Facebook now must change rapidly or face existential threat.
Mark Zuckerberg continued Facebook’s radical about-face last week, calling for new government regulation on harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability. This comes less than a month after his privacy-focused vision for the future. The $500 billion question: Is Facebook agile enough to pull this off?
Facebook’s latest initiatives remind me of Thomas Friedman’s comment about climate change: They have to avoid what is unmanageable and manage what is unavoidable. Friedman’s observation could be Facebook’s template for change—and their ability to change could be a blueprint for agile leadership.
This will be a telling real-time case study for all leaders today. Why? Because the biggest challenge most of us face is managing transformation—of our business models, our distribution models, and most fundamentally, helping our employees be agile enough to succeed and stay resilient in the midst of the stressors that change creates.
What’s unmanageable: Facebook built their $500 billion business on advertising purporting to be content and agnostic data sharing. Under a stance of openness, they have for years circumvented regulations and norms pertaining to other ad-driven information providers like broadcast companies, content companies and news organizations. But openness empowered some unmanageable players: Internet trolls, fake news purveyors and hate groups proliferated quickly and all over the platform. This put Facebook on the defensive and now requires them to change rapidly or face existential threat.
What’s unavoidable: Facebook is so big, and so deeply woven into billions of lives, that they are colliding with public opinion and government policy. Political candidates are calling for a breakup of tech giants, arguing that they are monopolies that surreptitiously betray users’ trust. And the #leavefacebook reaction of some users creates perfect conditions for a competitor to come in promising greater privacy and security.
Speed Vs. Agility
Facebook’s culture of “move fast and break things” helped it move with impressive speed in the past. But the transformation Zuckerberg outlines will take agility as well as speed. Are their employees able to shift direction, and embody existential change? Are they comfortable speaking truth to power, after so many change agents at Facebook have left the company?
Last year, when all hell broke loose on the privacy front, Zuckerberg and his team were slow to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation. They treated privacy and data protection as a public relations problem.