We asked top business school professors to analyze Elon Musk's first week running Twitter: 'A case study of failed leadership.'

• Elon Musk's acquisition and management of Twitter is a business school case study for the ages.
• Insider asked leading business school professors for their views on his first week.

Elon Musk's $44 billion deal to take Twitter private completed on October 27, and his first week in charge has been marked by chaos.

Among his first moves: Firing four of Twitter's top executives including ex-CEO Parag Agrawal and ex-chief financial officer Ned Segal. A number of high-ranking managers were also fired and lists were compiled about who to keep based on performance reviews. Some employees began sleeping in the office to meet as their new boss set tight deadlines for shipping new products.

This week, Twitter staff received an email Thursday confirming that there would be layoffs the following day, adding that offices would be temporarily closed. As Insider's Kali Hays reported, the layoffs actually began late Thursday, apparently earlier than expected.

Compounding the chaos is current and former Twitter employees using the service they helped build to publicize their layoffs, lawsuits, and complaints.

Musk's actions have provoked criticism but "it's not unheard of to take drastic action when a business is failing to fulfill its potential," said James Hayton, professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Warwick Business School. Twitter is underperforming compared to bigger peers that have already frozen hiring or cut jobs — and it's probably wise to cut numbers, he said.

"You would obviously fire the CEO in this scenario," Hayton added. "You need to take power and take control of the organization which is very difficult to do if you don't lay off those senior executives. Centralizing control is essential if you're going to try to engage in some rapid and possibly unpopular change so those things make sense, even if they're not pleasant."

He added: "This will be a shock, but it's better to pull off the band-aid quickly, rather than to let things fester."

'Not right for leadership or management'

Musk's approach to management is "a case study of failed leadership," as William Klepper, a management professor who teaches an executive leadership course at Columbia Business School, would define it.

He described Musk as a great "change agent" and a "genius" but "not right for leadership or management."

He pointed to the thorny relationship between Musk and Twitter's now-fired executives since April, when the billionaire first agreed to buy the company for $44 billion, then took back his offer. His indecision prompted Twitter to sue Musk, and he agreed to buy the firm at the original price in October.

The six-month saga showed "his word is not his bond," Klepper said, adding that Musk's decisions are "just too erratic to put any weight on it."

"His word is simply externalizing his current thinking, so I don't think there's credibility in what he says. I think that became clear in the way he navigated through the relationship with Twitter," he said.

For Klepper, Musk's autocratic style leaves no room for constructive criticism.

"Now a lot of people admire that because it comes across as a strong command, control kind of leader, and I can understand when the testosterone is flowing it might be appealing to people," he said. "But it doesn't have what I would call strong health for an organization over time."

Musk's best job title? Chief innovation officer

Musk would better serve as "chief innovation officer" in his conglomerate of businesses including Twitter, according to Klepper. He should then hire people with strong leadership and management skills to take on the top positions.

Hayton, on the other hand, thinks it's clear Musk can directly lead, pointing to his ability to hire top tech talent to execute his big visions at, for example, his space company SpaceX.

He added that it's "unfair" to assume Twitter will wither when Musk has only been CEO for a week, because in the beginning "things are of course being turned upside down."

"If you look at his other businesses, they have a clear trajectory, a clear strategy, and pretty successful ones," he said. "I don't think there's any reason to believe, once they've established what the new Twitter looks like and how they're going to operate it, that it's going to be unstable."

But ultimately, employees want stability as much as inspiration from their leaders if they're going to stick around.

Klepper's advice to Musk: "You should not be CEO of your company. You should hire managers within the functional elements of that organization, but you could sit up on top of this conglomerate with a lot of folks that know how your brain works and apply it constructively, as opposed to destructively in each of those companies."