COLUMN-Venezuela capture follows 'Trump's Ten Commandments' by the book: Ross Kerber

By Ross Kerber

Jan 7 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump's order for the U.S. military to capture Venezuela's president over the weekend looks in line with many of his other recent moves, foregoing bipartisan agreements and international alliances in favor of direct actions carried out with murky or shifting justifications.

Trump's decision-making process and management style have remained consistent, say two Yale leadership scholars in a new book, Trump's Ten Commandments. They call the president's understanding of authority that of "a tribal chieftain blended with the necessary fluidity and creative chaos of a business entrepreneur." In other words, a family businessman who should not be underestimated.

So what better way think about Trump's terms in office than as an extended case study on corporate governance?

I spoke with authors Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, and its research director Steven Tian this week about their portrayal of Trump as the opposite of most current S&P 500 CEOs who are champion coalition managers. Sonnenfeld has a special status as a consistent Trump critic who still kept lines open with the tycoon and, the professor writes, was once offered the presidency of Trump University.

Among the commandments they list are practices familiar to any U.S. voter like Trump's skill at divide-and-conquer, his "Wall of Sound" agenda that distracts opponents, and his standing as the "Sultan of Insult."

You can read our Q&A below, edited for clarity and length.

Q: This is an appropriate week to be talking about Trump's leadership style with the capture of the Venezuelan president. Could you talk about how you came to this idea of evaluating Trump through this leadership lens? There have been endless books about Washington's leadership, Lincoln's "Team of Rivals." Trump is the first president with his kind of background.

Sonnenfeld: A lot of people, even some of my colleagues in the beginning, thought that we'd be so enthusiastic about Trump, because he has a business background. And that wasn't the norm. Perhaps, Harry Truman was the closest thing offhand that I could think of a president, of the United States who had a business background. But with Trump, I wound up becoming the first critic of the TV show The Apprentice ...as we were battling, we wound up becoming friends.

Q: You called him "The Last Emperor" (in 2004) and your take on The Apprentice was that it was stressing the wrong values, how the competitions were not about creating so much as pitting competitors against each other.

A: Four years after that I brought him to one our CEO Summits (a Yale conference series) and the other CEOs were disdainful, because they didn't see him as a peer. They saw that he was running a regional real estate outfit that was a family-controlled tribal business with him as the tribal chieftain. Almost like a hub with spokes coming off of him, and as you know from our book, that's part of his leadership model that we identify... It was not a public company accountable to diverse constituents and they also resented the grandiosity that was apparent even then.

A: The modern public CEO has to show respect for the legitimacy of a vast array of constituents. Every time we give them an award, and at our events, they always insist, I'm speaking for the corporation, and for my colleagues, and my employees, my shareholders, not just for myself, and accepting your award. That's not the case with Trump. With Trump, he's happily accepting it on behalf of himself, and wonders what took you so long to give it to him.

Q: Isn't there an argument that in theory he can get more things done? I'm thinking of the example of the Gaza ceasefire, which (former U.S. President Joe) Biden wasn't able to get. I've seen Trump described as remaking the Republican party as a non-ideological transaction machine, maybe that's a better way to get things done?

A: There are some qualities of fluidity that allows he isn't stuck with rigid bureaucratic clearance processes. There's a downside, of course, the public accountability. But it does give him discretion to move pieces around, an awful lot of interim roles that he has in there. People who aren't cleared through Senate confirmation, people who haven't gone through the vetting process, but people that he thinks he can rely on. Now, sometimes you get some pretty poor people that are cronies, sycophants.

Q: I don't imagine there are Fortune 500 CEOs who want the same kind of underlings heading their major divisions?

A: CEOs who have henchmen? No, a board of directors wouldn't allow that.

Q: A theme I hear from you is that these big CEOs don't see Trump as one of them.

A: They resent the arm-twisting. They don't like what many of them consider MAGA-going-Maoist, where there's a form of state capitalism that's more akin to what China has practiced than U.S. belief in conservative free markets and laissez-faire economics.

Q: You say U.S. business leaders' response to the Capital Riot of Jan 6, 2021 was key to preserving democracy.

A: You're hearing me right. In a couple of critical moments, the most trusted source of leadership in the country right now, after the military, the most important voice is the business community. It's fallen away from public officials, federal, state, and sadly even local. It's fallen away from academics. It's fallen away from the clergy and the media. Where has it been ascendant is "my CEO." There's still an enormous amount of trust that they (many citizens) want to hear from their leader, their CEO. And they rose to the occasion.

Q: What you could call companies' collective pushback didn't last very long. You allude to this when you say that major business trade groups have been missing in action as Trump regained ground. If the CEOs really didn't like Trump, didn't they give it away? Why is it they don't feel like they can (now criticize Trump?)

A: It's the vindictiveness of this president. What could sound more like America than Bank of America? BAC.N And here they get attacked, Trump goes after them.

Q: It doesn't seem like U.S. business is really set up for collective action. For one thing there's the concept of antitrust, that there are limits to how much companies should be coordinating.

A: Only in select areas. Trade associations of course are collective actions. What they can't do is they can't talk pricing, and they can't divide markets.

Q: Trump's opponents need to understand his leadership style.

A: He's unorthodox. He gets certain things done in the Middle East, maybe on border control. Some of his leadership style has allowed him to get stuff done. He's also had blowback and failures. If he's dumb, he's dumb as a fox, because it took decades for scholars to understand what somehow, through his street savvy, he has instinctively understood mass communications and persuasion and charm.