Leadership Assignment on Elon Musk- A Contemporary Business Leader

Question

Task: In recent weeks you have been exposed to a range of content exploring people and organization’s; leadership and performance; leadership behaviors, styles development and effectiveness and strategic leadership.

For this leadership assignment, you are required to select a contemporary business leader of your choice (it can be from Australia or overseas). You should select a leader that is inspirational and relevant to you and your current/future career. You CANNOT select Political, Religious or Sports Leaders. Your choice of a “business leader” will provide you with an opportunity to analyze their contribution to the success of the business.

Your report should address the following questions:
1. Describe at least two (2) key factors that in your opinion make your chosen leader successful?
2. Identify at least two (2) keys ways that your chosen leader has made a significant impact on their business and how their performance as a leader can be measured?
3. Based on what you have learnt about your chosen leader, identify whether you now want to be a leader and why or why not and how are the “lessons learned” relevant to you and your current/future career?

Answer

Introduction
The current leadership assignment discusses about the contribution of the business leader which is extremely significant when considering how an organisation is perceived within the wider business ecosystem. The current study is focused on Elon Musk, one of the most successful entrepreneurs who has revolutionised multiple industries including the likes of the automotive and space sectors with his innovative ideas and visionary thinking (Yauney, 2018). Key highlights include the factors that made Musk successful, how his leadership impacted his businesses and what lessons can be learnt from Musk’s ways of working in a personal context.

1. Two factors that made Elon Musk successful
Elon Musk, born in 1971, has founded several companies in diverse segments and markets, with prime examples including The Boring Company (which is a tunnel construction company) and Neuralink, a business dedicated to studying implantable brain interfaces. However, the 49 year old South African business magnate is popularly known for his role as the CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors, the world’s leading electric vehicle manufacturer (Pierce, 2017). Discussing the key factors that make Elon Musk successful, focus and determination come to the forefront. In an interview with Inc.com, Musk’s long time roommate NavaidFarooq mentioned how Elon had always been a focused person right from his college days, whether it was learning about something new or playing a casual game of Civilization (Zetlin, 2019). The multi-talented and billionaire Musk has always depicted a strong sense of focus in his business operatives as well, whether it be the decision to build an entire ecosystem for the adoption of Tesla cars or enabling free access for all to learn about artificial intelligence though OpenAI.

Another key factor behind Musk’s success is his vision and the ability to solve complex problems based on reason and logic. For instance, Musk’s entry into the space industry received severe criticism, citing how it would be immensely difficult for a private player to compete with or even come close to the scale of operations that is currently facilitated by governmental agencies. The fact that Musk was the sole investor in SpaceX is testimony to the criticism he received initially. However, SpaceX, today, has test fired multiple rocket systems in collaboration with the American government while also engaging in independent missions to explore Mars (Money, 2020). Musk’s vision was also prominent when working to build Tesla in a bid to disrupt the conventional automotive sectors around the world. While electric vehicles were gradually becoming mainstream, the manner in which Tesla made an impact was never seen before (Trujillo, 2017). However, Musk realised what the existing problems were and took them head on through his businesses, and the vision behind his approaches was critical to him becoming the richest man in the world today.

2.1 Two ways in which Elon Musk has made significant impact on his business
Musk’s entry into Tesla was no short of a radical move, as it was his ideology and vision that led the company to become the number one electric vehicle manufacturer in the world within a decade. The theory of blue ocean strategy is relevant in this regard, where the key idea is to tap into uncontested market space based on offering a higher degree of value as compared to competitors (Leavy, 2018). Differentiation and cost leadership are at the heart of the blue ocean strategy, and this is exactly what drove Elon Musk to engage Tesla in developing the world’s first completely electric vehicle. . While the existing players including Ford, General Motors, Toyota and others had experimented with the electric vehicle segment, the key area of focus was to make cars that were compliant with the green standards of the industry (Ingram, 2018). However, Musk and Tesla decided to change the norms completely, thus developing a blue ocean market and essentially spearheading the electric vehicle ecosystem internationally.

In addition, Musk has also managed to internalize the values of offering a seamless and positive customer experience at the heart of his companies, which has had a significant impact on his businesses over time. Mihardjo et al. (2019) argue that customer experience orientation is critical for companies to sustain consumer bases in the industry 4.0 era. Tesla managed to do exactly that, with the initiatives aimed at incorporating all the needs of a potential customer under oneplatform. Musk had realised the troubles of conventional automotive business models, where third parties and dealerships played crucial roles but had their own problems. Tesla took on a store-exclusive approach, where all spare parts and other products are sold at Tesla Centres. The inbuilt software is also state of the art, and takes care of a ,majority of the customer’s needs and demands, whether it relates to generic entertainment or using complex algorithms to drive the car autonomously.

2.2 Measuring Elon Musk’s performance
As a leader of the Tesla organisation, Elon Musk has demonstrated responsiveness to the market situations as they are the influence of the business success. In the year 2019, the leader could predict a loss during the launch of Model 3 sedan at $35,000. It was due to the changes in customer preferences towards green and affordable electric vehicles. Based on the information regarding its poor share market performance which turned towards a heavy loss by falling 8% down he decided to cut the number of employees and trim the stores in order to push online sales and make the product more popular and affordable. Musk’s ability to respond to market changes promptly is certainly a mark of measuring his performance as a business leader. Additionally, the entrepreneur has also shown his capacity to respond even during the global pandemic situation. Tesla has reported a $104 million profit from electric car sales which could be able to surprise the business analysts (Boudette, Eavis&Phillips, 2020).

It could be identified that Musk has managed to earn the position of richest person in the world with $182.9 billion net worth. The net worth has grown during March 2020 at a higher rate which has contributed to this increased worth. Musk is also considered by Forbes as one of the most innovative leaders in the world. It is due to the performance of Musk in revolutionising Both the space and earth transportation. Apart from that, Tesla motor as his automaker could sell 240,000 all-electric vehicles in the year 2018 (Hern, 2018). Additionally, the rocket company SpaceX developed by Elon Musk is worth $20 billion.

Elon Musk has been awarded for his index design for Tesla
Roadstar and the growth a business leader started afterwards. In the year 2010, he was listed in Time’s 100 people that impacted mostly on the world due to the changes he brought into the automotive industry (Nusca& Lev-Ram, 2020). Gradually, the leader has started to demonstrate effective performance as a business person and was awarded as Fortune Businessperson of the year in 2013 for SolarCity, Tesla and SpaceX. The recent recognition from Forbes as the wealthiest person in the world is also a measure of Elon Musk’s success.

3. Relevance of lessons learnt from Elon Musk
Certain characteristics of a person lead to develop him or her as a successful leader among the others. In order to extract the lesson from Musk as a leader, the Transformational Leadership Style can be discussed. According to this theory, transformational leaders believe in continuous development and growth with a firm vision and goals to be achieved (Bernarto et al. 2020). Additionally, the transformational leaders set big ideas and goals around which he or she unites the team members to achieve the same. Elon Musk has been identified to follow a similar leadership style where focus and determination work as key elements pushing the business towards success. The leader is also capable of working on out-of-the-box ideas using which he is running an aerospace company and other spacecrafts along with electric cars. The leadership style followed by Musk inspires me to work as an innovative leader that will be able to pursue the customers by bringing forth ground breaking, effective and useful ideas to innovate service. This would help me to become a successful business leader by understanding and responding according to my vision and aspiration.

According to the Disruptive innovation theory, organisations are required to create a new market and network of value which would help in disrupting the existing market by displacing leading products, firms and alliances. The autopilot from Tesla is a system that assists in driving such as lane centring, self parking, cruise control and others is also an example of disruptive innovation implemented by Elon Musk which has inspired me to implement disruptive innovation as taken under consideration by the leader of Tesla (Christensen et al., 2018). Along with this, I would also emphasise in developing critical thinking and problem solving capacity inspired by Elon Musk to overcome the barriers that might come to the path of my career success.

I aspire to become a successful business leader as I want to create significant positive impact on the people through product design and business strategies that will be appropriate for the time, market situation and overall requirements of the customers and other entities. The concept of disruptive innovation, application of Blue ocean strategy and Transformational leadership style used by Musk inspires me to think out of the box, inspiring other people to work on my vision and responding effectively in different market situation as well. The lessons are relevant in terms of their application in a new business or entrepreneurial venture that I aim to pursue as a career. I have identified that Transformational leaders encourage working and develop an environment effective for working which is important to perform as an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur I also prefer to introduce a new product to the customers creating a new market where, learning the style of application of Blue Ocean Strategy by musk helped me to become confident about the new product development.

Conclusion
In conclusion, Elon Musk was identified to have achieved success largely based on the factors of a strong sense of focus and determination along with a long term vision built on reason and logic. The relatively young business magnate was further identified to have impacted his business significantly, ranging from creating uncontested market spaces for Tesla to entering the space industry that was predominantly left to governmental corporations. His performance could be measured based on his net worth growth and the plethora of accolades received, as Musk was recently declared to be the richest man on the planet, edging ahead of the likes of Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett. Several theories were also identified as relevant to Musk and his working operatives, with the most prominent being the blue ocean strategy, the transformational leadership theory and the theory of disruptive innovation.

References
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Christensen, C. M., McDonald, R., Altman, E. J., & Palmer, J. E. (2018). Disruptive innovation: An intellectual history and directions for future research. Journal of Management Studies, 55(7), 1043-1078.

Hern, A. (2018). Will Elon Musk's 120-hour week stop us worshipping workaholism? Retrieved 17 January 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/23/elon-musk-120-hour-working-week-tesla

Ingram, N. (2018). Tesla Motors: A Potentially Disruptive Force in a Mature Industry. International journal of management and applied research, 5(1), 8-21.Leavy, B. (2018).Value innovation and how to successfully incubate “blue ocean” initiatives.Strategy & Leadership.

Mihardjo, L., Sasmoko, S., Alamsjah, F., &Elidjen, E. (2019). Digital leadership role in developing business model innovation and customer experience orientation in industry 4.0.Management Science Letters, 9(11), 1749-1762. Mooney, M. (2020). Visionary Lessons FromElon Musk. Retrieved 17 January 2021, from https://www.success.com/visionary-lessons-from-elon-musk/

Nusca, N. & Lev-Ram, M. (2020). Elon Musk’s rocket ride.Retrieved 17 January 2021, from https://fortune.com/longform/elon-musk-ceo-tesla-spacex-2020-businessperson-of-the-year/ Pierce, A. (2017).Elon Musk’s Boring Company.Tech Directions, 77(1), 8.

Trujillo, J. (2017). The Thinking of SpaceX/Tesla CEO Elon Musk.Existentia, 17, 231-61.

Yauney, R. H. (2018). Leadership Development: A Study of Elon Musk. Marriott Student Review, 2(2), 4.

Zetlin, M. (2019).Elon Musk's Amazing Success Is Due to These 2 Qualities. Retrieved 17 January 2021, from https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/elon-musk-success-focus-determination-intelligence-studytesla.html#:~:text=What%20makes%20Elon%20Musk%20so,after%20the%20things%20he%20wants