Page 26 - Entrepreneur-November 2018

He’s a
Cautionary
Tale!
by Peter Cohan,
lecturer of strategy,
Babson College
he lessons that entrepre-
neurs should take from
T Elon Musk are clear: Put
the highest priority on what is best
for your company’s customers,
employees, partners, and inves-
tors. To do that, you must look at

your strengths and weaknesses
objectively. If you are not good at
a skill that’s critical to deliver what
stakeholders expect—now and in
the future—you should partner with
an executive who is.
For all of Musk’s ambition and
achievements, he seems unable or
unwilling to do this. Elon Musk is a
product visionary who should not
be CEO of a public company. Given
his control of the board of Tesla, it
looks like he will not be leaving the
job—but if the board were indepen-
dent, it would be replacing him.
To his credit, Musk has been
able to design, build, and deliver
some fine-looking electric vehicles
and what appear to be very effec-
tive reusable rockets. But Tesla
needs an adult—someone like
former Boeing executive and Ford
CEO Alan Mulally—to take over as
CEO. And Musk needs to accept
what he’s good at—and he’s very,
very good at product and vision.
His companies, his employees,
and everyone who stands to benefit
from his inventions would be
better off if Musk could accept his
own limitations.
If you are great at sales and
managing people, you should part-
ner with an executive who is great
at product innovation, and vice
versa. If you are good at building
a product and winning the first
customers for a company, but you
don’t have the patience for or inter-
est in building an organization that
can repeatedly deliver excellence
as the company scales, you should
replace yourself with a CEO who
can. This is what bold entrepreneur-
ship looks like: It’s not about shoul-
dering every burden alone but is,
instead, about maximizing the value
of everything—including yourself.

Peter Cohan is the author of
Startup Cities.

November 2018 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / 43