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Leadership Expert Offers Blunt Performance Review For Musk’s New Trump Role

Adam Grant joined The Daily Beast Podcast to discuss the DOGE Lord’s many managerial flaws.

President-elect Donald Trump this week tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the newly-minted Department of Government Efficiency, a largely unexpected and a highly unorthodox move that has many with (a lot of) questions. Among them, simply: Is that going to go well? Probably not, argued Wharton professor and organizational psychologist Adam Grant on this week’s episode of The Daily Beast Podcast. “There’s a lot of evidence that people who are high achievers in business actually fail in politics,” Grant said, adding that the ambitious “trial and error” mindset it takes to succeed in Silicon Valley isn’t often transferrable to D.C. “The way you solve problems in politics requires relationship-building and coalitions,” Grant said—“not exactly Elon’s strong suit.” Musk’s first move as DOGE head was solicit resumes over DMs on his social media platform, X; he also announced that DOGE employees will work for free. “I wouldn’t necessarily hold him up as an exemplar for a lot of the leadership skills that I study and teach at his alma mater.” Grant finished. “If we want to bring someone in, we gotta bring someone in who’s an expert at organizational change.”

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