Leadership Styles during Disruption: A Multi-Case Study

Abstract

This chapter reviews relevant literature in order to identify the leadership framework and profile that may better characterize entrepreneurs and business leaders that eventually founded or developed disruptively successful firms—popularly known as “unicorns.” Next, the chapter describes a conducted multi-case study that demonstrates a strong correlation between the positive checkmarks in the selected leadership framework—visionary leadership—and the profile of the leaders of nine different international corporations that became industry leaders in less than 20 years (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, General Electrics, Toyota, Alibaba, Tencent, and Inditex).

1. Introduction

During the last two decades, there is an increasing number of leadership theories and frameworks. However, less work has been done in terms of determining which frameworks would suit better some particular organizational outputs. The study described in this chapter explores how some leadership models may be linked to some exceptional occurrences, such as “disruptive success.” This label can be applied to startups or more mature—but not yet elite—companies that, at some point, grew fast and became world leaders in a period of less than 20 years.

After giving a quick review of state-of-the-art of the leadership research and theories [1], this chapter shortlists, briefly explains, and finally analyzes the candidate frameworks and chooses the apparently most suitable one. Next, the chapter describes a conducted multi-case study that tested the actual possible correlation between the chosen leadership framework and the profile of the leaders of their “disruptively successful” corporations. The option of the multi-case approach for the testing is the most fitting in the explained context, given the limited number of possible samples and the unquantifiable nature of the analysis. The other most plausible alternative option, direct interviews or direct surveys, would not have been doable, given the challenge of obtaining response from a large number of highly profiled business leaders.

2. Theoretical framework: leadership styles

The article “Leadership theory and research in the new millennium: Current theoretical trends and changing perspectives” [1] provides a review of the state-of-the-art research in terms of leadership research of the last two decades, including most of the theories and frameworks, except that of visionary leadership, which has anyway been included in the analysis [2]. Taking into consideration the profile that could be expected in the context of startups and an innovation-led context [1, 2, 3], best framework candidates for further evaluation would be (1) transformational leadership, (2) charismatic leadership, (3) entrepreneurial leadership, and (4) visionary leadership.

2.1 Transformational leadership

The concept of transformational leadership was introduced by James MacGregor Burns in his book Leadership [4] and then further developed in Transforming Leadership: A New Pursuit of Happiness [5]. Another researcher, Bernard M. Bass, expanded on Burns’ work by describing the psychological mechanisms behind transforming leadership. He applied the term “transformational” instead of “transforming.” Bass argued that transformational leadership has four constitutive parts [6, 7] which are (1) idealized influence, (2) inspirational motivation, (3) intellectual stimulation, and (4) individualized consideration. On the opposite, transactional leaders, which frequently are less successful in terms of outcomes [5], usually adopt four possible approaches which are (1) contingency reward—rewards in exchange of support, (2) management by exception (active)—monitoring and just acting when a corrective deed is necessary, (3) management by exception (passive)—no monitoring and just acting when a corrective deed is necessary, and (4) laissez faire—leadership avoidance [6, 7].

2.2 Charismatic leadership

Long ago, Max Weber described charismatic authority in his book Economy and Society [8], where he identified it as one of three types of legitimate domination. According to Weber, charisma is defined as a set of qualities in a person that allows him or her “to be set apart from ordinary people and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities … regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader” [8]. A charismatic leader is a person, who has the ability to influence people and who, consequently, has some controlling power over them [9]. A widely accepted framework developed and tested by Conger and Kanungo [10, 11, 12, 13] defines four characteristics in charismatic leaders: (1) possessing and articulating a vision, (2) willing to take risk to achieve the vision, (3) exhibiting sensibility to the needs of followers, and (4) demonstrating noble behavior.

2.3 Entrepreneurial leadership

The definition of entrepreneurial leadership can be traced back to different theories about entrepreneurship [14], entrepreneurial orientation [15, 16], and entrepreneurial management [16]. “Entrepreneurial Leadership is that leadership that creates visionary scenarios that are used to assemble and mobilize a ‘supporting cast’ of participants who become committed by the vision to the discovery and exploitation of strategic value creation” [17]. The article “Entrepreneurial leadership: developing and measuring a cross-cultural construct” [17] compares all the theories about leadership and entrepreneurship. In the case of entrepreneurial leadership, Gupta, MacMillan, and Surie came up with a list of 19 leadership attributes that appeared to be the most relevant [17]. They grouped the remaining attributes into two “enactments” and five roles that would help the analysis in case that this one is the chosen leadership framework [17].

2.4 Visionary leadership

“Visionary leaders are those who inspire extraordinary levels of achievement in followers through an inspiring vision and through other behaviors” [2]. The article “Characteristics of Visionary Leadership” highlights the relevance of certain management traits in the context of greenfield projects and then associates the following attributes to those of a visionary leader [18]: (1) creators of a positive and inspirational vision, (2) supporters of organized learning and growth inside the organization, (3) innovators, and (4) pioneers.

3. Method

3.1 Framework selection

The four models that were considered potentially suitable for a context of disruptive success—transformational, charismatic, entrepreneurial, and visionary—underwent a further scrutiny in order to determine which one would better suit the context of disruptive success, as it is briefly described in the next paragraph.

The original term “transformational” already implies the existence of some entity that experiences transformation, and it is not so suitable in the context of completely new startups [7, 19]. Charismatic leaders emerge in times of instability, change, or crises, but many critics argue that charismatic leaders tend to forget the group’s benefit and try to gain most of the attention for themselves. This reality implies that collective or organizational outputs may not always be prioritized or maximized, since that is not the main objective for this type of leaders [9]. Entrepreneurial leadership framework appears to be a suitable option for the study in terms of effectively measuring the entrepreneurial aspect in leadership, but it does not really screen or measure elements that may impact discontinuous innovation [17], which would be mandatory for the chosen context. Therefore, the framework that appeared to suit the best in terms of analyzing environments that combine entrepreneurship and innovation is that of visionary leadership [20, 21, 22]. Eventually, there is no assumption on what the results would have been or would be if some other of these frameworks would have been tested in the study. In the case of the selected framework, the results are the ones that tell if this choice was right.

3.2 Case selection

There are few companies—similar to Apple, Microsoft, or Google—that are really disruptively successful over the span of, for instance, a decade, so it is not possible to collect enough samples as to conduct a statistical study. Besides, the analyzed variables are not quantitative in nature. Multiple theorical and practical studies indicate that the longitudinal multi-case approach is the best one in terms of properly investigating the results of qualitative inputs [23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28]. In order to choose the specific companies or cases, disruptively successful firms, the following three criteria were applied: (1) the pool of chosen companies should be located in, at least, three different geographical realms i.e. North America, Western Europe and Eastern Asia, (2) the chosen corporations should be at the highest possible position in the rank of global top 100 companies as per market value [29], and (2) those firms should have become industry leaders in (a) a relatively short period of time—less than 20 years, and (b) after leveraging some competitive advantage based on discontinuous innovation.

An overwhelming percentage of the disruptively successful companies in the top 100 as per market capitalization are American and, mostly, they are located in Silicon Valley. Nine was the maximum number of samples in the list that allowed to keep a reasonable geographical balance across several geographic realms without mixing firms that were not really comparable in terms of size or level of achievements. Nine is also a number in the range of similar studies conducted in the past. For instance, the number was three in the case of the study “Internationalization of small- and medium-sized enterprises: a multi case study” [30], four, in the case of the study “Competitive product-service systems: lessons from a multi-case study” [31], and 10 in the case of the study “Knowledge management critical failure factors: a multi-case study” [32].

The list of selected American corporations included the top five that could be considered disruptively successful firms as per the rapid growth: Apple, Google, Microsoft, General Electric, and Facebook [29]. The other American companies ranked in-between in the original list were not disruptively successful ones e.g. Exxon Mobil, Berkshire Hathaway, Wells Fargo, and Johnson and Johnson [29].

The only large-enough Western European disruptively successful company that also met the criteria was the Spanish firm Inditex—number 67 as per market capitalization [29]. On the other hand, the Eastern Asian disruptively successful companies that ranked high enough in the global top 100 were Toyota Motors, Alibaba and Tencent—15, 22, and 32 [29].

Therefore, the list of multinationals and leaders included in the study is as follows:

1. Apple Inc.; Steve Jobs. USA

2. Google (Alphabet, Inc.); Larry Page. USA

3. Microsoft Corporation; Bill Gates. USA

4. General Electric; Thomas Edison. USA

5. Facebook, Inc.; Mark Zuckerberg. USA

6. Toyota Motor Corporation; Taiichi Ohno. Japan

7. Alibaba Group Holding Limited; Jack Ma. China

8. Tencent Holdings Limited; Ma Huateng. China

9. Industria de Diseño Textil, S.A. (Inditex, owner of Zara and other clothing retailing chains); Amancio Ortega. Spain

4. Multi-case study: findings

4.1 Rankings of leadership

Table 1 summarizes the findings on rankings associated with the four above-mentioned features.

Company name	Rank of most valuable firms [29]	Name of founder/leader	Rank of richest [33]	Other feature on measuring leadership relevance/impact
Apple Inc.	1	Steve Jobs	Dead	Ranked in the list of the 20 most influential Americans of all times [34].; Several articles and surveys rank Jobs in the top 2 of the greatest innovators of all times [35, 36].
Google (now Alphabet, Inc.)	2	Larry Page	12
Microsoft Corporation	5	Bill Gates	1
General Electric	13	Thomas Edison	Dead	Ranked in the list of the 20 most influential Americans of all times [34].; Several articles and surveys rank jobs in the top 1 of the greatest innovators of all times [35, 36].
Facebook, Inc.	17	Mark Zuckerberg	6	Ranked in the top of the greatest innovators of all times according to the Lemelson-Mit Invention Index [36].
Toyota Motor Corporation	15	Tailichi Ohno	Dead	Lean manufacturing, Just-In-Time (JIT), and derivative approaches created by Ohno are still currently used by a large percentage of manufacturing firms [37].
Alibaba Group Holding Limited	22	Jack Ma	33
Tencent Holdings Limited	32	Ma Huateng	46
Industria de Diseño Textil, S.A. (Inditex)	67	Amancio Ortega	2

Table 1.

Feature comparison between studied firms and founders.

It can be observed that, in 89% of the cases, the leaders either outperform their already outperforming firms, in terms of “value” rankings—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Amancio Ortega— or enjoy even more prestige and recognition than the companies that they started up. Only in the case of Larry Page, the achievements and profile of the leader appears to be, arguably, less remarkable than that of his own company.

4.2 Steve Jobs, Apple Inc.

Apple Inc., a multinational technology company, was founded by Steven Paul Jobs—known as Steve Jobs—in 1977, in Los Altos, California, USA [38]. In 2016, Apple ranked number 1 in the world in terms of market capitalization. Steve Jobs ranked top in the list of the 20 most influential Americans of all times [34].

Jobs was raised by adoptive parents in Cupertino, California—in Silicon Valley. His passions kept changing over the time. He dropped out of Reed College, in Portland, took a job at Atari Corporation as a videogame designer in early 1974, and saved enough money for a pilgrimage to India [39]. In 1976, back in Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs and his former friend, Stephen Wozniak, worked on a computer design of their own, the Apple I [39]. Jobs and Wozniak later designed a far better product, the Apple II [39].

Over the last four decades, Apple has been involved and played a leading role in a number of disruptive and revolutionary innovations. The list includes personal computers, music distribution, tablet computing, mobile phones and digital publishing. Elements of disruptive innovation can be found in at least four of the items in Apple’s list: personal computers, music distribution, tablet computing, and digital publishing. iPhones would belong to the category of revolutionary innovations [40, 41, 42, 43].

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs official biographer, described the founder of Apple as a “creative entrepreneur whose creativity, passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing” [44]. Jobs, pioneered devices such as iMacs, iPods, iPhones, iTunes, and iPads and initiated projects such as Pixar and Apple computers [18].

Some Jobs’ words, recorded in the mentioned documentary Triumph of the Nerds [45], can give a sense of his ability for creating positive and inspirational visions [18]:

To me, the spark of that (birth of personal computer industry in Silicon Valley in the early seventies) was that it was something beyond the sort of you see every day. It is the same that causes people to wantna be poets instead of bankers, and I think this is a wonderful thing. And I think that same spirit can be put into products. And these products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit [45].

Regarding the second attribute of visionary leadership [18], which is supporting organized learning and growth within the organization, Jobs spoke eloquently about its importance, from his own point of view:

“The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay” [46].

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it” [47].

4.3 Larry Page, Google/Alphabet

Google was started in 1998 in Menlo Park—California, USA. Founders were two students of Stanford University, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page [48]. Google’s beginnings were less humble than those of earlier Silicon Valley startups at the time, because the two founders were able to initially raise US$1 million US dollars [49].

Larry Page met Sergey Brin when Larry entered the doctorate program at Stanford. Both students were interested in finding a way for extracting useful information from the mass of data in the Internet. With that purpose, they devised a new type of search engine tool to track the backing links of each site. They called the new search engine Google—a name derived from a misspelling of the word googol [48].

Therefore, Google’s initial success was not based on disruptive innovation, but rather on revolutionary innovation—the development of relevancy ranking in the search engine sector [49, 50].

In essence, Google’s business model has been labeled as continuous disruptive innovation [51] or continuous innovation [50]. These labels define a concept different than Christensen’s. Google’s innovation model is based on a hub—Googleplex—that attracts talent; this is the same model than Edison’s [50, 52, 53]. Eventually, during the last two decades, this model helped Google to be involved in a relevant number of discontinuous innovations, including Android, YouTube, Google Books, and Google Maps, and some continuous ones, such as Chrome or Gmail [54, 55].

There is some dispute among scholars regarding the quality of Page’s leadership strength, especially during his early tenure [56]. Still, there are little doubts that Page congregates the four attributes that define a visionary leader, as several authors already validated in their studies [18, 57, 58]. Several quotes from Larry Page that highlight his visionary skills are as follows:

On being an inspirator: “What is the one-sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!” [59].

On his role as a supporter of organized learning and growth inside the organization: “My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that” [59]. On being an innovator: “Invention is not enough. [Nikola] Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people” [59]. On being a pioneer: “Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future. I try to focus on that: What is the future really going to be? And how do we create it? And how do we power our organization to really focus on that and really drive it at a high rate?” [59].

Page’s personality traits, like his introverted tendencies, may not fit the profile of a charismatic leader [55, 56, 58, 60], but he definitively does in that of a visionary leader. Eventually, it is interesting to notice that many other leaders analyzed in this study also are, apparently, introvert, e.g. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg.

4.4 Thomas Edison, General electric

General Electric (GE), a multinational technology corporation, was founded by Thomas Alva Edison in 1889, in Schenectady, New York, USA. Since then, GE has been in the lists of top ranked companies in the USA [61].

In 1859, Edison quit school and began working as a train boy on the railroad between Detroit and Port Huron. Edison took advantage of the opportunity to learn telegraphy and, in 1863, he became an apprentice telegrapher. By 1869, he thought that he had made enough progress with a duplex telegraph—a device capable of transmitting two messages simultaneously on one single wire—and abandoned telegraphy for full-time entrepreneurship. At that time, Edison moved to New York City, where he initially partnered with Frank L. Pope, an electrical expert, and produced the Edison Universal Stock Printer [62]. During the next decade, Edison grew fast as successful mogul [62]. By 1889, he had full ownership or participation in many electricity-related companies that got then merged. The resulting corporation was General Electric Company (GE) [61, 63].

From the very beginning, General Electric adopted an innovation development strategy similar to Google’s. The actual scheme was not so much based on sparks of disruptive innovation and genius, but on a systematic approach toward producing inventions [64]. This method required concentration of researchers and projects in one spot. The first chosen location was Menlo Park, in New Jersey. Menlo Park hub was then succeeded by a larger laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey [53]. Both hubs developed a long list of innovations [53]. Some of the most relevant ones were the phonograph, the incandescent electric light and power, the motion picture camera, and the alkaline storage battery [53].

Thomas Edison ranks in the top of almost every list of all-time greatest innovators, pioneers, and entrepreneurs. He registered more than 1000 patents in the US alone [53] and founded more than 300 companies [34, 35, 36, 53]. Edison’s role on the development of these technologies and later commercialization of them clearly qualifies him as visionary, innovator, and pioneer [18]. Edison also was one of the first entrepreneurs to apply the principles of organized teamwork to the process of invention [65].

4.5 Bill Gates, Microsoft

In 1975 William Henry Gates III—known as Bill Gates—, a student then at Harvard University, and his friend, Paul Allen, partnered and founded a developing software company, called Microsoft [66]. First, they adopted BASIC, a programming language used at the time on larger computers, as the core of their work. By 1980, Gates managed to convince a large computer manufacturing multinational, IBM, to depend on Microsoft for every software related to personal computers (PCs). Then, other manufacturers of IBM-compatible PCs also turned to Microsoft in search of its products. By 1990, Gates was the PC industry’s king [67].

Microsoft’s initial success was based on one disruptive innovation—personal computers and related software [66]. Later, Microsoft also played a key role in another emerging industry: gaming—Xbox [68, 69, 70].

Gates is as introverted, similar to Larry Page [45, 55] and, definitively, he is not as charismatic as Steve Jobs [39, 45, 71, 72], but, still, he has been equally visionary. Bill Gates clearly fits in the description of an innovator, a pioneer, and a supporter of organized learning and growth [45, 67, 71, 72, 73].

4.6 Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard student, launched the facebook.com, a directory in which fellow students entered their information and photos into a template. Within 2 weeks, half of the students had signed up [74]. Then, his two roommates, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz, helped him add a few features and they made Facebook available to other universities [74]. It differed from other social media sites at the time in the fact that it required real names and e-mail addresses [74]. In 2004, the three partners moved to Palo Alto, California, where venture capitalist Peter Thiel invested in the firm. In May 2005, Facebook received additional money from a venture capital firm (US$12.7 million) [74]. Facebook’s initial success was therefore based on one single but relevant disruptive innovation: social media [71, 74].

Among other achievements, Mark Zuckerberg reached the top five in the list of wealthiest people on earth [33]. Again, Zuckerberg is as charismatic as Jobs or Edison [39, 45, 71, 72]. However, he definitively qualifies as a visionary leader. Besides other studies, interviews, and papers that prove this point [55, 71, 72, 75], Zuckerberg produced a number of quotes that support this statement. On being an inspirator: “We look for people who are passionate about something. In a way, it almost doesn’t matter what you’re passionate about” [75]. On being a supporter of organized learning and growth inside the organization: “I think as a company, if you can get those two things right–having a clear direction on what you are trying to do and bringing in great people who can execute on the stuff–then you can do pretty well” [75]. On being an innovator: “People think innovation is just having a good idea but a lot of it is just moving quickly and trying a lot of things” [75]. On being a pioneer: “In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks” [75].

4.7 Amancio Ortega, Industria de Diseño Textil (Inditex)

The Inditex group is a multinational textile fashion retailer firm founded in 1985 in A Coruña, Spain. Inditex currently owns famous brands such as Zara, Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, Zara Home, and Uterqüe. Inditex ranked 67 in the global top 100 as per market capitalization [29].

As a youth in A Coruña, Galicia, in northwestern Spain, Amacio Ortega gained an entry into the garment business by working as a delivery boy for a men’s shirt store and assistant in a tailor’s shop. He later managed a clothing store that catered to wealthy clients. Finally, Ortega saw an opportunity of appealing to a much broader audience by selling garment at extremely competitive prices. His proposal was based on reducing production costs by using less expensive materials and more efficient manufacturing systems. Ortega first applied this approach in a bathrobe business, Confecciones Goa, company that he founded in 1963. Then, in 1975, Ortega started the first Zara’s ready-to-wear clothing store. Zara soon became not only an internationally famous chain but also the flagship of the holding company Inditex, which he founded 10 years later [76].

The success of Inditex—and H&M, its main competitor—is ultimately based on a revolutionary innovation called “fast fashion” [77]. Inditex devised a new model of supply chain, the Agile Supply Chain (ASC), that allows its fashion retailer chains to update products just in time [77, 78]. In this process, store managers constantly communicate customer feedbacks to collection designers, who immediately update models and production [77, 78]. Inditex’s supply chain operations focus on three aspects: maximizing resources used, minimizing inventory, and minimizing lead times [78]. Inditex produces a significant amount of its production in-house and makes sure that its own factories reserve 85% of their capacity for in-season adjustments [77]. Inditex’s business model, which is based on flexibility and speed, requires a vertically integrated value chain that differs greatly from that of other competitors, like Benetton and Mango.

Amancio Ortega, who was the one that directly conceived and engineered the above-mentioned business model, clearly is an innovator and a pioneer [18]. He also supports organized learning and growth inside of his firm. An article in The Economist describes how Ortega works:

He has never had his own office, desk or desktop computer, preferring to direct his firm while standing with colleagues in a design room of Zara Woman, the flagship line. One former long-term CEO of Inditex, and Mr. Ortega’s business partner for 31 years, José María Castellano, says that his ex-boss’s working method is to discuss things intensely with small groups, delegate paperwork, listen hard to others and prefer oral over written communication [79].

“Ortega eats lunch with his employees in the company cafeteria. He can regularly be found sharing table on the factory floor with some of the designers, fabric experts and buyers” [80]. “Dear colleague, dear friend”: these are the words that, both, Ortega and Steve Jobs, used in letters addressed to employees [81].

Ortega also is, as most of the previously analyzed leaders, an introvert. “Reclusive,” “secretive,” and “reserved” are words frequently used to describe him. Amancio Ortega has guarded his privacy so jealously that his company only released a photograph of him when the firm was first listed [82].

4.8 Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Motor Corporation

Toward the end of the second world war, Taiichi Ohno worked as a production engineer for Toyota, a Japanese car manufacture founded in Japan by Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937 [83]. In those days, Toyota was much less productive than its Detroit-based competitors, the Big Three—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler [83]. In 1956, Ohno visited the USA to learn their supply and inventory methods. In that trip, he visited one of the supermarkets of the Piggly Wiggly chain [84, 85]. Ohno observed then how customers picked up a number of items from shelves and, in turn, the supermarket quickly and precisely replenished them [84]. This model gave Ohno ideas on how to reduce inventory and simplify assembly lines [84, 86, 87]. Based on the streamlined approach to replenishment, Ohno devised the Toyota Production System, which is more broadly known as lean manufacturing or Just-In-Time (JIT) inventory system. That gave Toyota an edge in terms of productivity and quality [86, 87]. The new system made Toyota the car industry leader. Since that time, the principle of lean manufacturing has been adopted by many firms and industries [84, 86, 87].

Based on this history, there is no doubt that Taiichi Ohno was a visionary, an innovator, and a pioneer [18]. The other quality of a visionary leader, supporting internal growth, was clearly evinced by the way that he spoke about Toyota and its organizational style over the length of his career. For instance, he described Toyota in the following way: “The Toyota style is not to create results by working hard. It is a system that says there is no limit to people’s creativity. People don’t go to Toyota to work, they go there to think” [88].

In terms of actively supporting internal growth:

When you go out into the workplace, you should be looking for things that you can do for your people there. You’ve got no business in the workplace if you are just there to be there. You’ve got to be looking for changes you can make for the benefit of the people who are working there [89].

Unlike the previous cases, Toyota was not a startup at the time of its disruptive success and Ohno was not its founder. Ultimately, though, the combination of Onho’s leadership and revolutionary innovation transformed Toyota from being an average car maker in Japan to becoming the number one global leader.

4.9 Jack Ma, Alibaba group holding limited

In 1999, Alibaba Group, an online trading company, was established by Jack Ma, a former English teacher, in Hangzhou City, China [90]. Everything started in 1995, during a trip to the USA, when Jack Ma learned for the first time about website portals and Internet. He immediately realized that the design of portals could be a great business opportunity in the yet-unformed Chinese market, especially in the business segment. After his return to China, Ma founded China Pages, a website page developer for Chinese businesses. However, 2 years later, he closed his first company because of strong competitors such as Chinesepage [91]. For a while, Ma went back to his former job as a public servant, but then, in 1999, Ma persuaded his team at the ministry to go to Hangzhou and found the Alibaba Group [91]. Alibaba’s growth was fast. Six years later, in 2005, Alibaba attracted the attention of Yahoo!, which bought a 40 percent stake. In 2007, Alibaba.com raised US$1.7 billion dollars in its initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong [91].

Alibaba’s business model bets a revolutionary innovation: Ma’s belief that the small-business-to-small-business online market offered much greater opportunity than the consumer-to-consumer one, the reason being that, unlike consumers, small businesses are willing to pay a membership fee [91].

Ma’s visionary leadership is as uniquely prolific as that of Edison and Jobs. In 2003, Jack Ma created a new company, the consumer-to-consumer online marketplace Taobao (meaning Chinese in “searching for treasure”). Taobao did not charge a fee but made money from online services and advertising. By 2007, Taobao had a 67 percent market share in China and eBay sold its Chinese operations to the media consortium TOM Group.

Some quotes from Ma that also proves his talent as an inspirator and team builder are as follows: “A good boss is better than a good company”; “If we are a good team and know what we want to do, one of us can defeat ten of them”; “We never lack money. We lack people with dreams, who can die for those dreams”; “For most people, they see and believe. We believe, and then we see. For leadership, we have to see things that other people don’t see” [92].

4.10 Ma Huanteng, Tencent holdings limited

Tencent Holdings Ltd., also known as Tencent, is a Chinese multinational technology conglomerate holding company founded by Ma Huateng in 1998. Tencent is among the largest video game, social media, venture capital, and investment corporations in the world [93].

Ma Huateng studied computer science at Shenzhen University, where he earned a bachelor of science degree (1993). He then worked as a researcher for China Motion Telecom Development Ltd. before founding Tencent in 1998. In 1999, Ma’s company launched QQ service (then called OICQ), which quickly became China’s most popular instant-messaging platform. In June 2004, Tencent raised nearly US$200 million in the capital market [94]. By 2015, QQ had 850 million monthly users [94]. WeChat, a mobile instant-messaging application that was introduced in 201, soon gathered 650 million users [94]. Tencent also create Qzone, which boasted 670 million monthly users by 2015 [94].

Tencent started based on a revolutionary innovation, Internet-based QQ service. Later, the company provided users with a range of innovative “online lifestyle services.” These services included online media outlets, e-commerce outlets, gaming options, social media sites, online advertising, and an online payment option [94].

Huateng is clearly a pioneer and innovator. In terms of being inspirational and a great team builder. Once, he said:

“At Tencent, we may be businessmen, but we are still chasing our IT, our science. We are still striving to create something really cool, trying to create things we couldn’t even imagine without our new technologies. I am still clinging to this enthusiasm’ [95]. ‘For us, it is important to choose a character, super emphasis on this one. This is related to our culture. The founders like to be simple and don’t like to be politicized. Including the selection of cadres, the character is very important. The second is to look at professional ability and coordination, intelligence and so on. This is a few principles for us to select talent” [95].

An interesting quote in terms of leadership style—as a paradigm of invention versus innovation in practice—is this one:

“In America, when you bring an idea to market, you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share. In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China – execution is” [95].

5. Conclusions

Unlike other studies [1, 2, 3, 30, 31, 32], the presented multi-case study focuses on a very specific business context: that of the creation of exceptionally successful firms such as Apple, Google, Facebook, or Tencent. The described multi-case study found the four attributes that define visionary leaders (creators of a positive and inspirational vision; supporters of organized learning and growth inside the organization; innovators; pioneers) in the nine studied cases. This is the first search effort that proves the link between the visionary leadership framework and firms that experienced disruptive success—unicorns.

In regard of the reasons why this type of profile is required in the studied context, one may be the fact that, in the case of disruptive innovation, nobody, even clients, may be able to forecast or imagine items such as the final functions and aspect of the products, the expected demand, and other features. Visionaries may be the only ones that can actually provide some accurate guesses, and, at the same time, put together, motivate, and guide a team in the right direction. In the future, it would be interesting to conduct more targeted research that could, both, give more details on the profile and the role of these leaders in the stated context and further describe the associated leadership attributes. Also, it would be of interest to investigate how the visionary leaders and disruptive-innovation-based environments interact with each other and why this type of leadership helps produce such outstanding results. Finally, it would also be interesting to test how other leadership frameworks fit in the same context and how the same leadership framework fits in the different ones.