There Are Many Different Leadership Styles – Chaos Is Not One of Them
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My book, The Leader With A Thousand Faces, explores many aspects of leadership, including the various types of leadership that have been identified. One of the earliest papers on the subject, published in 1939, identified three leadership styles - Authoritarian, Democratic, and Laissez-Faire. Since then, people have been defining and redefining leadership styles to include Bureaucratic, Coaching, Transactional, Transformational, and servant-leader. None of these styles describes what is happening with Elon Musk and DOGE. The best description of this approach to leadership is chaos.
In business, would we ever take any of the following actions?
Make mass voluntary separation offers without an understanding of the long-term cost impacts.
Send separation and layoff offers via email without any legally enforceable agreements to be signed by both parties.
Grant non-employees access to critical systems without any engagement with HR, running background checks, or required training.
Grant full access to all confidential information and systems to people without any relevant business experience.
The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk's Government Takeover | Wired
Shutter entire business divisions or departments without understanding the underlying business mission and contractual obligations the closure would create.
What does USAID do? | USA Facts
Trump wants to dismantle the agency that provides weather forecasts. It will make your life worse | Fast Company (I wonder if this has anything to do with the infamous redrawn 2019 hurricane map.)
Musk is using his Twitter playbook to run DOGE. Let's not forget how that has failed. Since acquiring Twitter/X, the company's valuation has dropped by 80%, and revenues have dropped by 84%. The number of subscribers is no longer growing.
X valued at 80 percent less since Elon Musk's acquisition, says Fidelity | Business Standard
Growth stalls at Elon Musk's X | Financial Times
I fully support spending reductions. I believe that the greatest long-term threat to the United States is the growing federal deficit. In October 2024, I wrote an article about my frustration that neither candidate was addressing this issue during the campaign. Since 2008, the deficit as a percentage of GDP has risen from 70.1% to 124%. The most recent House budget proposal would further increase the deficit.
Ray Dalio published a series of articles on LinkedIn exploring "How Countries Go Broke." They are in-depth, data-driven studies that prove the risk facing the United States is real and impending.
Tangle's Ari Weitzman points out many flaws with the DOGE approach to budget cuts. One of the greatest flaws is where they are proposing to cut. They are going after small expenditures that will not make a meaningful difference. USAID accounted for 0.3% of 2024 spending. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's budget is less than 1% of federal spending. All federal employee salaries and benefits account for less than 5% of the federal budget.
To cut $2 trillion in government spending, federal expenditures would have to be cut by about one-third. We need to cut spending. We need to be more efficient. We need to begin generating budget surpluses to allow us to pay down our debt. There should be no discussion of tax cuts until the deficit is reduced by half.
What is happening with DOGE is creating uncertainty. The actions will be mired in the courts and prove ineffective, leaving the government in a weaker position both domestically and internationally.
Leadership does not create chaos; it brings peace and calms stormy seas. *
* I ended today's article with a haiku. I concluded every chapter in my book with one. I like haikus because they require the writer to present complete thoughts in a few words.
Related Articles
What Happened the Last Time a President Purged the Bureaucracy | Politico
How To Thrive When Leaders Create Chaos In The Workplace | Forbes
Elon Musk's Toxicity Could Spell Disaster for Tesla | Wired
They're not just suing to stop DOGE. They're suing Elon Musk himself. | Politico
This program saved the government $28 million a year. Now Trump is killing it | Fasat Company
Six-Chart Sunday (#56) – Shutdown Countdown | Bruce Mehlman's Age of Disruption
How much of the federal budget is mandatory spending? | USA Facts
Republicans Finally Reveal How They'll Pay for Tax Cuts for the Rich | The New Republic
Which states get more federal money than they send | Axios
Ray Dalio published a series of LinkedIn articles examining the impact of high sovereign debt on the long-term ability to govern. They are thoughtful, data-driven, and worth the time to read them.
How Countries Go Broke: Introduction & Chapter One
How Countries Go Broke: Chapter Two & Chapter Three
How Countries Go Broke: Chapter Four & Chapter Five
How Countries Go Broke: Chapter Six & Chapter Seven
How Countries Go Broke: Chapter 8 to Chapter 11
How Countries Go Broke: Chapter 12 to Chapter 14
How Countries Go Broke: Chapter 15 & Chapter 16
My article on the federal deficit.
An Example of Poor Analytics - The Federal Debt on LinkedIn
An Example of Poor Analytics — The Federal Debt on Medium
Chips and Salsa: Snack-sized news and posts
Texas now leads the nation with 16 top-tier research universities. Nine of them are part of The University of Texas System.
Daniel Parris provides another excellent example of data analysis. He started with a hypothesis and changed it when the data did not support it. It took several iterations until he reached a final conclusion. Every data analytics project would benefit from this approach.
Do People Actually Hate Coldplay? A Statistical Analysis | Stat Significant
There is merit to the premise of this article. Starting with the bottom line is often the most effective way to tell your story – but not always. Before you begin writing, you need to know what story you want to tell, and your call to action needs to be based on your audience. Then, you can decide which storytelling framework will be the most effective.
Mastering the Executive Summary | Medium
We definitely need to teach our children about financial literacy. Many of the adults I meet need the same lessons.
Inside the movement to teach kids about money | Marketplace
This is the first time I have heard about digital shoplifting.
Gen-Z's Shopping—and Shoplifting—Habits Might Surprise You | Inc.
This article leaves out what may be the most essential key to an effective data-driven culture. You must listen to the data and change your mind if the data does not support the original hypothesis.
Data-Driven Culture: 4 Keys | MIT Sloan via LinkedIn
Fame is fickle, and it is probably not all it is cracked up to be.
This Raunchy Viral Moment Made Her Famous... Until It All Went Downhill | Medium
At one time or another, everyone feels like an imposter. For most, this feeling passes as they become comfortable in their new role. When it never goes away, there is a bigger problem.
A philosophical discussion about natural laws.
The nature of natural laws | Aeon
There can be order in clutter.
The more data we collect, the harder it is to keep it organized and retrievable.
This New Algorithm for Sorting Books or Files Is Close to Perfection | Wired
Quotes
"Don't throw away the old bucket until you know whether the new one holds water."
- Swedish Proverb
"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. The trick is to focus on the first small thing."
- Vincent Van Gogh
"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."
- Aesop
You can order The Leader With A Thousand Faces on the Recommended Reading Page of my website.
My goal is to make this newsletter as interesting and valuable as possible. Please share your thoughts and suggestions for improvement. If there are specific topics in leadership you would like me to focus on in future issues, please send them my way.
