New Jeffrey Sonnenfeld book on leadership: "Trump's Ten Commandments"
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Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management who is one of the nation's premier CEO whisperers, is out Tuesday with "Trump's Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox," including: "Reducing Complexity to Simplicity" and "The Role of Grandeur, Image, and Heroic Aura."
Why it matters: "Like him, loathe him, or try in vain to look past him, President Trump is the most consequential leader on the planet right now," Sonnenfeld told Axios' Mike Allen. The professor calls his book an "objective leadership analysis by [someone] who has known him for a quarter century."
Sonnenfeld met Trump in 1992. The mogul's trademark seduction began: The two later conversed at Trump Tower, over lunch at one of Trump's golf clubs, at the Connecticut home of Larry Kudlow, and at a Sonnenfeld CEO summit at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan.
- In 2004, Sonnenfeld critiqued Trump's then-hot show, "The Apprentice," as a "Manager's Journal" column for The Wall Street Journal.
Zoom in: Based on all those years of studying Trump, Sonnenfeld says the tactics include "divide and conquer, the sleeper effect of constantly repeating false information with unshakable confidence, starting negotiations by giving the other side a bloody nose rather than a handshake of trust, centralizing all power [in your own hands], personal grandiose branding on everything."
- All that, plus: "Trump's Perpetual Noise Machine of Constant, Overwhelming Distractions."
The bottom line: "The key insight about how Donald Trump leads is that he is the sun around which all else must revolve in the Trump solar system," Sonnenfeld concludes. "Power must not reside in institutions, collectives, or equals; all power must radiate from Trump himself. If he is not at the center of an event, then in his retelling, it is not important, or it did not happen."
