

The way that Mr Musk takes decisions also cuts across consensus. Comparatively little research has been done on how CEOs make their choices, but an article by Harvard Business School published in 2020 had asked 262 of the school’s own alumni how 1) ______.

The authors of the paper did discover a wide range of approaches, with some managers going on gut instinct and others using very formalised processes. But the researchers found that bosses who use more structured processes tend to lead bigger and faster-growing firms (which way causality runs is not clear). They also tend to make decisions more slowly. Mr Musk and his followers are 2)  ______. Reports are already surfacing of fired Twitter workers being asked to come back.

He is unorthodox in another way, too. Peter Drucker, an expert management thinker, described the CEO as being the person in the organisation 3)  ______. No one else in the firm is in a position to combine these perspectives, Mr Drucker wrote.

Mr Musk is not so much bridging this gap as making the distinction between the inside and outside of the company irrelevant. His personal brand and wealth is inextricably linked with the other firms he runs. At Twitter he is going even further, tossing out product ideas on his own Twitter feed, polling the audience for their views and offering 4)  ______. And Twitter itself is a platform on which everyone – 5) ______- weighs in publicly to say how things are going. There is not much of an inside to talk of.

          You might object that Mr Musk is a one-off, and so is this deal. When he first made his offer to buy Twitter, he explicitly said that it was 6)  ______. He later tried to wriggle out of the transaction entirely. The story of a billionaire owner of a social-media platform has little in common with the challenges that preoccupy the salaried executives of most public firms. Maybe so, but  7)  ______, skipping the PowerPoint sessions and managing through memes, the MBA will still need a bit of an update. 

 

VIII Match the words from two columns to make collocations used in the text. Use four collocations in your sentences.

 

1.	to make	A.	real-time commentary
2.	gut	B.	the audience
3.	formalised	C.	out product ideas
4.	to bridge	D.	processes
5.	personal	E.	firm
6.	inextricably	F.	executive
7.	to toss	G.	linked
8.	to poll	H.	strategy
9.	to offer	I.	brand
10.	economic	J.	instinct
11.	salaried	K.	rationale
12.	public	L.	a gap

 IX Read the text in the previous task and answer the questions.

1.    How can CEOs choose their strategy?   

2.    How does Elon Musk’s decision-making process compare to that of other CEOs?   

3.    What roles do CEOs play in establishing the link  between the company and the outside world?   

4.    How does Elon Musk's personal brand and wealth relate to the other companies he runs?   

5.    How does Elon Musk's personal brand relate to Twitter?    

6.    Does Elon Musk use his own Twitter feed to make product decisions and receive feedback from his audience?  If yes, how does he do it?  

  X Vocabulary focus. Follow the link .  Study the words and word combinations using flashcards. Take a test and check your knowledge. Play matching vocabulary game (match words to their definitions to make cards disappear).

XI OVER TO YOU. Discuss the questions with other students.

A.   How would you describe Elon Musk's management style after reading the article?

B.   What impact has Elon Musk had on Twitter since taking over?

C.   How will Elon Musk's leadership style influence Twitter's direction and decisions?

D.   In your opinion, what are some of the bold decisions made by Elon Musk after taking over Twitter? 

E.    Do you think Elon Musk's management style is more beneficial or detrimental to Twitter's success? Explain your answer.