[SIDE-BY-SIDE] Elon & Sam
As I continue to do deep dives into individuals (like Steve Jobs) in The Personal Moat series, I also would like to start writing about a pair of individuals. Not to confused with Partnerships where you can be a couple in your personal life or business partners in your professional life, but by highlight two individuals side-by-side you can perhaps really appreciate the differences!
Today I’d like to compare and contrast Elon Musk’s leadership style and strengths versus where Sam Altman’s is and how we can mostly account for why people observe and understand they come at it very differently.
We know a lot about these two individuals because they live such a high-profile, public professional life. They are both also mostly vocal about how they think or what they think anyway so there’s a lot to validate and contend with here.
Since they are both leaders of massive organizations, I think we’ll look at their what they bring into Large Groups.
So let’s start with their way in Large Groups/Business.
Elon in a Large Business
Elon has no Large Business Strengths actually. Most people don’t so let’s not get too carried away here, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t any ability to work in larger groups and how he fits in.
He has stated many times, particularly in his early and ramping up days at Tesla that he prefers to not be the CEO or the one running the show, but instead be the Chief Design/Engineer person. His strengths lies in the lab (mostly) and at the same time explains why he’s less comfortable in large groups by Design.
The departments of a large org in which he can contribute to very well) is in Upper Management (which he’s provide he is), Direction and Interaction.
In Upper Management, he has the Trait (45) which means he’s the person to run the entire show. But he needs to delegate other people with Trait (21) in order to get things done. We’ve been this many times at Tesla, SpaceX etc.
In terms of Direction and Interaction, I see these are the ability to create the direction the trajectory of the work (again with support from others in the department) and also is very good at bringing other people in various parts of the organization to create something new and emergent.
Sam in a Large Business
Here Sam has 1 Large Business Strength (14-2 Strength of Direction). He has some partial strengths here in the areas of Logical Enforcement and Innovation.
When we say someone has a Large Business Strength is when it comes out when he’s in a large organization. In Sam’s case, he’s currently the CEO of OpenAI and so under those conditions this Strength of Direction is something that will be drawn out of him.
This Strength supports setting the overall path, vision and operational momentum. This means he brings in — consciously or unconsciously — to the organization the ability to align on, pace and move the org toward its stated goals.
Elon vs. Sam
This is not to say that Elon isn’t able to set the vision and path and operational momentum while Sam can. What it shows is how comfortable they are and how comfortable people their respective Businesses feel stabilized by these strengths they bring.
Elon isn’t as comfortable being the CEO because frankly he’d must rather focus on where he knows his Personal Moat/Strengths are: in Logical Concentration (9-52), Judgement (18-58) and Manifesting in the Now (20-34).
Sam is more comfortable in his role in management both large (and small teams, not detailed here) and keeping a consistent ways to harassing that within the context of a larger org like OpenAI. Unlike Elon, his logical strengths are not as prominently consistent as Elon’s. So I think Elon is much more interested in the iterative perfection that comes from engineering and logic and find that using those strengths is both rewarding for himself and those around him.
In contrast, Sam is probably the more consistent manager in his immediate exec team and also in the larger org in terms of stabilizing the functioning of that org.
Overall, even though their Design couple be more different, it shows that:
Anyone, given their strengths and Design can be a good executive
Your design governs the level of comfort you have in different environments like a very big organization like Tesla or OpenAI. It helps explain why you might feel discomfort, even when you might have ample experience (as Elon does) as chief executive.