Authoritarian leaders are not confined to the public sector, to government. They appear as well in the private sector, in business.
In recent posts I provided three prominent examples of authoritarian, even dictatorial leaders of countries: Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini; Russian President Vladimir Putin; and Chinese President and Chair of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping. Here three prominent examples of authoritarian, even dictatorial leaders of companies: Tesla’s, Space X’s, and Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk; Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg; and News Corps’ Executive Chairman, Rupert Murdoch.
Like their private sector counterparts, each of the three corporate leaders faces one or more massive problems. Musk’s Twitter is crazed every which way, with most experts additionally predicting his ADD will result in Tesla and Space X being negatively impacted. The stock price of Zuckerberg’s Meta has dropped some 70% in the last year, much more than most of its major tech counterparts. Moreover, his megalomaniac leadership style is clearly not lending itself to smart decision making, especially as it applies to his fixation on the metaverse. As to Murdoch, in many ways he’s continuing his stunning run. But he’s under the wierd illusion that he’s immortal which explains why, though he’s not far from age 92, his plan for succession remains, shall we say, murky.
What do all authoritarian – here dictatorial – leaders have in common? Ten key characteristics:
- Their power is near complete and their authority is extremely high.
- Their power and authority are centralized.
- Their flow of information is tightly controlled.
- They discourage or even punish independent thinking.
- They discourage or even punish dissent.
- They surround themselves with loyalists.
- They hold power so long as they want to hold power.
- Their governance structures become rigid and even sclerotic.
- Their mechanism for succession is at their discretion.
- Their hold on power and authority is not total. Even they are vulnerable to forces they cannot wholly control such as, internal dissension or fractionalization; external restlessness and restiveness; events outside their sphere of influence such as natural disasters, collapses in markets, pandemics – and their own hubris.
What, in short, does a leader like Zuckerberg have in common with a leader like Xi? Turns out, quite a bit.