sum up:
	In 2023, well before he switched to full-throated support of Donald Trump’s campaign, Elon Musk outlined the qualities he hoped for in a president. “Are they good at getting things done? There’s a lot of decisions that need to be made every day,” Elon Musk told CNBC. “They’re CEO of America. We want a good CEO of America.”

Twice now, voters have elected Trump on the promise that he would behave as this decisive chief executive and bring his business experience to bear, rather than becoming bogged down in Washington’s political swamp. After his election last November, “Trump is a businessman” was the four-word mantra used by foreign leaders, from Ireland’s then Taoiseach Simon Harris to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as they expressed their early hopes he would use his much-hyped dealmaking experience to apply tariffs judiciously or put pressure on Russia.

The president still dresses like the US chief executives of the 1990s, who were mostly older white men in suits and ties. Since taking office in January, he has also behaved, on the surface, like those command-and-control corporate leaders. He has issued executive orders at unprecedented speed and volume, avoiding the messy horse-trading that might have ensued if he had taken the legislative route through Congress.

He has made appointments to cabinet positions and senior administrative roles from among loyalists, exercising the same prerogative with which US chief executives still sometimes chair their own boards and stack them with supporters. With Musk’s help as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), he has pushed through radical cost-savings at federal departments and agencies. 

Lately, though, the more capricious leader of the first term has re-emerged. Within a few weeks of taking office in 2017, he initiated a rapid, and decidedly un-CEO-like, cull of members of his handpicked administration and staff. Now, despite his desire to avoid similar critical headlines, a second-term churn has started.

Musk is stepping back from his role at Doge, as Trump’s enthusiasm for the Tesla and SpaceX boss, and Musk’s excitement about Trump’s policies, have waned. Earlier this month, the president fired national security adviser Mike Waltz after he accidentally added a journalist to a Signal group chat about retaliation against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Polls published to coincide with Trump’s first 100 days in office showed an unusually steep decline in the president’s approval rating.

The switchback raises the question of what sort of business leader Trump was in the first place. Are there useful parallels between the Trump administration and business leadership? Do management, organisational and leadership theorists offer anything that can help outsiders understand Trump and his team? And what are the early signs his leadership strategy and style will succeed or fail this time?

Trump the real estate mogul was never a typical chief executive and his company was not the sort of organisation management academics typically like to study. He did, though, secure a niche in the business leadership pantheon when, in 2001, Harvard Business School published a case study about him as part of an intermittent series called “Doer’s Profiles”. 

HBS case studies are meant to stimulate classroom discussion among would-be MBAs and business students. They usually address real-world business dilemmas at some length. Only two other people merited the same treatment that year, former president Jimmy Carter and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. The business school added Nelson Mandela and Bill Gates in 2007 and 2008.

Trump’s thumbnail profile was particularly open-ended, consisting mainly of a digest of his achievements and setbacks, and extracts from his ghostwritten 1987 bestseller Trump: The Art of the Deal.

Howard Stevenson, co-author of that case study, led HBS’s start-up curriculum. His definition of entrepreneurship, quoted in Forbes on his retirement in 2011, fits Trump the businessman perfectly: “The pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control.” 

Speed and energy, a disdain for established structures and norms, and a ruthless use of power — built on the pillars of the leader’s charisma and followers’ loyalty — mark out Trump’s entrepreneurial approach. In this respect, Trump resembles less a conventional CEO than the omnipotent tech impresarios who surrounded him at his second-term inauguration in January: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the ubiquitous Musk.

While expressing his dislike of most of what Trump has achieved so far, conservative commentator David Brooks recently voiced his admiration for the “vitality gap” Trump had opened up with his opponents. “All his life, he has moved forward with new projects and attempted new conquests, despite repeated failures and bankruptcies that would have humbled a nonnarcissist,” he wrote in The New York Times.

In one respect — his blizzard of executive orders — Trump’s first 100 days do look like those of an activist CEO, says Timothy Devinney, professor of international business at Alliance Manchester Business School and co-author of a number of recent papers on populist leadership. “The US system was meant to be slow and deliberative, which has created problems for anyone in an executive position. Executives want to be able to execute: ‘Here’s the way forward. Mobilise the troops and let’s go.’”

But former advertising executive Richard Hytner, founder of leadership consultancy Blue Hat Man, likens Trump rather to entrepreneurial leaders such as advertising tycoon Sir Martin Sorrell, who subvert the usual communication channels, bypass lieutenants and announce policy changes publicly without notice, as Trump did in removing Waltz.  

If he persists, Trump could succeed in shaping the organisation to conform with his vision, rather than having to adapt his vision to the structure. Franklin D Roosevelt, who operated at similar velocity in his first 100 days, as he pushed through New Deal reforms in the 1930s, offers a presidential change management template.

Devinney says he is also reminded of the brash, brand- and personality-based rise of media baron Silvio Berlusconi to become Italian prime minister in the 1990s. Like Trump, the charismatic Berlusconi sailed through criminal charges, personal ridicule and accusations of conflicts of interest, bouncing back from defeats to hold the premiership three times. As Berlusconi told the FT towards the end of his shortlived first stint as premier in 1994: “I’m the protagonist of a revolution. I have to operate in a completely different way to my predecessors.” There are also similarities with the approach of present-day “strong man” autocratic leaders admired by Trump, such as India’s Narendra Modi or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. 

Theorists who specialise in how power is exercised find much to analyse in Trump’s leadership. Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer has criticised experts who indulge in wishful thinking about what leaders should do, instead of analysing rigorously what they actually do. Successful leaders almost always manoeuvre tactically to attain and use power, for good or evil, points out Pfeffer. He teaches a course called The Paths to Power to show students how to do the same.  

Trump conforms to all of the principles Pfeffer laid out in 2022 in his book 7 Rules of Power. The US president is exceptional only because “most people aren’t willing or able to go to quite his extreme”, Pfeffer says. Most obviously, Trump has risen to the White House by shattering norms and by exercising the last and most important of Pfeffer’s rules: “Success excuses (almost) everything.” 

In the process, Trump shapes the behaviour of his followers, who are ready to forgive or forget how that power was achieved in pursuing their own self-interest. In his book, Pfeffer cites South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who switched from calling Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic bigot” to becoming one of his most loyal supporters. Asked in 2019 to explain his change of stance, Graham told the New York Times it would be “odd not to” switch, because “I’ve got an opportunity up here working with the president to get some really good outcomes for the country”.

Similarly, Pfeffer says, Trump’s second-term advisers know that “the people who crossed him in the first term got their asses thrown out of government. You have to keep your boss happy and if keeping your boss happy is flattering the boss on a constant basis, that’s what you’re going to do.” But this can only continue for so long. A business analogue, suggests Pfeffer, is the rise and fall of the minivan, on which Lee Iacocca, Chrysler chief executive and object of Trump’s admiration, founded the revival of the carmaker in the 1980s. By 2000, “the market was saturated” and demand had peaked.

What then does leadership theory say about when, if ever, the market for Trump’s leadership will reach saturation point? 

McGill University management professor Henry Mintzberg, a veteran observer of organisations, points out that successful entrepreneurs “build teams . . . but there’s no team here that I can fathom”.

Trump also differs from great entrepreneurs in that, particularly in his second term, he prizes loyalty above competence, and praise for his own leadership above useful dissent. The recent ousting of Waltz has been connected to his hawkishness, which was at odds with Maga ideology, as well as to his misuse of the Signal app. That episode ought, by rights, to have doomed defence secretary Pete Hegseth too, but so far his loyalty seems to have shielded him. 

Some Trump supporters claim the president has assembled “a team of rivals”. The tag was applied to Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, which included politicians who had run against him. Trump’s circle includes former critics such as vice-president JD Vance or opponents such as secretary of state Marco Rubio, but as a group they present as yes-men and women. Last month’s celebratory 100-day cabinet meeting was a case in point. Pam Bondi, attorney-general, gushed during the televised session: “Mr President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country ever, ever. [I’ve] never seen anything like it, thank you.”

Far from challenging Trump, they seem more likely to fall into groupthink, the sort of chummy collective decision-making labelled by psychologist Irving Janis in the 1970s and that boards and cabinets have tried to avoid ever since. 

Barbara Kellerman of Harvard Kennedy School wrote a book about Trump’s first term as president called The Enablers, analysing the behaviour of Trump’s “tribe” — including Trump voters — and his team at the outset of the pandemic. She says her definition then still applies “100,000 per cent”: “Enablers are followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in behaviours that are destructive”. She says “the worshipful attitude” of Trump’s close advisers in his second term “is a replica of the first term — except in the first term we had guard rails”.

With unquestioning support, Trump is free to exert what the early 20th-century sociologist Max Weber called charismatic authority, unbound by laws and bureaucracy and fuelled by the uncritical backing of those closest to him. 

Weber’s ideas fed into the idea of transformational leaders, who inspire their followers to achieve goals beyond what they thought possible. Musk and Bezos’s stratospheric goal-setting would be modern examples from business. Indeed, the coexistence of two charismatic leaders — Trump and Musk — in the White House was always bound to be uncomfortable.

In his 1922 classic Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), Weber wrote: “It is recognition on the part of those subject to authority which is decisive for the validity of charisma. This recognition is freely given and guaranteed by what is held to be a proof, originally always a miracle, and consists in devotion to the corresponding revelation, hero worship, or absolute trust in the leader.” 

Trump’s insistence that his life was saved by divine intervention when he avoided assassination during last year’s election campaign fits this bill. So does his grandiose, narcissistic claim, in a recent interview with the Atlantic magazine, that, in his second term, “I run the country and the world”. 

Trump’s presidency can be seen as a performative, Apprentice-style show, in which plot developments — who is fired and who, in the end, is hired — are orchestrated for ratings, and the camera returns again and again to the unassailable boss. The appointment of Fox News hosts Hegseth, as defence secretary, and, more recently, Jeanine Pirro — aka “Judge Jeanine” — as interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, would seem to support such a reading. Meanwhile, a new emphasis on rococo embellishment in the Oval Office reinforces the sense of an emperor or king in his full pomp.

A real business judgment on this chief executive would be harsher. “This is a CEO who has underperformed quite quickly the manifesto that got him the job,” says former adman Richard Hytner. In the corporate world, “I don’t know whether he would still be in post.”

Transformational leaders stand in contrast to transactional leaders, whose humdrum short-term aim to get the work done rarely achieves dramatic long-term changes. London Business School professor Herminia Ibarra points out that once people have tied their identity to transformational leadership it is hard for them to backtrack: “The identity hook increases escalation of commitment to Trump when his behaviour gets harder to justify.”

The question is whether Trump has the patience and the ability to delegate that mark out successful entrepreneurial leaders. Trump has already shown a determination to be at the centre of every “deal”, such as the minutiae of individual countries’ tariff negotiations. Mintzberg says Trump “calls all the shots himself and does everything himself, and you see that happening in the most extreme form of micromanagement that’s ever been seen”, such as getting himself elected chair of the Kennedy Center, Washington’s arts hub. 

Transformational, charismatic leaders create instability. That is why they also need bureaucratic structures through which their ideas can take concrete shape — what Weber called “routinisation”. Neither Musk, nor Bezos, could achieve their gravity-defying ambitions, be that at SpaceX and Tesla, or Blue Origin and Amazon, without a solid organisational base to turn their revolutionary ideas into operational routine.

Trump has his transactional side (all those deals) but the chaos unleashed by Musk and Doge, combined with the latest signs that management discipline in the Oval Office is again fraying suggest a potentially serious weakness.

Devinney points out that a strong brand-based strategy can be brought down once the brand itself tarnishes. The disintegration of venerable accounting firm Arthur Andersen, once its conflicted relationship with Enron, the fraud-hit energy company, was exposed in 2001, is a classic example. If failures start to taint the Trump brand, they will inevitably stick to Trump himself.

In a final stage, according to the rules of power, the loyalists could turn against the leader. “When the politicians figure that the risk of continuing to permit Trump to get away with what he’s doing is greater than the risk of confronting him, they will change their behaviour,” suggests Pfeffer.

“When kings really rule, they rule by divine right: God anointed them to rule and they had absolute authority,” adds Kellerman. She detects a shift in sentiment in recent weeks. “The fact that we are [now] seeing increased resistance . . . and the [negative opinion] polls across the board: that’s not like any king. You are starting to have pressures on Trump. You are going to start seeing some cracks.”