This is the seventh installment in a 10 part blog on Microsoft as a practitioner of asymmetric marketing.
7. Tribal Leadership
Great tech companies who practice asymmetric marketing are like tribes. Microsoft is clearly a company with a tribal leadership model. Tribal leadership is a form of leadership where the leader is not just an ‘executive’ or manager, but a doer with ‘reputation equity’ within the organization, i.e. someone who actually has a role in the value creation of the business in a very hands-on way. When Bill Gates re-assigned himself to Chief Software Architect this was a revalidation of the tribal culture of Microsoft. Ellison, Dell and McNealy are also tribal leaders in the best sense, founders who have grown along with the companies they lead.
Tribalism was the norm in the growth of Silicon Valley but was severely damaged as a concept during the bubble when many leadership teams were hand-picked by VCs to take companies into a rapid IPO environment. I believe that the culture of entrepreneurism in general was damaged by the entire period of the bubble because of this departure from tribal leadership models in tech companies. Today's VC environment is more attuned to investing in experienced leaders as a result.
Tribal leadership tends to be a function of a founder or co-founder who carries the mythology of the company and inspires higher levels of performance throughout the organization. They lay out the religion. They become the message, in the words of Roger Ailes, CEO of the Fox News Network and former Reagan speech writer.
Tribal leaders like to lead through thought leadership and corporate evangelism. Check out the Bill Gates Home Page to see what I’m referring to. The Bill Gates Home Page contains speeches and essays that don’t just resonate outside of Microsoft with customers and partners, but inside the company as people ‘self-organize’ around the direction set by the chieftan.
Any company can learn from Microsoft and implement a tribal leadership model if the ‘leader’ actually gets it. Gerstner at IBM was a tribal leader who came in from the outside and restored a sense of excellence at IBM. Ed Zander, formerly of Sun, is now providing a more tribal leadership at Motorola leading to a business turnaround.
Tribal leadership is hands-on leadership by example so there is room for more than one tribal leader within a tech company, e.g. Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. Here's a link to a news story on Ballmer inserting himself directly into the leadership of one Microsoft division that is not meeting management expectations.
But tribal leadership has not been a characteristic of marketing executives in the tech industry, which is why there is so much fragmentation of the marketing, sales and business development leadership functions in many companies. In fact 83% of tech companies do not have Chief Marketing Officers integrating both sales and marketing functions in a single go-to-market leader according to an online survey on the AlwaysOn Network dated 12/01/03.
Today's startups are going back to a more tribal leadership model including learning how to bootstrap their businesses. Here's a link to a conference that includes bootstrapping on the agenda.
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