Mark Zuckerberg as a leader

Human has developed a culture, a society a technology and a world from Stone Age to the current era where information technology along with Artificial intelligence has made a huge impact on civilization. The acceleration has never decreased, but increased tremendously. Innovative ideas make a huge impact on human development. There have been quite a few such ideas.  Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and the CEO of facebook is the personality that will be discussed here. Socially known as a geek, a nerd and a shy person, Mark has probably been able to create the evolution of the marketing, communicating and advertising philosophies.

            First and foremost, it is relevant to state the fact that the movie “social networking” does not provide100% accurate information regarding Mark or his respective company. “It has been reported that the film will not paint Zuckerberg in the best of light” (Winslow, 2010). It is notable that Mark Zuckerberg has a strategic, conventional attitude towards his ambitions. We see him making crucial decisions along the way, such as turning down the offer of 1bn USD by yahoo, which many thought was a huge mistake. 90% of the early twenty year olds would have accepted this where he did not and here he rises up as one of the billionaires and a potential legend of the information era. Moreover, when facebook made a mistake with the FB news feed where every post a person makes go around his entire network, an FB user called Ben Parr made a group called “Students against Facebook news feed”, Instead of him, “Zuckerberg sent Parr an email asking for his advice on what Facebook could do better when introducing new products.” (Winslow, 2010). This reflects his humble attitude towards FB users and ability to handle those conflicts and admitting mistakes. In my opinion those qualities are not associated with many of the people at his age. This is a great example for his matured approach towards his managing activities.

            Observing his managerial activities, there is a lot of lessons can be taken for quite a few managers in conservative backgrounds. Unlike many Asian managers, he does not look in to the race or religion or any of those discriminating aspects. His executive board is a great example for the above fact. He makes his decisions on their employees regarding their quality. “Every employee is rated on a scale from 1 to 5, with five being the highest. No one gets a five. If you get a 1 or a 2, you’re quickly shown the door” (Marshal, 2009). This does not mean that Mark does not respect his employees. In fact when he had an idea argument with Chamita Palihapitiyta, one of the VPs, “whether it was the sheer number of friends a user starts with, or simple virility (making it easy to invite other friends) that was more critical to driving growth” ( Marshal, 2009), where palihapitiya was behind the idea of virality, Mark decided to practice both, optimizing for virality first, It proved to be the correct decision.

In conclusion, it is noticeable that Mark Zuckerberg's innovations do not rely completely upon his nerdy outlook, but on his matured and focussed approaches towards his goals.

References

• ·         T, Winslow. (2010). Dissecting Mark Zuckerberg. Available: http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/leadership_playlist/2010/07/facebooks-leadership-dissecting-mark-zuckerberg.html. Last accessed 24th may 2011.
• ·         M, Marshall. (2009). The evolution of a remarkable CEO. Available: http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/02/mark-zuckerberg-the-evolution-of-a-remarkable-ceo/. Last accessed 24th may 2011.