Having Oprah Winfrey as the owner and a cornerstone of a company confers many advantages. However, it’s not without its drawbacks. As an organization whose entire existence relies on one person with extreme amounts of power and influence based on referent power, what if that power starts to fade? At the moment, Winfrey has the ability to influence presidential elections (some say she single-handedly pushed President Obama over the top in the race against Hillary Clinton) and boost the sales of books tenfold on The New York Times best-seller list.76 What happens though if something goes wrong and the public’s trust in her diminishes? One of the things for which Winfrey is well known is her generous charitable contributions, including a $40 million Leadership Academy for girls in South Africa. Yet Winfrey faced numerous criticisms about the way the school has been run, including a 2007 accusation that one of the teachers was sexually abusing students.77 Although the controversy was handled fairly deftly, it raises concerns for Harpo.
One of Harpo’s jobs—to control the content it disseminates—remains a challenge as well, because Winfrey not only creates much of the content but is the content itself. Every copy of O Magazine has her on the cover. Every television show created by the company lists Winfrey as a producer. Oprah is the brand. The lingering question for Harpo: What happens if something happens to Winfrey? Her stated intentions for the new OWN network is that it must live on beyond her, but whether people would tune in without Oprah represents a real dilemma for the organization.

Question:-

13.1 What are the potential dangers of having one super-powerful leader of an organization?
13.2 How might Winfrey go about ensuring that Harpo survives after her departure or in the event of a loss of faith on the part of the public? Is it possible to have a true leadership succession plan in these circumstances?
13.3 As a holder of immense referent power, what types of concerns should Oprah Winfrey have in terms of influencing the employees around her?