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Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO

venturebeat.com

31–40 of 93 posts

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO

#31
This was a great article. Zuckerberg has the reputation for being a first class prima donna douche-nozzle, with his hired execs stepping in to do damage control and actually run the company.

But what impressed me in the article was that it showed he wasn't the simple tyrant who accidentally hit a gold mine his reputation makes him out to be, but is thoughtfully (though ruthlessly) trying to adapt and run his company.

I came away colored impressed. I wouldn't want to work there, but I was still impressed.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO

#32
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is nothing like a "slave driver" environment. People are extremely smart and focused on building cool things fast - top to bottom.

oh please, it's facebook, not Google, their "cool" projects involve translating the site into pirate and latin languages. + with ~1000 employees, chances are you as a programmer are most likely doing mundane crap. The "extremely smart and focused" people don't take well to having to do bullshit projects.

you have no idea what you're talking about

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO

#33
> Managers have to force-rank their employees. The more > Machiavellian managers make a point of telling their > employees where they stand.

Haven't other articles (and other research) shown that force ranking is not an effective strategy? And if my manager regaled me with daily "ranking updates," I'd go insane.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

[Edit: added link to Dan Pink's TED Talk]

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO

#34
post #23
post #15

In short: If you are successful, you are remarkable!!! and I agree with vaksel completely: it sounds like a slave driven environment.

Did you read the article? It mentions how many different things he's tried and how much he's been criticized for his many failings. He's remarkable because he was willing to change his company and himself again and again till it worked.

I am definitely not trying to undermine what he has done. However, the article gist IMO is that when things were not going well, everyone was blaming him and finally when things are falling in place, everyone is giving credit to him. If facebook wont have grown the way it has in the last six months, the same people, who are identifying what he did as remarkable leadership qualities probably would be saying the exact opposite. So, in short, remarkable is proportional to how successful you have been.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO

#35
post #24

"""Zuckerberg insisted the goal was easily attainable. He took regular breaks throughout the day to do 10-15 pushups, even if he was in the middle of a meeting with visitors. He completed the 5,000.""" 5000 push-ups, one week = 715/day assuming 7 day week. That means 48 breaks per day of 15 push-ups. So assuming 12 hour days, 4 breaks per hour. So every 15 minutes he did 15 push-ups for a week?

(Some napkin math...)

If we assume he's awake 16 hours of the day, at 48 breaks a day, that's only 3 breaks an hour. With 10-15 pushups taking a minute or less to do, that's only 5 minutes or so an hour.

For someone who possesses a great deal of drive in the rest of his life, this does not seem impossible.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO

#36
post #3

After all the negative press constantly surrounding Zuckerberg, it's refreshing to hear something positive for once. And, as always, it's inspiring to see evidence that tech founders can potentially be great CEOs. I think the real value of this article is the info on Facebook's internal policies, though. Ranking people based on relative performance? Relentlessly replacing lack-luster employees? A focus on providing i…

This employee-ranking system is common at big companies, including Microsoft and Amazon. There are two key difficulties with such a system, and it would be interesting to learn how Facebook grapples with them:

1 - It's imperative that the criteria for ranking employees is well-aligned with company goals. At Microsoft for example, on most teams you are ranked mostly on what features you ship. That sounds great but it can lead to extreme feature bloat in products. It's hard to take a stand for simplicity and elegant design in a meeting when the other guy's job depends on shipping the feature, and your job depends on getting the other guy to agree to include your feature.

2 - AMZN and MSFT both merge each manager's ranked list of direct reports with the lists created by other managers who report to the same Director or Senior Manager. This process can often be much more political than meritocratic, since other managers usually don't know much about an individual engineer's performance. If a team is flat-out better than other team and all of their engineers deserved to be ranked higher, that can be very difficult to defend in a meeting in front of a VP.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO

#37
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is nothing like a "slave driver" environment. People are extremely smart and focused on building cool things fast - top to bottom.

oh please, it's facebook, not Google, their "cool" projects involve translating the site into pirate and latin languages. + with ~1000 employees, chances are you as a programmer are most likely doing mundane crap. The "extremely smart and focused" people don't take well to having to do bullshit projects.

Um, you know ivankirigin works at Facebook, right?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO

#38
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is nothing like a "slave driver" environment. People are extremely smart and focused on building cool things fast - top to bottom.

oh please, it's facebook, not Google, their "cool" projects involve translating the site into pirate and latin languages. + with ~1000 employees, chances are you as a programmer are most likely doing mundane crap. The "extremely smart and focused" people don't take well to having to do bullshit projects.

You've been Annie Hall / Marshall McLuhan'd!

[Edit for obscure reference: In film Annie Hall, someone criticises Marshall McLuhan in a line at the cinema, and he pops out from nowhere and says 'You know nothing of my work'. It's quite a famous scene.]

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO

#39
post #3

After all the negative press constantly surrounding Zuckerberg, it's refreshing to hear something positive for once. And, as always, it's inspiring to see evidence that tech founders can potentially be great CEOs. I think the real value of this article is the info on Facebook's internal policies, though. Ranking people based on relative performance? Relentlessly replacing lack-luster employees? A focus on providing i…

It's not like this is revolutionary. Change "Mark Zuckerberg" to "Bill Gates" and "Facebook" to "Microsoft" and what you have is just about every article that was written about Microsoft's business culture in the early to mid-90s (back before everyone hated them)

Meritocracy, relative performance, individual incentives...these are all Microsoft innovations from decades ago. Kudos to Zuckerberg for taking note of a successful formula but credit still should go to Gates an co.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg: The evolution of a remarkable CEO

#40
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh please, it's facebook, not Google, their "cool" projects involve translating the site into pirate and latin languages. + with ~1000 employees, chances are you as a programmer are most likely doing mundane crap. The "extremely smart and focused" people don't take well to having to do bullshit projects.

Um, you know ivankirigin works at Facebook , right?

someone whose company was acquired in order to get them into Facebook, will most likely have a different experience and quality of projects, than the average drone. + he's been there what...a month? he is still biased by the honeymoon phase.
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