The mindset of Meta
I would rather complain about Facebook then have to look at Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to the 11,000 employees he just let go.
It’s a sad day when technology is not meeting the market. For all those employees, I have a feeling there’s a bright future after they adjust to the insanity they face today. These are some of the best people in the technology industry. Overall, Meta has been on a tear hiring ever better year over a year and seeing the financials follow.
The technology we build computes a mindset calculation for the leader ship of a company. For Meta, we have calculated a 10 year history of hiring mindsets. The graphs below indicate improved mindset hiring across six major mindset types over the last 10 years. The black lines indicate net income, revenue and employee growth.
The dotted lines indicate the connectivity of that hiring to the changes in financials. As long as those two lines don’t cross, you’re fine. Just as Mark indicated something started to change and they overestimated the market. Would it have been possible for Mark to hire better people at a higher rate? I think so. He would have had to step up the type of people hired in order to adapt to market conditions better. At the same time proactively adjusting people that don’t fit could’ve been done years ago. It’s something that Amazon, Microsoft and Google practice all the time.
How to read this chart.
Mindset hiring of opportunistic, disciplined as well as results driven people have just recently crossed. Sometime in 2021 hiring experts dipped below and crossed. That means less expert started to join the company than the demands placed upon the company to perform. Not good.
The real trouble is degradation of systems thinking and holistic thinkers starting in 2016. That’s really not good. These are the people that are capable of pivoting the company. Somebody that lives by a rulebook and dies by a rulebook is not going to be the person who creates the new rule book. Mark’s trying to re-create a rulebook and keep the old one functioning. Some people call that dual transformation. Losing systems thinkers and holistic thinkers is not how you pull off dual transformation.
Next steps:
Mark, I hope you did not lay off the highly capable, lights on thinkers. Regardless, I plan on coming back to this article and seeing what is the distribution of mindset. Retaining those system stinkers is going to be really important if your aspirational goals are to be met. It’s a sad day for anyone making a living on the Internet. I sure hope they rebalance the team in the right way.