Where Rupert Murdoch’s blame ends and ours begins

This piece is part of a leadership roundtable on Rupert Murdoch’s handling of the News Corp. scandal — with opinion pieces by Tuck School of Business Professor Paul A. Argenti, London Business School Dean Sir Andrew Likierman, and Harvard Kennedy School Professor Marty Linsky.

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.

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• Where Murdoch's blame ends and ours begins
• The very different tale of James Murdoch
• Is Rupert Murdoch a successful leader?

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-.

However, these high marks for his business acumen and his crisis management do not begin to tell the story of Murdoch’s leadership. On at least two key dimensions of leadership, his record is less glowing.

First, an essential manifestation of leadership is the capacity to adapt to new and challenging realities. Murdoch’s News Corp. has been unwilling, or unable, to find its way into the biggest new reality facing the industry, the onset of the digital age. He has been slow to respond. By his own declaration, he loves his newspapers and his emotional commitment to them is certainly a corporate constraint on growth and adaptation. At least one of his belated but significant forays into the world of new media was a commercial and financial disaster: He bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005 and sold it this July for a mere $35 million. The failure of his organization as a whole to adapt its business value proposition to new technology has been a huge problem that can only get worse.