Facebook: The Six-Year-Old Fuddy Duddy
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sorry. Really. Sort of. Responding to one privacy-related debacle after another in an op-ed in the Washington Post, he promises a "simpler way to control your information." Sounds like all the other times the company has offered the same thing.
Facebook finds itself trapped in an irony that snares many high tech companies. Technology thrives on change. However, when it comes to managing business strategies and tactics, companies like Facebook are as flexible as a creaking neighborhood crank. Eventually the lack of suppleness will hurt.
"Agility" is a big concept in technology. Managers adopt flexible processes and respond incrementally to changing conditions and needs. Done well, an agile approach saves total time and resources a business must invest in a project and often delivers superior results compared to old "stay the course" methods.
Tech companies, particularly ones founded within the last 10 or 12 years, are associated with being nimble. And they generally are -- in technology. But the agile thinking seems to stop at the lab door. When it comes to overall strategy and objectives, tech companies, particularly new ones, seem as ham-handed as any behemoth, and as inflexible in reconsidering tactics as an arthritic octogenarian is in modern dance.
A further irony is that Facebook has often acted like a corporate adolescent. The two aspects of youth and clumsiness aren't incompatible. Young people are often flexible in how they move, but not in how they approach problems. Parents often ruefully enjoy stories about sons and daughters who keep pushing and pushing until finally getting their way.
Pigheadedness can work at times. However, it's an ill-advised encompassing approach to business barriers. Good programmers will tell you that they never give up on solving a problem, but how they get from point A to point B can change enormously. That's because they're working in an agile way and realize that achieving the goal is more important than having a given code segment be shown "right."
Facebook has been a textbook example of a company that wanted to keep moving in the same direction, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that a radical change in tactics was necessary. Zuckerberg promises a new approach to privacy? He and his company have done that multiple times, and each time reneged on the promise. The most recent example showed how a long-repeated promise that advertisers never have access to individual customers' identities was utterly empty.
Managers don't solve problems by hoping they go away. Nevertheless, trying to burnish the image isn't the answer. Dallas Lawrence a managing director at PR firm Burson-Marsteller, pointed to Google as an example that Facebook could follow. Why? "Google's response was to aggressively educate global regulators and privacy experts while dramatically expanding their Washington, DC footprint." I suspect Lawrence applauds the use of PR more than the results. Just in the last few weeks, Google has again tripped itself over privacy and has shown itself a PR embarrassment.
More important than image is to reexamine business strategy and priorities and develop some agility so management plans for the best method to achieve underlying goals, not tactics to simply get its own way. The former is mature and effective. The latter embodies intransigence and is childish.
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