Introduction of Mark Elliot Zuckerberg Zuckerberg
We chose Zuckerberg for our project because he is a young up and coming CEO. He leads a company that we are all consumers of (every group member has a Facebook Profile). His company is going part of our daily lives and could one day be part of every human beings day. Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984 in Dobbs Ferry, New York, into a comfortable, well-educated family. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice attached to the family's home. His mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before the birth of the couple's four children children — Mark, Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle. Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named "Zucknet." His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate within the house. Together with his friends, he also created computer games just for fun. "I had a bunch of friends who were artists," he said. "They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it." To keep up with Mark's burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to come to the house once a week and work with Mark. Newman later told reporters that it was hard to stay ahead of the prodigy, who began taking graduate courses at nearby Mercy College around this same time. Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. There he showed talent in fencing, becoming the captain of the school's team. He also excelled in literature, earning a diploma in classics. Yet Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers, and continued to work on developing new programs. While still in high school, he created an early version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse. Several companies — including including AOL and Microsoft — — expressed expressed an interest in buying the software, and hiring the teenager before graduation. He declined the offers.
After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University. By his sophomore year at the Ivy League institution, he had developed a reputation as the go-to software developer on campus. At Harvard, Zuckerberg designed a program called Coursematch. It allowed students to view which classes other students were taking. Then, Zuckerberg created a Facebook precursor Facemash which allowed viewers to vote on the looks of the students pictured on the website. Facemash led to some sanctions by the Harvard administrative board because of its offensive nature. Shortly after this incident, Mark was contacted by Divya Narendra and the Winklevoss twins (Tyler and Cameron). These young men wanted him to create a social networking site called HarvardConnection. Zuckerberg agreed to help them, but instead started work on his own site called the face book. On February 4th, 2004, Zuckerberg launched his new site thefacebook.com. Along with his roommates and cofounders Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Soon many Harvard students were on Facebook and Zuckerberg began to work on expansion. Starting with Stanford University, Columbia University, and Yale University, Facebook started its huge expansion to roughly 750 million users. This amount of users leads to Facebook's estimated valuation at $66.5 billion dollars. Zuckerberg remains CEO and his shares alone are worth $13.3 billion and a net personal worth of $17.5 billion. Zuckerberg continues to expand Facebook. The Social Network gave us a glimpse into the story of Mark Zuckerberg. He dropped out of Harvard while developing Facebook and has become one of the most powerful and youngest CEOs in the world. But there is more to Facebook than what the movie showed. What makes Facebook what it is now is its management, structure, and its ability to successfully scale to meet demand. When Zuckerberg first started Facebook, he was not the best leader. He didn‟t communicate well, he kept things to himself, he had a bad attitude, and he didn‟t always get along with his employees. When his in-house recruiter, Robin Reed, confronted him and said, “You‟d better take CEO lessons, or this isn‟t going to work for you” he began to evaluate the criticism he was receiving and acted on it
Individual personality traits of mark Zuckerberg Personality Mark Zuckerberg‟s personality is not the most normal personality you would expect to find in a CEO. Even though he is still in his late twenties, Zuckerberg has had to endure many maturing experiences. Many know his personality traits from the way he was , but Zuckerberg along with others who know portrayed in the movie The Social Network him very well have said that it did not portray him to the full extent. If one had to categorize Zuckerberg‟s personality based on the Big 5 Traits , he would be said to have conscientiousness and openness to experience. Because of his high level on intelligence, it makes him aware of everything around him and always knowing what
is physically and mentally going on. At points it might seem like Zuckerberg has attention deficit disorder, but in actuality he is taking in all of his surroundings while multi-tasking. Zuckerberg would also fall under the openness to experience category because he is drawn to new ventures and experiences. A person with this trait is said to have high levels of creativity, and Mark Zuckerberg demonstrates this quality to the fullest extent. A perfect example of this is his creation of Facebook. If Mark Zuckerberg was to take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator his type would more than likely turn out to be an INTJ. What this stands for is introversion, intuition, thinking, and judgment. Zuckerberg is a very introverted person because he does not like to share everything about his life with other people. He likes to keep many personal things to himself. His intuition is very keen and acute and this can be seen in his business strategies when dealing with Facebook. He knows when to make certain moves and how to make certain improvements when the time is needed for such things. His high IQ and levels of intelligence make the thinking type a no brainer. He was studying computer science at Harvard University and made an entirely new website while doing so. But what the thinking type deals with more is his ability to make decisions. He doesn‟t sit back and think over problems or many possible solutions, but rather he jumps in and goes with the easiest solution available. And finally, the judgment part of his type shows that he does not really have too much care for how the outside world perceives him. Zuckerberg is a very proud and carefree individual and this shows throughout his entire life and professional career. Motivation Mark Zuckerberg‟s dominant approach to governing others leans more towards a taskoriented leadership style. His approach to leadership has proven to be successful as he, ultimately, did not invent social networking, but instead utilizes task-management in order to guide his employees to see a common value in perfecting it. The Social Network does a fantastic job of depicting this approach. During the movie Mark is persistent in motivating his friends to input their maximum effort when he first moved to Palo Alto, California in order to achieve product development goals he had set for Facebook. This is why Facebook‟s greatest advantage as a whole is innovation. Facebook famously bungled the introduction of its first news feed — essentially, every post a member made on their wall was shared with their entire network. One member, Ben Parr, started a group called "Students against Facebook news feed," and its membership swelled to 750,000 users within a week. Instead of digging his heels in, Zuckerberg sent Parr an email asking for his advice on what Facebook could do better when introducing new products. Naturally, Zuckerberg primarily exercises inspirational motivation to create a need for achievement. His high degree of task-oriented leadership has also raised the expectancy of effort and performance in which he seeks from his employees. Values Instrumental the most obvious instrumental value that‟s Mark Zuckerberg posses is Intelligence. His
brain operates on a very high level which is evident throughout his life from creating Synapse to attending Harvard to starting a multibillion dollar company. Along with intelligence, Mark has showed a great amount of competence in his ability to take Facebook from a dorm room to where it is today. The amount of courage and ambition possessed by Zuckerberg in order to drop out of school and take a big risk in order to pursue a dream is outstanding. The final notable instrumental value is Open-mindedness. Mark was open enough to stop school and try this idea. Most people would never be open to quitting school in order to pursue such a dream. Terminal Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most generous people in the world. His values include Equality, World Peace, and Happiness. Mr. Zuckerberg is part of an initiative, started by Bill Gates that also involves billionaire Warren Buffet, to donate half of his wealth to people who may need it more than he does. For example, He donated $100 million dollars to the Newark Public School System. This notion shows how he wishes for there to be equality. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to satisfy people and make their lives easier. Satisfaction and an easier life sounds like a quick way to make people happier. Mark Zuckerberg has the unique position to have a profound impact on the world through his value system.
Achievements of Mark Zuckerberg
In high school years, Mark Zuckerberg was already excel in software programming and he created a communication system called ZuckNet to be used by his father, Edward Zuckerberg in his home and office. He also made Synapse Media Player which attracts big companies like Microsoft and AOL to buy from him but he did not sell it to them but upload it as freeware. In 2003, he created facemash which is sort of a hot or not game to him. Its growth was expanding out of hand and was closed in just a few days. Yet, it is a good inspiration to him that social network might be one bid thing. In 2004, he launched the Facebook from his bedroom in Harvard and was gaining popularity in rapid pace. In 2005, his operation expanded and „the‟ is dropped from the name and it is called facebook instead- a much simpler name to remember. In 2006, facebook is finally open to everyone around the world. Before this, facebook initially invited only Harvard and certain colleges to join. Mark Zuckerberg is ranked 36th in Forbes 400 and 35th in Forbes Billionaires while he is 16th in United States. He is also ranked number 9 as world‟s powerful people. Indeed, facebook is really „something‟ and it change the way the whole world connects in the World Wide Web and hence, it gets to become the most popular social network in the world. In 2009, facebook was awarded the Crunchie for Best Overall Startup or Product Of 2009 by by GigaOm, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was awarded as 2010 Person of the Year in TIME, an American news
magazine. TIME is a famous weekly magazine with the largest circulation in the world and it was an honor for him to be featured as the cover person. In 2011, Mark Zuckerberg was the top guy in Fortune's '40 under 40' list. 40 gentlemen are selected and he triumphed over his rival Larry Page, co-founder and CEO of Google, who is positioned at second place, and Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, who is positioned at 9th.
Reasons behind Mark Zuckerberg’s Success
Strong Personal Philosophy: Amid the astounding numbers of revenue and users, and the cast of characters that reads like an A-list index to the high-roller investors of the tech world, the S-1 document that Facebook filed yesterday also held the personal manifesto Zuckerberg plans to use as a guide for the company after the IPO. "We don't build services in order to make money; we make money in order to build better services. Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission--to make the world open and more connected." Zuck‟s trotted out this “open and connected” tenet at various times, most recently in an impassioned post on Facebook opposing SOPA and PIPA. “We will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the Internet,” and with equal furor in a rebuttal to the FTC touting how much social media has contributed to the government, the advancement of democracy, and the growing cottage industry of social software. Make It Not Always About the Money: Naysayers were quick to wag tongues and fingers when Zuckerbergturned down Yahoo‟s nearly $1 billion offer to buy Facebook in 2006. But the decision to keep Facebook independent was far from a lapse in judgment. In less than two years, Myspace accepted $580 million to join News Corp., and YouTube took $1.5 billion from Google. As valuations fluctuated between $10 billion and $1 trillion, Zuckerberg stuck to his simple resolution. He‟d consider an IPO when it “made sense” rather than make himself and investors rich. "I'm here to build something for the long term. Anything else is a distraction." Even Cameron Winklevoss agreed. Culture of Innovation: Zuckerberg worked with only a handful of developers in the early days of Facebook but when the “snakepit” of angst-ridden, overworked staff got to be counterproductive, he made some important additions. Chris Cox became the evangelical HR executive while newly installed COO Sheryl Sandberg ushered in an era of stability in 2008. Things still retain the playful air of a tech development hive, but with an edge. At its HQ, male Facebook employees vanquish distractions even when they go to the bathroom (which is frequently, thanks to all those free beverages). Recognized that You Don’t Have To Be First To Market:
Myspace and Friendster both predate Facebook, yet are now virtually extinct. Facebook trumped those earlier social networks because it provides more of a compelling pull, rather than a push. Likewise, when it entered the deals game last year alongside veterans Groupon and LivingSocial, it took their existing model and did it one better by adding polls and encouraging users to share. All of that fits with Facebook‟s core mission, “Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Take Pride in Hacking: For Zuckerberg, hacking goes way beyond the allegations that he coded his way into the Harvard Crimson and ConnectU. Zuckerberg‟shacker culture is about using shared effort and knowledge to make something bigger, better, and faster than an individual can do alone. His "hackathons" at Facebook are legendary and help foster innovation in all manner of projects from building better data centers to crowdsourcing urban planning for its surrounding neighborhood. Play To Win, Without Competing: Zuckerberg's social-networking juggernaut is the smallest and youngest of Silicon Valley‟s Fab Four, but it‟s killing it with stellar results in the ad business and attracting all kinds of talent. The Great Tech War of 2012 may be on, but Zuck‟s not going to play. "People like to talk about war. There are real competitions in there, but I don't think this is going to be this type of situation where there's one company that wins all this stuff."
Leadership style of Mark Zuckerberg Transactional Leadership To better understand the theoretical concept of any leadership style, it is imperative not to hold an intrinsic value to one notion because social sciences warrant the need for it. This means that there are no absolutes in leadership theory that best identifies a leader. Rather there is contrast and spectrums of various theoretical models and integrations. However, TL theory is based on contingent rewards for subordinates by controlling behaviors via leader‟s expectations. In contrast, the leader‟s expectations are ultimately fulfilled by what is best for him or her as the overarching goal of the group. This means the underlining motive of both leaders and subordinates are solely based on contingencies (e.g. money) and values individualism. Therefore, it can be argued that this does not serve as an ideal model for sustainability. This means, TL is limited by that lack of foresight and that Zuckerberg may benefit most from developing a Positive Focused Strategic Leadership contrast.
Leadership qualities of Mark Zuckerberg
Vision: His vision was that of a more open and connected world. And throughout the growth of Facebook, he has stuck to his vision of a product that offers value while connecting people and building a world with more empathy. Right from the beginning, the frugal-living Zuckerberg was never in it for the money. He had a larger vision and not only thought ahead of where he wanted to take Facebook, but pushed himself and his team to put all their creativity into their work. Go beyond comfort zone: To be a good leader, to go places, you must be willing to go further than others have and do things others won‟t. He worked his ass off, did things he was uncomfortable with (like travelling across continents to speak to audiences about his vision) and did what had to be done to build his company. Willing to make mistakes: From the privacy fiasco to the newsfeed, Zuckerberg was willing to take risks, and often had to backtrack on changes that did not work. But that did not dampen his appetite for innovation and part of Facebook‟s philosophy is to innovate, so we can safely assume that he will continue to do things that don‟t always go down well with some of its users. Face criticism: While many young people would have withered in the face of the very public criticism, including having a rather unflattering movie made about him (The Social Network), he took it like a champ, even taking the staff for a screening of the movie. Adapts to situations quickly: When he faced growing criticism over privacy allegations, Zuckerberg caved in to public opinion, giving users more control over their privacy. He learned quickly how much user experience mattered and adapted his decisions to be more inclusive of them. Build the right relationships: From someone who had few friends (as portrayed in The Social Network), to hobnobbing with the likes of Peter Thiel (Paypal) and Sean Parker (Napster), Zuckerberg has, from the start, built connections and relationships with the bigwigs of Silicon Valley. If you believe that you are the sum of the people you are closest to, then Mark Zuckerberg is certainly in very good company.
Lessons in Leadership from Mark Zuckerberg
It’s OK to Say No: As your business grows, you will attract interest from third parties, there will be requests for partnerships and buyouts. A valuable trait of a CEO is the ability to say no. Don‟t get sucked into trivial activities. Make sure you have enough time
for the important things. Zuckerberg put an end to plenty of projects because the efforts weren‟t getting interest. Grow and Take Risks: Don‟t be afraid to grow quickly and take risks along the way. According to Zuckerberg companies need to “move fast and break things.” Be Data-Driven: Stay in tune with your company‟s reality by tracking data and understanding trends. Do what you can to find ways to measure success and failure across the board. Many CEOs ignore information to the contrary and think that their business is doing well. He uses the dot-com era as an example. Showing surges in users was enough to raise large amounts of capital during the era, but then the venture capital market collapsed and many companies were wiped out. The companies that survived focused on sound business models. Conventional Wisdom is Often Wrong: Don‟t be afraid to ask your team “why?” if they say something can‟t be done. Steve Jobs did this and Zuckerberg does this when their team tells them something can‟t be done. It‟s effective in reaching deeper truths which may point to great product ideas or innovative business models.
Mark Zuckerberg took many steps to become the mogul he is today. He has had his fair share of growing pains, but he‟s held fast to the helm at Facebook.
