NEW BROOMS: Billionaire Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump
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KEVIN LAMARQUE
Last week was pretty schizophrenic. I woke up with a new decision each day, due to a new emotion or information. From calling off an international expansion, postponing a significant tech spend and pausing an imminent increment cycle to freezing new hires and vetoing an acquisition proposal, I said a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ on the same decision and confused everyone around me. Yes, we all are entitled to change our choices based on new information. But last week, not just the changing data points, but emotions and interpretations were utterly confusing too.
Black swan moments
If you have been an employee for a long time, it wouldn’t be difficult to recall various phases when your company or other enterprises were in a crisis and it required someone to fix it. Most were caused by external events like 9/11, the global financial crisis or Covid, though some were caused through accumulated strategic errors of leadership.
Irrespective of the cause, you need a CEO or a leadership team to turn this around. Some leaders create these black swan moments and seize control of the organisation through the process. Should we say this is most likely seen during a new leadership takeover? We have become familiar with new leaders saying they must transform the organisation by making sweeping changes but rarely do we hear people saying, “I will continue on the strengths of the current talent with fresh perspectives.”
Demolition party
I remember being part of a phase where my organisation brought in a new leader from another continent to take charge of operations in the APAC region. By the time India had started work, we heard of two resignations in the Singapore regional HQ after his morning town-hall. He started his address saying, “I am here to eliminate any role that does not generate revenue.” Over the next six months, he brought down the regional HQ headcount to less than 15 from 50-plus.
Functions like HR, marketing and tech were reduced to mere headers rather than any substantial representations. He would be nasty during meetings, but a jovial guy to have a drink or lunch with. It didn’t appear that he was whimsical, rushed or stressed to have his way. Every time I met him, I got the sense that he knew what he was trying to do. He wanted the organisation’s bottom-line to dramatically transform from the abysmal numbers it had been languishing at for many years. But the atmosphere within the office had a tinge of fear. “What would he say or whom would he sack” was a whisper that went around. But on the business front, he was very decisive and market-driven. He backed new customer-driven initiatives and supported the business heads who were revenue-focused. He converted the region into a nimble and agile organisation in those two quarters.
The succession
But, as they say, ‘what makes you also breaks you’. His aggression cut across the hierarchy; his bosses also found him too hot to handle and eventually got rid of him. As fate would have it, his replacement enjoyed the fruits of his brave decisions.
Over the next two years, the region had some of the best financial results in history, and the people who survived the previous regime, under the so-called tyrant, saw growth and significant economic gains under the new leader.
We whispered that he had done all the dirty work and the successor was basking in the glory. Some of us lamented that the organisation lost its soul during the shake-up, and we all became mercenaries. But, going by financial metrics, the firm had grown its bottom line consistently.
Functional fixedness
Think about the leaders you quickly judged based on their initial behaviours. Functional fixedness, a cognitive bias in psychology, is the tendency to perceive something only in terms of their typical or intended use, hindering the ability to see them as tools for alternative purposes.
Do we also suffer from function fixedness when it comes to new leaders? Based on our past templates of people and initial impressions, do we tend to bucket new leaders in a few areas and discount their ability to cause long-term impact on teams and organisations? Most business turnarounds are marked by initial storms leading to not-so-favourable circumstances and, eventually, the desired outcomes. Begs the question whether we should hold our horses on new leaders and their unsettling first few decisions.
Paulo Coelho said, “Not all storms come to disrupt your life, some come to clear your path.”
I am hoping we are in the midst of a similar storm of tariffs.
(Kamal Karanth is co-founder of Xpheno, a specialist staffing firm)
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Published on April 13, 2025
