In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal, there has been a glaring lack of leadership from Facebook. Almost five days of silence passed before its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, faced the public with a post to his Facebook profile and a series of well-rehearsed interviews with handpicked media outlets.
As the public bayed “Where’s Mark?”, his right-hand woman, Sheryl Sandberg, has avoided much of the scrutiny, in spite of the fact that she is the architect of Facebook’s data-centric advertising business and a highly skilled communicator.
As the social network faces its biggest reputation crisis yet, critics are asking if the author Lean In, a book about leadership in business, is choosing to lean out of the limelight.
“It’s truly remarkable that Sandberg hasn’t come under greater public scrutiny for this crisis, since she is widely perceived to be the ‘adult’ who was hired to manage these kinds of political situations in a savvy way for the company,” said Kara Alaimo, assistant professor of public relations at Hofstra University.
Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist who said he encouraged Mark Zuckerberg to hire Sandberg, and who helped poach her from Google about a decade ago, pointed out the executive had long been “applauded for Facebook’s extraordinary growth and profitability”. “Now that the dark side of that success has been exposed, she needs to do a better job of accepting responsibility for the consequences of the choices she makes,” he said.
“She’s not leaning in at all,” McNamee said, in a reference Sandberg’s widely read book published five years ago. “If ever there was a time for her to lean in, this is it.”
Sandberg joined Facebook as chief operating officer from Google in March 2008, at a time when Facebook was growing rapidly but bleeding cash. She brought a wealth of managerial and operations experience, emotional intelligence, political acumen and, crucially, first-hand knowledge of how to build a sophisticated advertising business based on user data.
At Google, Sandberg was instrumental in developing the company’s lucrative advertising programs, AdWords and AdSense. As soon as she arrived at Facebook, Sandberg asked staff what business Facebook was in. “Everyone had their own ideas,” she told Vanity Fair in 2013. “But through that process, the people who were the important decision-makers became committed to ads.”
Under Sandberg’s leadership, an ad model that took advantage of Facebook’s social graph emerged, starting with “engagement ads” that invited users to “like” the page of an advertiser and interact with the brand. Later, Facebook developed “custom audiences”, allowing external advertisers to merge the data they had about individuals with Facebook’s data.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
