Why Mark Zuckerberg shouldn’t listen to management gurus

Why Mark Zuckerberg shouldn’t listen to management
By Felix Salmon February 10, 2012


This is why Mark Zuckerberg was smart to stay in complete control of Facebook and not listen to anybody telling him that a multi-billion-dollar company needed a seasoned, professional CEO in charge.

Jack and Suzy Welch are onto something when they diagnose a potential class problem at Facebook, post-IPO.

After its IPO, Facebook is going to have two classes of citizens. That’s just reality. Some of its 3,000 or so employees — several hundred in number by some counts — will have significant riches in the hand. Newer hires, though — well, they’ll mostly have options in the bush.

Where they go hilariously wrong is in their proposed solution to the problem. There’s a carrot, which as far as I can tell involves Silicon Valley manager-geeks suddenly transforming themselves into motivational speakers. And then there’s a stick:

With all this exultant “barking,” there also needs be bite — in the form of frequent, rigorous performance reviews. The facts are, if Facebook wants urgency, speed and intensity around its mission, those behaviors must be explicit values that, when demonstrated, result in bonus money and upward mobility — or not.

Any company, in the wake of an IPO, finds itself growing new and previously-unnecessary layers of management, especially in areas like the general counsel’s office, investor relations, and public relations. But for the Welches, that’s not enough: extra management also has to be marbled throughout the organization, to be found everywhere as “frequent, rigorous performance reviews”.

There is absolutely zero evidence that frequent, rigorous performance reviews ever do any good, and quite a lot of reason to believe that they actually do harm. And what’s true of business professionals in general is especially true of Silicon Valley engineers — a culture where pretty much everybody knows exactly who’s hot and who’s not, without any need for formal, frequent, or rigorous performance reviews.

What’s more, it’s far from clear that the best way to motivate a Silicon Valley engineer is to dangle an annual bonus in front of his face and tell him that if he works hard he could get an extra couple of months’ salary at the end of the year. Rather, the best way to get the most out of engineers is to surround them with other great engineers, in a collegial atmosphere where everybody works hard and everybody does really well building great products that everybody is proud of.

Performance reviews are horrible, divisive things which create a whole other set of class distinctions within a company, between the “high performers” who get money and promotions and the grunts who live in fear that their review will be used to punish or fire them. (And of course if bonus-greed isn’t a great motivator of computer engineers, fear is even worse, especially in the context of Silicon Valley, where there are multiple jobs permanently being dangled in front of just about anybody who can code.)

Managing a company like Facebook is all about creating a magnetic culture — a place where employees love to work, and where they’ll tell their friends that they’re having a great time and that they should come join them. Meanwhile, there has never been a company in the history of capitalism where managers really love the performance-review process and tell all their friends that they would hugely enjoy going through it themselves on a frequent and rigorous basis.

In other words, the mere existence of such things would probably be enough to put off many talented potential employees with a wide choice of possible employers. At a company like GE, a CEO like Jack Welch tends not to worry about such things. But at Facebook, the ability to continue to attract Silicon Valley’s best coders is very high up Mark Zuckerberg’s list of priorities and concerns.

Which is reason number 1,452 that all of Facebook’s shareholders should be very happy indeed that the company is being run by Mark Zuckerberg and not by Jack Welch.


http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/02/10/why-mark-zuckerberg-shouldnt-listen-to-management-gurus/