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How Zuck Learned To Run Facebook

According to The Facebook Effect, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's management role models are the Washington Post Company's Don Graham and a guru named Peter Drucker – the so-called "father of modern management."

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You're asking: Who?*

We were too, so we looked up Drucker on Wikipedia and found some of a list of his "basic ideas."

Here are those and brief comments on how we see them in action at Facebook:

Mark Zuckerberg Facebook CEO
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/prospere/2927938192/sizes/l/">Ludovic Toinel</a>
  • "Decentralization and simplification. Drucker discounted the command and control model and asserted that companies work best when they are decentralized. According to Drucker, corporations tend to produce too many products, hire employees they don't need (when a better solution would be outsourcing), and expand into economic sectors that they should avoid."
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 Facebook has a hacker culture, where every engineer is expected to build new products and features.

  • "A profound skepticism of macroeconomic theory. Drucker contended that economists of all schools fail to explain significant aspects of modern economies."

Facebook revenues doubled during the last recession.

  • "Respect of the worker. Drucker believed that employees are assets and not liabilities. He taught that knowledgeable workers are the essential ingredients of the modern economy. Central to this philosophy is the view that people are an organization's most valuable resource and that a manager's job is to prepare and free people to perform."[17]
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This also touches on Facebook's hacker culture.

  • "A belief in what he called "the sickness of government." Drucker made nonpartisan claims that government is often unable or unwilling to provide new services that people need or want, though he believed that this condition is not inherent to the form of government. The chapter "The Sickness of Government" in his book The Age of Discontinuity formed the basis of the New Public Management, a theory of public administration that dominated the discipline in the 1980s and 1990s."

Early Facebook backer Peter Thiel is very much an anti-government libertarian.  The Facebook Effect author David Kirkpatrick thinks Facebook is taking over the role of governments by managing people's identity online.

  • "The need for "planned abandonment". Businesses and governments have a natural human tendency to cling to "yesterday's successes" rather than seeing when they are no longer useful."
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Mark is notoriously willing to kill a successful product for one he thinks is better.

  • "A belief that taking action without thinking is the cause of every failure."[18]

Probably, Facebook could think harder about how to role out new products that effect its privacy policy.

  • "The need for community. Early in his career, Drucker predicted the "end of economic man" and advocated the creation of a "plant community" where individuals' social needs could be met. He later acknowledged that the plant community never materialized, and by the 1980s, suggested that volunteering in the nonprofit sector was the key to fostering a healthy society where people found a sense of belonging and civic pride."
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Facebook holds a field day every year, where employees dress up in team colors and compete in various games.

  • "The need to manage business by balancing a variety of needs and goals, rather than subordinating an institution to a single value.[19][20] This concept of management by objectives forms the keynote of his 1954 landmark The Practice of Management."[21]

Instead of focusing just on revenues and trying to milk a popular site for all its worth, Mark puts most of Facebook's efforts toward making the site more popular.

  • "A company's primary responsibility is to serve its customers. Profit is not the primary goal, but rather an essential condition for the company's continued existence."[22]
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Mark hates intrusive ads.

  • "An organization should have a proper way of executing all its business processes."

This is why Mark hired Sheryl Sandberg as COO. She built Google's ad sales operation.

  • "A belief in the notion that great companies could stand among humankind's noblest inventions."[23]
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This is why Mark doesn't want to lose control of Facebook – ever.

*Update: Apparently, I am the only person on the planet who hadn't heard of Peter Drucker before researching this article. And this offends people. Sorry world! Help me out for next time? Besides Peter Drucker, who are the 5 other must-reads in business?

Facebook Mark Zuckerberg
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