Leadership Case Study Mo Abudu

¶ … Leadership is difficult to quantify; studying it empirically is not a simple task, because so many different variables can be considered as the potential result of leadership.

If we want to evaluate the leadership of a given CEO -- for example, to assess the leadership achievements of Mo Abudu, founder and CEO of EbonyLive TV and its various affiliated ventures (Inspire Africa, VLA) -- what statistics should we be measuring? The most popular measurement, of course, is purely financial, and regards a CEO as the sole motivating factor behind any company's economic performance -- most studies that examine Steve Jobs's leadership at Apple are quick to mention that, at the moment of Jobs's death, Apple actually had more money in the bank than the United States government (Isaacson 2012).

But it is naive to assume that merely counting cash is a good way to measure leadership, just as rapid growth is not always sustainable growth. In evaluating the leadership qualifications of a large corporation, it is undeniable that employee satisfaction or employee retention might actually be more important to the daily performance of the corporation than the kind of explosive growth rates that are unduly overemphasized by investors and stock markets.

Explosive growth rates are, of course, no good predictor of the stable long-term prospects of a given business enterprise, even if they are taken to be an indication of bold and decisive corporate leadership, while a corporate culture which breeds loyalty and diligence among employees generally is also a reflection of leadership, and probably a far better measure of what makes leadership genuinely valuable in business. (Chen Van Velsor 1996).

Steve Jobs is often held up as a model for business leadership, and perhaps the most important fact about Jobs is something that he shares with the case study proposed for examination here, Mo Abudu, CEO of EbonyLive. This is a very specific model of business leadership because the leader is almost wholly identified with the corporation, being not merely the founder but also the source of vision and (more importantly) the public face of the business.

Abudu's leadership style at EbonyLive follows this model familiar from Steve Jobs at Apple, although other examples can readily be adduced -- Sir Richard Branson at Virgin, Elon Musk at Tesla, or Jack Dorsey at Twitter are all examples of leadership in this same style.

What are the characteristics? Even though each of these leaders is engaged in a very different field of business -- Abudu is an "old media" CEO compared to Dorsey's "new media" or "social media" business, Jobs and Musk produce high end consumer goods (computers, cars), and Branson is probably best known for transportation but is legendarily polymathic -- each is the public face of the business in the media itself. Just like Jack Dorsey has his own Twitter account, Mo Abudu has her own chat show on EbonyLive.

The importance of this particular style of leadership cannot be overemphasized when we are trying to evaluate metrics for leadership, because in some sense this is difficult to quantify: while you can cite viewership statistics for Abudu's own chat show "Moments with Mo" or count the number of Twitter followers Dorsey has, the role of a CEO as public spokesperson has a much larger significance than can be measured.

Public recognition value is also important, because this becomes tied in with the issue of brand recognition, and favorability ratings are also important, because the product is so closely associated with the individual CEO. And yet even the force of personality can overcome these factors too -- most people would not recognize a photo of Elon Musk, and whether the legendarily-difficult Steve Jobs would ever achieve high favorability ratings is a vexed question (Isaacson 2012).

To return to our case study, evaluation of Abudu's leadership would certainly need to consider statistics like viewership -- for "Moments with Mo" and for EbonyLive programming worldwide -- but also "transformational" qualities like recognition, favorability, and public approval, which can only be measured by pollsters or focus groups. (Northouse 2007). An empirical evaluation of any leadership conducted in this manner -- including Mo Abudu's leadership at EbonyLive -- would also need to approach the subject from different angles.

To measure Mo Abudu's efficiency of leadership would require a number of different statistics: how well did her publicly-stated goals for the corporation match the achievement of those goals? How large is EbonyLive's employment in relationship to its annual budget, and how does this ratio compare to that of other media companies of similar size? Efficiency in media production, after all, would relate directly back to leadership. It is worth remembering that.