“Move fast and break things” was his favorite motto. A mantra that Mark Zuckerberg repeated countless times in the early days of Facebook. However, twenty years later, his approach has evolved along with his company, now known as Meta. Throughout these two decades, Zuckerberg has shared a series of notable pieces of advice that have influenced the way he leads teams and manages one of the largest companies in the world.
In a recent interview with Forbes, Zuckerberg shared some of the most valuable lessons he’s learned about leadership and business management. With a mix of humility and confidence, the Meta founder detailed how his approach has evolved over the years, adapting to the challenges and opportunities that have arisen along the way.
Zuckerberg admitted one of His “most controversial” leadership advice for business leaders is to avoid delegating responsibilities. According to him, a founder should be involved in as many decisions and aspects of the company as possible.
“That’s something that I think I’ve gained confidence in over time, it’s like feeling like I can delve into everything and take it in the direction that I believe. You learn, rinse and repeat. The goal is to do good work over a long period of time,” he added.
Zuckerberg values efficiency in meetings, following a rule that allows him to read materials in advance and reflect on them. For each meeting time, you prefer to spend an hour beforehand to review documents and an hour afterward to follow up. This practice ensures that meetings are productive and that all participants are well informed.
“You’re probably worrying too much about the competition,” Zuckerberg says, adding, “Instead, focus on executing.”
“I think most companies probably focus too much on the competitors, and maybe even too much in the ideas,” he explained. “And I think, at the end of the day, Much of what makes great companies great is the ability to execute relentlessly.execute efficiently and do it rigorously and get better and better at it all the time.”
Meta announced new company values in 2022, one of which was “Move Fast.” This is an abbreviated version of the best-known saying of Zuckerberg: “Move fast and break things,” a mantra from the early days of Facebook.
Over the years, the board became “advance fast with stable infrastructure” in 2014 before becoming simply “act fast” in 2022.
During that year, the company came to define moving fast asor “act urgently and don’t wait until next week to do something you could do today” and “continuously work to increase the speed of the initiatives of highest priority by methodically removing the barriers that stand in the way.”
Zuckerberg proclaimed 2023 as a “year of efficiency” for Goal and explained that its objective is that The company will “flatten” its organizational structure by “eliminating some layers of middle management.”
“I don’t think you want a management structure in which only managers manage managers, but rather manage the people who do the work,” he said. Zuckerberg in an internal question and answer session last year. So Goal eliminated 11,000 jobs in November 2022 and cut another 10,000 in March 2023.
