Part A: Introduction
The report provides an overview of the career highlights and major events of the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. He was born in 1984 and after quitting the university, developed his website Facebook, Inc. and became its CEO in 2013. In 2010, he won the award of Person of the Year by Times Magazine. The report also identified that CEO’s personality is open to experience as he handled his company by himself by getting experience over the years. In addition, he is a transformational leadership. It is due to the fact that he not only inspires his employees, but openly communicate with them, empower and motivate them and provides a vision and strategic direction to them. Moreover, he focuses on the CRS that can be ascertained by the fact that he constantly provides funds to institutions like schools and hospitals to improve educational system and to eliminate every disease.
Furthermore, he encourages his employees to share ideas as his office is open with his employees. He promotes the vision of connecting people to easily collect information. In addition, the culture he developed in the company is based on the love. Despite the legitimate power he has and high level control on the company, his 99% employees rated him the best CEO and love to work with him.
Part B: Research
Career Highlights
Mark Zuckerberg is the American computer scientist, which is known for his co-creation for social networking site, Facebook. He was born in 1984 and started to study in the Harvard University with the major subjects of psychology and computer science. He developed programs in the university like CourseMatch and FaceMash. CourseMatch enabled students to select courses and make decision regarding teams to study in groups, whereas FaceMash was built for fun purpose to enable students to select face from different photos. In 2004, he developed another website known as Thefacebook.com along with his friends, such as Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum and Dustin Moskovitz. However, he was blamed for stealing the concepts of his fellow students (Divya Narendra and Twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss) who planned the social networking site with the name of The Harvard Connection. In turn, Zuckerberg gave shares of three hundred million US dollars to senior students (Roe, 2014).
After quitting the college, he started to work on his website at new location (Palo Alto, California). In 2004, he developed a file sharing program named Wirehog as a competition to Wayne Chang (fellow Harvard)’s i2hub. In 2005, a company named Accel Partners invested about 12.7 million dollars in Facebook. After 2 years, Mark introduced Facebook Platform to provide facility to software developers to use Facebook to develop other applications. In 2 years, he developed more facilities along with Facebook Platform known as Beacon and Connect. In 2013, Mark Zuckerberg presented a new venture named Internet.org with collaboration of cell phone companies like Qualcomm, Samsung, Opera Software, Ericson, Microsoft, MediaTek, and Reliance. The focus of the venture was to enhance the usage of internet in emerging countries. He also became CEO and Chairman of Facebook, Inc. in 2013 and was provided one dollar as salary (Roe, 2014).
Major Work of Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg got fame by his social networking site (Facebook) as a connecting platform and the company has 1.44 billion users on monthly basis.
Achievements and Major Events
In 2010, Zuckerberg won the award of Person of the Year by Times magazine (Lussier & Achua, 2015; Huffing Post, 2010). Moreover, in 2011, he was named as one of the Most Influential Jews by an Israeli newspaper known as The Jerusalem Post. One of the main events of his life is the startup named as Education foundation in 2010 with the aim of making improvement of quality of education in public schools. In addition, Zuckerberg and Prischila Chan got married on May 19, 2012 and in 2015 they had a daughter named Max. Furthermore, he regularly contributes to the various social causes and provides funds to Newark Public Schools and San Francisco General Hospital. He also gave $25 million funds along with his wife to help victims of the Ebola disease in West Africa (Famous People, 2016).
In 2012, Mark filed the prospectus for five billion dollars’ initial public offering (IPO) and wrote a letter to investors. He stated that Facebook was introduced to make world more open as well as connected. The investors should be aware that the mission of the company is to revolutionize the ways people spread and take information with improved technologies (Merithew, 2012; Pepitone, 2014). In other words, he identified that connection is the most important purpose of the company (Frier & Chang, 2015). According to a survey conducted by career site named Glass-door in 2013, Mark Zuckerberg was the No. 1 on the list of Top fifty CEOs (Lussier & Achua, 2015).
Part C: Conclusion and Examples
It can be concluded from the above discussion that Zuckerberg’s personality is more open to experience as he inspires people and fearless. It can be determined by the fact that one of the employees of Facebook quoted that “What other CEO has the guts to purchase a chat company for $ 19 B? (Kux, 2016). In addition, his leadership style is transformational (Wagner & Hollenbeck, 2014) as transformational leaders are creative, visionary, empowering and community builders (Hacker & Roberts, 2003).
The example of his transformational leadership is that the current and former employees of the Facebook considered the company as fun place to work due to the way Zuckerberg developed relationship with his staff. Staff members are his best friends and debate is the trademark of staff meetings because Zuckerberg is described as intense listener by his employees (Lussier & Achua, 2015, Caan, 2015). It can also be understood by the fact that an employee of Facebook indicated that after he joined the company in 2010, he started work on the project named graph search. In few months, he received two reviews of Zuckerberg for discussing the project (Kux, 2016).
In relation to courage and moral leadership, Zuckerberg focuses on the corporate social responsibility and ethics. The example of this is the recent sharing of earnings ($5.38 billion) to make the world a better place by upgrading the education system, curing all diseases by the end of century and protect the environment from the climate change. Recently, he announced the proposal that includes his aim to change the world. He stated to have control of Facebook and with the help of his wife to give money for social causes (Frank, 2015).
It can also be concluded from the above discussion that Zuckerberg as a transformational leader focuses on the motivation and empowerment of employees. It can be understood by the fact that he has removed the barriers and traditional hierarchies among executives and other employees. As the office of the CEO has glass walls. He wants his employees to easily approach him and make them feel valued (Caan, 2015). The earlier example of empowering and motivating his employee for the graph search indicates his transformational leadership abilities (Kux, 2016).
As described earlier, the CEO is a good listener and he focuses on the open and two-way communication. The example of this is the open office along with his employees and sharing of ideas, vision and debate in staff meetings (Lussier & Achua, 2015). The letter of him to CEO at the occasion of IPOs is another example of the open communication in which the CEO communicated with the investors about the vision of the company i.e. to be connected (Merithew, 2012). Moreover, the CEO has high level power and influence over the company and his employees. He has legitimate/position power that can be linked to the fact that he single-handedly built the company and used his position to make key decisions regarding investments, employees’ hiring, projects, and other aspects of the company as part of CEO responsibilities (Kux, 2016). In addition, he managed the ownership of the company in a way that give him amazing power to direct the company (Sengupta, 2012).
It is concluded that the CEO has clear vision and strategy to be a successful business entrepreneur. One of the examples of this is the interview of Zuckerberg in which he mentioned that his vision is to connect the people all over the world to provide them opportunities of getting access to jobs, education, health and communications (Frier & Chang, 2015). For this he identified the strategic direction of having multiple Facebook products like WhatsApp, Messenger, Search, Video and Instagram to connect users. Moreover, his strategic direction is to make improvements in advertising for brands, especially on mobile (Shontell, 2014). Last but not the least; as a CEO Zuckerberg promoted the culture of love and values of care. The example of this is the first F8 developer conference, where he stressed on the culture of loving (Pepitone, 2014). Moreover, his donations to social causes are the examples of values based on ethics and CSR.
References
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