Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Villain or Hero?

The release of the movie The Social Network about Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg raises a good question about who succeeds in business. For the New York Times, quoting Gawker founder Nick Denton, it's the issue of "whether it is possible to be successful without being at least a bit of a brute."
Despite what you have probably read in the leadership literature, the answer to the question is almost certainly "no."
Even Robert Sutton's bestseller, The No Asshole Rule, has a chapter giving the brutes their due. He presents the evidence that bad behavior often leads to gains in personal power and stature as it helps individuals intimidate and vanquish rivals. At the level of organizational effects, he allows that it can motivate perfectionism and bring underperformers to their senses.
To those grudging compliments I would add another line of defense: People committed to an idea are often so focused on getting the idea implemented that they are insensitive to their effects on others. Their focus, persistence, and resilience blocks out anything that stands in their way — and the feelings of others belong in that category. That might be the story with Zuckerberg.
For that matter, it is probably a big part of Laura Esserman's success. She's the breast cancer surgeon and medical visionary who is featured in Chip and Dan Heath's book Switch and in a recent Wall Street Journal article (which by the way only hints at her achievement, because it covers just one of her four profoundly influential initiatives). Esserman is, by her own admission, quick to anger and sometimes hard on those who work with her. With 45,000 women in the U.S. still dying each year from breast cancer, she has an impatience for progress that is hard to begrudge. Sometimes that overrides her desire to be liked.

The fact is that people who get great things done are, like the rest of us, imperfect human beings. They have weaknesses alongside their strengths, and bad days interspersed with the good. They exhibit both appropriate and inappropriate behavior. This reality seems tough to accept. When I teach my course on power, students typically try to infer people's underlying motivations, decide if they "like" the characters we are studying, and determine whether individuals are "good" or "bad." This human leaning toward oversimplified judgments has a number of negative consequences.
First, it retards learning. Once people determine someone is "bad" or "flawed," they think they don't have much to learn from that individual. That's wrong — we should be focused on learning from all people and all situations. This is true because, as the research literature teaches us, we can learn as much from failures as from successes. It's also true because even a deeply flawed leader can have a strength worth emulating.
Second, characterizing multiply-dimensioned human beings into oversimplified categories like "good" or "bad" inevitably can only deceive us. It eliminates nuance and inappropriately reduces the complex nature of human behavior and social life. A reductionist view may make things seem clearer, but provides a not very veridical view of the world and the people with whom we need to interact.
Third, it resists useful revision. Once we categorize someone, we stop paying attention to their actual behavior and instead assimilate everything into our (already formed) judgments. That compromises our ability to interact effectively with those around us. For the "good," we become too trusting, not seeing the possibility of self-interested behavior on their part. As for the "bad," we foreclose the whole idea of interacting with people who might be beneficial.
Fourth and maybe most importantly, our creation of "heroes" or "villains" is potentially immobilizing. Author and teacher Michael Eric Dyson explains this eloquently as he reveals the dangers of lionizing leaders. Dr. Martin Luther King, for example, was flesh and blood, and "investing in King's perfection allows us to dismiss the humanity of the underregarded." Dyson notes that we would be better off to allow the man his imperfections because "with a more nuanced view of King in play, we should be inspired to create social change in our communities, armed with the belief that good things can be done by imperfect people." Similarly, commenting on the revelation that Jesse Jackson fathered a child out of wedlock, Dyson points out that "leaders cannot possibly satisfy the demand for purity that some make" and that leaders who believe they are heroes "often possess a self-satisfaction that stifles genuine leadership." Leaders, and others, who recognize that good and bad runs through every human being, are more likely to be prudent, not overconfident, and more humble.
It may be true that the search for, and construction of, heroes and villains is inevitable in literature and film and in life. One way to experience The Social Network is with the sense that we must consign Mark Zuckerberg to the one category or the other. But if we really want to understand social behavior, well enough to get important things done, we would be well served to recognize that the keys to success will never be as simple as that.

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