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Where Rupert Murdoch’s blame ends and ours begins
Authored by Christiane Montuori on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 11:57 AM | Add the first comment!
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Ah, the schadenfreude. Ah, the piling on. Ah, the avalanche of clichés: “live by the sword, die by the sword”, “reap what you sow”. It goes on and on.
Is it possible in this media frenzy—one that so eerily parallels Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.’s own journalistic practices—to take a dispassionate view of the man as seen through a leadership lens?
Being successful in business has nothing inherently to do with leadership, but for most people that’s where any assessment of Murdoch’s “leadership” begins. By all the typical measures, he is enormously successful and has exhibited many of the qualities such a role demands: brains, vision, persistence, focus. He took one modest newspaper that his father left him when he was 23 years old and turned it into an empire that made him No. 117 on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people (and an even more impressive No. 13 on its list of the world’s most powerful people). Not bad. Score one for Murdoch. A+ on this dimension.
How about crisis management? Crisis management is also confused with leadership, even though—like firefighters rush into a burning building to save people—it’s part of the job description. Nevertheless, people will examine Murdoch’s performance during this crisis and make judgments about his “leadership”. He seems to have done everything his shareholders and the public would want him to do: diffuse the crisis and preserve as much as possible of his reputation, News Corp.’s stock price and the corporate empire. He closed the offending newspaper, the News of the World. He fired or accepted the resignation of key lieutenants who were closer to the action than he was. He humbled himself before Parliament and allowed the politicians to display their hypocritical self-righteous anger. He certainly deserves no worse than an A-.
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