Zuckerberg’s management lesson

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t get jokes. At least that’s the message from Twitter founder Biz Stone, who earlier this week recounted the story of when he and co-founder Evan Williams went to Facebook’s offices to discuss a potential takeover.

“I had a meeting once with Zuckerberg, and every joke I said landed like a dead fish on the ground,” Stone told American radio network NPR.

The meeting, which saw Evans and Stone put a price tag of $500 million on their then-fledgling social media service, ended without a deal.

But what put Stone off most, he says, was when Zuckerberg invited the pair to the Facebook cafeteria for lunch.

“So we had to wait on this huge line for lunch. Evan was like, aren’t you the boss? Can’t you like kind of cut the line a little bit here?”

“And he’s like, that’s not how we do things here.”

At that point, Stone says he made up an excuse to leave. “We don’t like to be queued,” he told NPR.

Stone’s story was treated as a bit of joke, but to me it actually reflects very well on Zuckerberg and speaks of the innate leadership qualities that the young CEO appears to display.

Last night I finished reading The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick’s chronicle of Facebook’s creation and rapid growth.

What comes across most is Zuckerberg’s brilliance in the area of product development. From the launch of Facebook he showed a unique ability to continue to develop new features for the platform while at the same time streamlining and tweaking the service to ensure usability was protected.

Over the last six years, Facebook has rolled out a stunning number of changes to its service, covering everything from application development to advertising services.

While there have been some big mistakes made during this period – most notably changes to the company’s privacy controls and policies which sparked widespread controversy – Facebook’s growth trajectory has never been affected.

Much is also made in the book of Zuckerberg’s ambivalence towards money, in the form of advertising dollars or the numerous takeover offers the company received in its early years.

This appears to stem from the high-minded (many would say arrogant) way in which Zuckerberg sees Facebook as a tool that is changing the way the world communicates. According to Kirkpatrick’s book, growth has usually been more important than cash.

From a leadership point of view, The Facebook Effect describes a CEO essentially learning on the job – a process I am sure the 27-year-old continues to go through.

One of his key strategies seems to be hiring well and getting out of the way of the experts he brings in – something which might seem incongruous with the fact that he remains in unquestioned control of the company under its share structure and constitution.

Of course, big leaders are judged on little things – which is why not jumping the lunch line should earn Zuckerberg a few extra points.