G2 On Leadership
Facebook’s leadership: Time for an update?
The ongoing privacy controversy at Facebook raises the familiar dilemma of what to do when fast-growing start-ups threaten to outgrow the management abilities of their creative young founders. The Google guys got kudos for bringing in industry veteran Eric Schmidt as chief executive, but things didn’t work out as well when Pepsi’s John Sculley took the reins from a young Steve Jobs at Apple. What’s the leadership wisdom here?
KLMNO Michael Useem is a
professor of management and director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s
Wharton School.
Some who are called to lead in new ways have risen to the occasion. Others have properly stepped aside.
Consider a moment of decision for Union Gen.
George Meade during the Civil War. On June 28, 1863, he commanded a corps of 10,000 soldiers in the Army of the Potomac as it pursued the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during its move north toward Pennsylvania. A federal courier arrived at Meade’s corps headquarters near Frederick at 3 a.m. “I thought that it was either to relieve or arrest me,” Meade later said, but the courier’s message from President Abraham Lincoln instead ordered Meade to take command of the entire Army of the Potomac, a force of 95,000. Meade fully embraced his promotion into a far
larger game. Just three days later near Gettysburg, Meade’s Army of the Potomac’s engaged and then defeated the Confederate Army, commanded by General Robert E. Lee. Meade’s victory at Gettysburg offered compelling evidence that some people can successfully move up to a far more demanding and complex leadership calling. Creative young company founders have
sometimes done just that, rising to ever greater leadership responsibilities without faltering as their firms have prospered. Frederick Smith founded Federal Express in 1971 — and he still runs it, with 280,000 employees. Others have opted to hand over responsibility to seasoned managers, as eBay founder Pierre Omidyar did to [Meg] Whitman in 1998, and as Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page did to Eric Schmidt in 2001. Here’s the leadership wisdom for a creative young founder: If you think you can master the next levels of leadership demands and complexity, embrace them, as Meade and Smith have proven can be done. But if you are ambivalent about your capacity — or taste — for ever-rising responsibilities, stay engaged but get out of the corner office.
Amy L. Fraher is a retired
Navy commander, naval aviator, former United Airlines pilot and director of the International Team Training Center at San
Diego Miramar College. My issue is not with [Facebook chief executive
Mark] Zuckerberg’s age or business experience, per se. What I wonder is whether he possesses the team-building skills required to elicit the leadership qualities from his employees needed to run the business long term.
PAUL SAKUMA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Gail Sredanovic of the group Raging Grannies protests Facebook’s privacy policies this month at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.
on
washingtonpost.com This week’s business chats
washingtonpost.com/ discussions
TUESDAY How to Deal, Lily Garcia, 11 a.m.
THURSDAY Color of Money columnist Michelle Singletary, noon.
FRIDAY Cars columnist Warren Brown, 11 a.m.
How did Facebook — or its leader — become
fixated on such a complex non-user-friendly solution as the only possibility? Like the organizational culture at NASA in the 1980s, when managers overlooked potentially catastrophic flaws in the Challenger’s O-ring design, has Zuckerberg’s near-missionary zeal to create a networked world created a groupthink mentality, one that supersedes the transparency and open communication that Facebook cites as its core values? And has its brilliant co-founder been so seduced by his vision that he has forgotten the most important leadership lesson —always question your own assumptions? Yash Gupta is professor and dean of the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University. The typical entrepreneurs generally don’t ponder what
their future management structure is going to look like. They’re the kind of people who aren’t happy dealing with bureaucracy, so they’re not likely to envision how the bureaucracy of their own companies is going to be assembled. They tend to be people with big ideas and big passion; they’re not very interested in maintenance. They’re seed planters, not bean counters. In fact, research has shown differences between the brains of entrepreneurs and the brains of other kinds of business people. They’re literally wired differently. The transition from the more entrepreneurial
style of leadership to the more managerial is inevitable, and it must be handled properly. If it’s done too soon or too late, then problems occur. Knowing when to make the shift isn’t an exact science. The organization has to be careful not to stifle the culture that generated the initial success. Otherwise, there’s a risk of ruining the brand.
Cadet Megan Snook is one of 13 cadets and four instructors from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point who take on the weekly On Leadership
questions.
Although Facebook has sustained success, perhaps what Mark Zuckerberg needs now is a mentor. Bringing in a different set of eyes and ears may provide him the wisdom he needs to maintain “command and control” over a company that is still growing exponentially. Having a veteran leader onboard can offer multiple benefits to a younger chief executive as far as time management, personal support and the devil’s-advocate position that so many of us
Excerpts from On Leadership, a Web feature exploring vision and motivation by Steven Pearlstein and Raju Narisetti. To see videos and read the entire panel’s comments, go to
www.washingtonpost.com/leadership.
SUNDAY, JUNE 13, 2010
sometimes need. Kathryn Kolbert, a public interest lawyer and journalist, is director of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College. Consider the human
pyramid — a favorite of the pep squad. They work well
with 10 people. Those on the bottom do the hard work and provide the most support. The person on top has the best vision. Communication from level to level is key, particularly when any one link is wobbly. But try building a pyramid with 100 people, and the fragility of the enterprise is immediately apparent. To go from small to large, founders need to
focus on finding ways for employees at all levels to stabilize the venture. Good advice not only comes from those at the
top. Middle managers, particularly those who are closer to customers and clients, have a lot to add. As we’ve learned from the cheerleaders, it’s the people at the bottom and middle who do the heavy lifting.
John Baldoni is a
leadership consultant, coach and regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review online. Leadership wisdom is
something that accrues with age and experience. And so it is no wonder that Mark Zuckerberg is struggling with large issues. He’s still in his 20s. Youth does not preclude effective leadership. Our military is led from the front by a very capable core of junior officers. They are supported by equally youthful noncommissioned officers. Both may lack the wisdom of years, but they make up for it with experience and a focus on mission. These men and women have learned to lead through their people, not over them, and in doing so they provide a strong leadership example for the rest of us.
“Life,” Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” The same holds for leadership. Lead going forward, but pay attention to where you have been. Jonathan Cowan is
president and co-founder of Third Way, a think tank of the progressive movement. Great leaders recognize
that what it takes to get an idea off the ground is dramatically different from running and growing an organization. Yet all too often, start-ups fail to make the
shifts necessary to prosper and compete in this middle stage. Who knows? Perhaps the next leader of Facebook has “friended” the current CEO — and he or she is just one click away from better navigating the company’s meteoric but challenging rise.
Microsoft’s free but limited Office Web Apps fall short in competitive field B
ack when cellphones flipped open, the impending arrival of a new
version of Microsoft Office would be stop-the-presses material. Now, even the debut of a free version of Microsoft’s flagship productivity suite can seem less exciting than
temporary tweaks to Google’s home page. Microsoft helped park itself in this position by shipping a series of underwhelming releases: Office 2003 had few useful changes outside its Outlook e-mail program, while Office 2007’s overdue interface rewrite
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often went no deeper than the first layer of dialogue boxes in its constituent applications. Meanwhile, competitors delivered such useful alternatives as the ugly but free and open-source OpenOffice (
openoffice.org), Apple’s innovative, Mac-only iWork and Google’s free, Web-based Google Docs (
docs.google.com). That last rival alone has done so well that Microsoft’s new Office Web Apps deserve a description that no release of Office has merited in more than 15 years: the challenger to a comfortable incumbent. It’s inexplicable, then, that
Office Web Apps — to be followed next week by Microsoft’s full Office 2010 suite —look like the apathetic work of an overprivileged student. The oddly limited versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote leave Web Apps a stub of Office as we know it, with document- sharing features that fall embarrassingly short of Google’s. But at least none of this inadequacy costs anything. To try Office Web Apps, simply
go to
office.live.com and sign in with a Windows Live account in, more or less, the browser of your choice. Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome all ran Microsoft’s applications as well as the Redmond, Wash., company’s own Internet
ROB PEGORARO Fast Forward
Explorer. The only major advantage to using Office Web Apps in Windows instead of Mac OS X or Linux was the ability to use fonts installed on the computer. Mobile use was another story,
notwithstanding Microsofts advertised phone support. I couldn’t read OneNote outlines on an iPad’s copy of Safari or an HTC Evo 4G’s Android browser, and the latter program crashed when I tried to read Word and PowerPoint documents. Microsoft’s Web versions of
Office programs look strikingly like their deskbound originals, just with far fewer buttons at the top of each window. The Word Web Apps “ribbon” toolbar features four tabs, vs. eight in Word 2010. That makes it harder to get lost but easier to find yourself wanting an absent feature.
Some of those omissions make sense. PowerPoint, for example, doesn’t necessarily need the real thing’s array of between-slides transition effects. But some defy
logic. Word lets you write text from right to left but lacks a word count and a footnoting tool. And Excel provides nearly zero help with composing formulas, one of the most basic functions of a spreadsheet. Those applications also show
a puzzling inconsistency in how they work. Although Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint save your work automatically, as Web applications should, Word does not. And although Excel and OneNote let two people work on the same document at the same time (changes showed up on a second computer about a minute after being typed on the first), Word and PowerPoint will kick you out of a document when you share it with somebody else. Office 2010 (look for a full
review here next week) can save files to the Microsoft SkyDrive site that hosts Office Web Apps, with its absurdly generous 25 gigabytes of free storage. But Thursday, that feature served only error messages. Unlike Google Docs, Office
Web Apps offer no data-export choices. Although they accept older Office files (in a backward interface that asks you to designate an online storage folder before selecting the file from your desktop), they then convert them to new file formats that Microsoft debuted with Office 2007 — and won’t save
Help File: Still on hold, waiting for a Verizon iPhone The one thing that could
Q: Is there any chance Verizon Wireless will have the iPhone anytime soon?
A: No, no, a thousand times no. The “Verizon iPhone” rumor has been circulating since a few months after Apple’s smartphone debuted on AT&T Wireless in 2007. And it’s been false every single time since. But the wish among some would-be iPhone users for a choice of U.S. wireless carriers is so strong that even Apple’s introduction of the new iPhone 4 last week — available, just like its predecessors, only on AT&T
in the United States — did not stop two different people on Wednesday alone from asking me whether a Verizon iPhone might not still be on the way. No such thing will happen
anytime soon. Apple seems resolutely uninterested in making multiple models of the iPhone: one built on the GSM (Global System for Mobile) wireless standard, which AT&T employs and which dominates most markets worldwide, and another for the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology used by Verizon and Sprint but absent in most other countries.
change this is Verizon’s move to switch its network to a newer, faster standard called LTE (Long Term Evolution). Since many GSM carriers plan to make the same upgrade, Apple wouldn’t have to ship two iPhones with different innards. Even then, Apple could elect to continue its partnership with AT&T — perhaps because of Verizon’s wish to have more control over the phone’s configuration than Apple would allow. But with Verizon on the same standard, at least hackers would theoretically be able to unlock iPhones and use them on
them in any other form afterward. A dismaying variety of
performance and reliability issues, such as OneNote’s odd sluggishness at switching between branches in an outline and the entire suite’s habit of coughing up server-error messages at random times, round out problems with Office Web Apps. Even the ads that help underwrite its costs, especially the ugly banners on the Office Web Apps home page that you’ve seen in too many other places, need improvement. In its current underdeveloped
state, Office Web Apps would have been more accurately named Works Web Apps, after the cut-down home productivity suite that Microsoft axed last year when it realized nobody liked it much. This effort, however, doesn’t
have to share Works’ fate. Microsoft can keep posting improvements and upgrades instead of being bound by the usual three-year Office upgrade cycle. But the same goes for Office Web’s online competitors, which have a lot more practice at this business than Microsoft.
robp@washpost.com
Living with technology, or trying to? Read more at voices.
washingtonpost.com/faster forward.
that carrier’s network. In the meantime, if you’re set
on Verizon’s network and you need a new phone, you’ll just have to buy some other model. Please do so and ignore any other reheated rumors on this subject.
Rob Pegoraro attempts to untangle computing conundrums and errant electronics each week. Send questions to The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071 or
robp@washpost.com. Visit
voices.washingtonpost.com/ fasterforward for his Faster Forward blog.
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