外媒評(píng)論：Facebook是一家危險(xiǎn)的公司

There’s a telling anecdote in Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes’ recent op-ed arguing that it’s time to break up the social media giant. When Yahoo sought to buy Facebook for $1 billion back in 2006, CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted because he didn’t like the idea of working for Yahoo’s then-boss, Terry Semel.

“Outside of a couple of gigs in college,” Hughes writes, “Mark had never had a real boss and seemed entirely uninterested in the prospect.”

Not much has changed on that count. Facebook is a public company now and it has a board of directors, but Zuckerberg, who serves as board chair, still controls around 60% of the voting shares.

This set-up effectively reduces the power of the board to that of an advisory body, Hughes argues. Nor does Zuckerberg answer to government overseers, who have largely left the internet an unregulated playground.

All these years, Zuckerberg has never had to worry much about accountability. And that helps explain his weaknesses as a leader, which have in turn led Facebook into its current mess.

A big part of the appeal of entrepreneurship is that you get to be your own boss. But that’s a privilege best appreciated by those who’ve already had the experience of working for someone else. “You actually learn how to manage and you get some mentoring,” says Stanford University management professor Robert Sutton, the author of Good Boss, Bad Boss and The Asshole Survival Guide. Even a bad boss helps you figure out what not to do.