The ongoing turbulence at Twitter under the mercurial and often whimsical leadership of Elon Musk is perhaps one of the biggest and costliest social science experiments ever attempted at scale. Musk has broken almost every rule of well-understood and well-researched aspects of organizational performance.

Peter Drucker is widely considered as the father of modern management. When he passed away in 2005, Twitter wasn’t born yet. An astute thinker and a prolific writer, his ideas on knowledge work were ahead of their time and have proven robust. Meanwhile, Musk’s actions at Twitter seem to take us back into the early 1900s.

Drucker famously advised Jack Welch amongst many others. What would he have told Elon Musk?

There’s no way to know for sure but we can speculate based on Drucker’s extensive writings.  I have kept my own commentary minimal in order to emphasize the contrast between Drucker’s notions and Musk’s actions.

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Managing knowledge workers is a marketing job

Increasingly, employees have to be managed as partners—and it is the definition of a partnership that all partners are equal. It is also the definition of a partnership that partners cannot be ordered. They have to be persuaded. 

Increasingly, therefore, the management of people is a marketing job.

And in marketing one does not begin with the question, “What do we want?” One begins with the question, “What does the other party want? What are its values? What are its goals? What does it consider results?”

Musk’s actions so far have been more anti-marketing than marketing. He might have created a challenge but I am not sure how clear his mission is. Ordering rather than persuading seems to be his default way of operating.

Fear doesn’t work

Managing knowledge work and the knowledge worker will require exceptional imagination, exceptional courage, and leadership of a high order. In some ways it will be a far more demanding task than managing the manual worker. 



The weapon of fear—fear of economic suffering, fear of job security, physical fear of company guards or of the state’s police power—which for so long substituted for managing manual work and the manual worker, simply doesn’t work at all for knowledge work and knowledge workers.


Knowledge workers, except at the very lowest levels, are not productive under the spur of fear; only self-motivation and self-direction make them productive. They have to be achieving in order to produce at all.

In contrast, Musk seems to use fear and coercion as a primary motivating mechanism.

Knowledge workers as volunteers

They have to be treated and managed as volunteers, in the same way as volunteers who work for not-for-profit organizations.
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The first thing such people want to know is what the company is trying to do and where it is going. Next, they are interested in personal achievement and personal responsibility—which means they have to be put in the right job. Knowledge workers expect continuous learning and continuous training. 



Above all, they want respect, not so much for themselves but for their area of knowledge. In that regard, they have moved several steps beyond traditional workers, who used to expect to be told what to do, although later they were increasingly expected to “participate.” 

Knowledge workers, in contrast, expect to make the decisions in their own area.

Musk’s handling of employees so far has been considered not just disrespectful but even downright cruel.

Knowledge work productivity

Drucker highlighted six major factors affecting knowledge worker productivity. Consider three of those:

2. It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.

5. Productivity of the knowledge worker is not—at least not primarily—a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least as important.

6. Finally, knowledge-worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both seen and treated as an “asset” rather than a “cost.” It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.

Each of these requirements—except perhaps the last one—is almost the exact opposite of what is needed to increase the productivity of the manual worker.



As Drucker stated, Musk’s behavior is more geared towards