On paper, Egyptian jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri, who just formally filled Osama bin Ladin's shoes as al Qaeda's emir, seems a perfect replacement for the late Saudi terrorist. Zawahiri formed his own terrorist group as a teenager, and ever since he has fought autocratic Muslim regimes and the United States with both tenacity and intelligence. As bin Ladin's number two, he learned at the feet of the master, and by some accounts taught his boss much of what he knew about how to run an underground organization.
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But whereas bin Laden was an inspirational organizer who helped unify jihadists as he created and grew al Qaeda, the general consensus is that Zawahiri is banal, divisive, and in most ways a lesser leader. U.S. officials greeted the announcement with scorn. One senior counterterrorism official declared that Zawahiri had not "demonstrated strong leadership or organizational skills" and that "alienation and dissention" is likely to plague the terrorist group.
Let's hope the predictions are true. But, as former GE CEO Jack Welch once wrote, "An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage." And al Qaeda, for all its faults, is a learning organization. But does Zawahiri have the chops to lead and transform the ailing terrorist network? If he can learn from the organization's past mistakes, he could make al Qaeda even more formidable than it was under bin Ladin.
In the spirit, then, of the Harvard Business School extension campus in Waziristan, here are five lessons that Zawahiri and other terrorist groups often fail to heed.
Lesson One: Put People First
In the canon of management advice, emphasizing an organization's people is perhaps the most common. Many organizations repeat this mantra without really understanding it and in practice honor it only in the breach. Terrorist groups, which eagerly sacrifice some of their best to war and suicide bombings, may seem an exception -- but they are not. Many terrorist groups collapse in their first year (not unlike fusion restaurants and literary journals), and stories abound of would-be suicide bombers blowing themselves and their buddies up with prematurely detonated homemade bombs. At times, the results are more comical than frightening. In 2007, a car that terrorists had rigged to blow up near a London nightclub was towed because it was parked illegally.
Picking the right people -- and training and educating them -- is as necessary for a terrorist group as it is for a top corporation. Al Qaeda has relatively few Mohammad Attas, the steely 9/11 leader who saw that plot through to its deadly fruition. Good organizations must attract smart people and then train them for violence, both of which are difficult.
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