‘Doing something bigger in the world’
Zuckerberg says values, mission will become increasingly important for companies
When Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a nearly 5,800-word open letter on Feb. 16 — the longest single post he had ever shared on his Facebook timeline — he introduced it with this simple phrase: “I know a lot of us are thinking about how we can make the most positive impact in the world right now.”
At that moment, many other businesses, from Google to Starbucks, were publicly fighting policies proposed by President Donald Trump, most notably in the area of immigration. But Zuckerberg didn’t mention the president or politics. Instead, he posed a broader question: “Are we building the world we all want?” Facebook, he argued, had a responsibility to help people.
It was a mission statement, shared just as discussion of business leadership’s relationship to government leadership was reaching a fever pitch. Facebook itself had been stung by critiques of its role in “fake news” and “filter bubbles.” Implicit in Zuckerberg’s letter was the idea that, despite Facebook’s vacuuming up piles of cash, its real purpose wasn’t to make money. It was to make the world a better place.
From automakers such as Ford and Audi to fashion houses like Gucci and Ralph Lauren, companies are increasingly seeking to align their commercial activities with larger social and cultural values — not just because it makes them look good, but because employees and customers have started to insist on it. Some efforts are clearly reactions to the political environment and the divisiveness surrounding Trump.
Five years ago, before Facebook’s IPO, Zuckerberg posted what he called a “founder’s letter” that spelled out the company’s philosophy for prospective investors. “We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money,” Zuckerberg wrote. Instead, Facebook “was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”
I recently sat down with Zuckerberg to discuss this letter and his latest one in order to learn how his thinking might have changed over time. Facebook’s offices have grown to become a sprawling empire in Menlo Park, Calif., with bulldozers busily constructing new expansions.
“I didn’t start Facebook as a business,” Zuckerberg says. “I built it because I wanted this thing to exist in my community. Over some number of years, I came to the realization that the only way to build it out to what I wanted was if it had a good economic engine behind it.” In this way, he notes, “Facebook has always been a mission-driven company.”
The open letter Zuckerberg posted in February “wasn’t exactly a follow-up” to the founder’s letter, he says. “The founder’s letter was written for shareholders buying into the IPO to understand how the company operated.” The new letter “had a different goal, less about how we work and more about what we’re going to do.”
What’s changed dramatically since 2012, according to Zuckerberg, is the rising skepticism about global connectivity.
“When we were getting started in 2004, the idea of connecting the world was not really a controversial idea . ... People thought that this was good,” he says. “But in the last few years, that has shifted, right? And it’s not just the U.S. It’s also across Europe and Asia. Folks who have been left behind by globalization are making their voices louder.” Zuckerberg explains, “I feel like someone needs to be making the case for why connecting people is good, and we are one of the organizations that I think should be doing that.”
I mention several of the ways that some corporations express their values — Starbucks committing to hiring refugees, for instance, or others that engage in charitable giving. But Zuckerberg isn’t steering Facebook toward external social action or philanthropy.
“I think the core operation of what you do should be aimed at making the change that you want,” he replies. “A lot of companies do nice things with small parts of their resources. I would hope that our core mission is the main thing we want to accomplish: making the world more open and connected. Almost all of our resources go toward that.
“When I want to do stuff like invest in education and science and immigration reform and criminal justice reform,” he goes on, “I do that through a different organization, through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.” (He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, created CZI to make good on their pledge to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares during their lifetime.) “It’s not that people (at Facebook) don’t believe in those kinds of things. I just think building social infrastructure for a global community (is Facebook’s) mission.”
Within that mission, Facebook has created tools that enable charitable fundraising as well as societal support (like its Safety Check feature, which has helped people find each other during crises).
There is often skepticism when companies claim to be values- or mission-based, because near-term financial results seem to take precedence over other purported corporate values. When I ask Zuckerberg about this, he doesn’t acknowledge any disconnect between satisfying a higher mission and meeting financial goals.
“People want business leaders — and all leaders — to be authentic and stand for things,” he says.
Then Zuckerberg brings up the fake-news controversy that hit Facebook in the past year — the contention that the company wasn’t vigilant in removing inaccurate, politically motivated posts by fictional news outlets because they generated ad revenue. His voice rises in intensity.
“One of the most frustrating things is when people assume that we don’t do something because it will cost us money. Take, for example, some of the debates going on now around the news industry and misinformation. I mean, there’s definitely a strain of criticism (asserting) that Facebook (lets) people share misinformation because it will make (us) more money. And that really is just not true at all.”
The underlying value that drives Facebook’s content decisions, Zuckerberg says, is freedom of speech. “I believe more strongly than ever that giving the most voice to the most people will be this positive force in society,” he says. “Often when you make decisions that aren’t exactly what people want, they think you’re doing it for some underhanded business reason. But a lot of these things are more values-backed than people may realize.”
Zuckerberg does recognize that there may sometimes be unintended consequences to Facebook’s actions. “It’s a work in progress,” he admits. “At each point, you uncover new issues that you need to solve to get to the next level.”
He asserts that in the future, all businesses will increasingly need to tap into values and mission, and that consumers and employees will demand it.
“Especially with folks who are millennials, that is going to be the default,” he says. “When I started Facebook, there were a lot of questions around, ‘Is this a reasonable way to build a company?’ And then when more millennials started graduating from college and we went to recruit them, it became very clear that they wanted to work somewhere that wasn’t just about building a business, but that was about doing something bigger in the world.”