Organizational Behaviour: Leadership of Elon Musk - Analysis Report

This report examines the leadership of Elon Musk, focusing on his role as a business entrepreneur, investor, and engineer. It explores his leadership principles, including motivating employees, inspiring through selflessness, and recognizing their work. The report highlights Musk's key decisions, such as founding SpaceX and Tesla, and his sources of inspiration, which include influential figures like Kayne West and Fred Astaire, as well as various books. It also discusses Musk's approach to dealing with employees, emphasizing hard work, service to the organization, and taking care of employees' needs. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of leaders in organizations and advocates for a selfless approach to achieving goals, recognizing the importance of leaders to avoid major faults.

Organizational Behaviour: Leadership of
Elon Musk

LEADER and LEADERSHIP
LEADER
• Inspires a group of people.
• Superior position in the group.
• Creates a vision and engages others.
LEADERSHIP
• Achieving the goals.
• Performance towards a common goal.
• Directs to achieve the goal.

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION ABOUT
ELON MUSK
• South African born American business
entrepreneur, investor and an engineer.
• Founder, CEO and lead designer of the
organization “SpaceX”.
• Co-founder, CEO and product architect of
Tesla, Inc.
• Co-founder and CEO of Neuralink
(Forbes.com 2018).

Some Important Decisions Taken By Musk
• Travelling to North America for the purpose of
education
• Dropping the university in order to “build the
internet” (Muhlberg 2014).
• Starting his first company, “Zip2”.
• Founding of the company “X.com”
• In order to promote the company PayPal, he
joined with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin.

Some Important Decisions Taken By Musk
(continued)
• Starting the company SpaceX
• Investing into Tesla Inc.
• Helping in the foundation of “SolarCity”
• Becoming the CEO of Tesla Inc.

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION FOR MUSK
He is mostly inspired by the activities of the two famous persons:
• Kayne West
• Fred Astaire (Mair 2016)
He is also motivated by the books he read. These are:
• ‘The Lord of the Rings’ by J.R.R. Tolkien
• ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ by Douglas Adams
• ‘Benjamin Franklin: An American Life’ by Walter Issacson
• ‘Einstein: His Life and Universe’ by Walter Issacson
• ‘Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down’ by J.E. Gordon

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION FOR MUSK
• 'Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants' by John D. Clark
• 'Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies' by Nick Bostrom
• 'Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future' by Peter Thiel
• 'Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness' by Donald L. Barlett and James B.
Steele
• ‘Merchants of Doubt’ by Naomi Orestes and Erik M. Conway
• The ‘Foundation’ trilogy by Isaac Asimov
• ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ by Robert Heinlein
• The 'Culture' series by Iain M. Banks
• ‘Our Final Invention’ by James Barrat

PRINCIPLE OF MUSK TO DEAL WITH
EMPLOYEES
• Motivating the employees.
• Inspiration through selflessness.
• Recognizing and analysis of the work
performed.
• New ways of inspiring and motivating.

PRINCIPLE OF MUSK TO DEAL
WITH EMPLOYEES (continued)
• Service to the organization.
• Hard work.
• Taking care of the employees and other
subordinates
• Taking care of the needs of the employees.

CONCLUSION
• Leaders are the basic of all organizations
• Leadership id the process of motivating the
subordinates.
• Elon Musk is the of view that the leaders
should help their subordinates in a selfless way
in order to achieve the goals.
• Leaders should at first recognize what they are
trying to do so as to avoid major faults.

REFERENCES
• Aguinis, H. and Bradley, K.J., 2015. The secret sauce for organizational
success: Managing and producing star performers. Organizational
Dynamics, 44(3), pp.161-168.
• Forbes.com (2018). Forbes Welcome. [online] Available at:
https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/ [Accessed 14 May 2018].
• Mair, M., 2016. Enlightened entrepreneurship: the success of Elon Musk.
• Muhlberg, H., 2014. Elon Musk and patent soul-searching: intellectual
property. Without Prejudice, 14(7), pp.28-29.
• Qin, J., Yu, C. and Gao, H., 2014. Coordination for linear multiagent
systems with dynamic interaction topology in the leader-following
framework. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 61(5), pp.2412-
2422.
• Summerfield, M.R., 2014. Leadership: A simple definition. American
Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, 71(3), pp.251-253.