Look Around

May 3, 2011 Career News

Elon Musk, head of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, thinks “professional managers” lack innovativeness. Peter Drucker would have said Musk’s head is in the clouds

Perhaps if they were fueled by his own hot air, Elon Musk’s spaceships would have already reached a point “where we are exploring the stars, where we’re going to other planets, where we’re doing the great things that we read about in science fiction and in the movies,” as he has described it.

That, anyway, was my reaction after reading an interview with Musk last week in , in which the chief executive of Space Exploration Technologies (“SpaceX”) dismissed the abilities of most of his peers to innovate and drive change.

“I’ve never really wanted to run companies,” said Musk, who also heads electric vehicle maker Tesla Motors (TSLA). “Unfortunately, I came to the conclusion I was better than the CEOs we hired. If I’m not CEO, I can’t make the inventions happen in the way they need to happen.

“Professional managers—MBA CEOs—are not very creative or adaptable, and their skills don’t suit a startup,” added Musk, who earlier in his career co-founded PayPal (EBAY). “Business is like a multidimensional probabilistic chessboard. The rules aren’t set, and the same moves don’t always make you win. A lot of people can be really good in a set-piece battle; my biggest differentiating skill is I can invent new pieces.”

Innovation: Not an Elite Practice

I am certainly not here to question Musk’s brilliance. But the notion that “professional managers” can’t be creative or adaptable is more than arrogant. (Musk should try telling this to Intel’s Paul Otellini (INTC), who received his MBA from the University of California, Berkeley; or Procter & Gamble’s Bob McDonald (PG), who graduated with an MBA from the University of Utah; or Ford’s Alan Mulally (F), who earned a master’s in management from MIT.) It’s dangerous, too. Musk’s remarks make it sound as if innovation is the purview of only a chosen few—when in fact, innovation is a discipline that almost anyone can and should learn, as Peter Drucker (who himself was no slouch in the brainpower department) carefully observed.

You don’t have to be an “inventive genius” to be effective in this area, Drucker wrote in his 1985 book . Rather, he explained, for the vast majority of us innovation will result from more mundane wellsprings: “analysis, system, and hard work.”

Drucker wasn’t necessarily a fan of graduate business programs, which he thought focused too much on helping their students become rich; he once likened some of the most elite universities to “Fagin’s school for pickpockets and prostitutes.” He also wasn’t suggesting that everybody has the capacity to produce giant breakthroughs. “There are clearly people who are more talented innovators than the rest of us,” Drucker acknowledged.

Superstars of Innovation

Nor did Drucker maintain that every advance is created equal. “Among history-making innovations,” he wrote, “those based on new knowledge—whether scientific, technical, or social—rank high. They are the superstars of entrepreneurship; they get the publicity and the money.”

Notwithstanding all this, Drucker asserted that every manager—not just the white coats in the R&D lab—must make innovation a priority.

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