Zuckerberg Memo Outlines Management Based on Efficiency

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg is getting a lot of love from Wall Street, which saw the company’s stock add $100 billion in value in Q1, largely on the basis of announcing layoffs. Now the 38-year-old is getting attention for a 2,200-word staff memo that has garnered high marks for candor even as he eliminates another 1o,000 jobs. “Last year was a humbling wake-up call,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew, and our growth slowed considerably.” Streamlining while working more strategically is the foundation of what Zuckerberg has coined a “year of efficiency.”

“Cancel unnecessary projects. Eliminate middle management. Flatten the corporate hierarchy. Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday laid out to staff an updated vision of how he wants Facebook owner Meta Platforms to operate,” is how The Wall Street Journal sums up the communique, “punctuated by headings such as ‘flatter is faster’ and ‘leaner is better.’”

The memo spelled out Meta’s plans to eliminate 10,000 jobs in the coming months, with an additional 5,000 open positions to go unfilled. In November, the company announced 11,000 job cuts. Zuckerberg has positioned the surgical trimming as an antidote to overexpansion during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when online activity surged, only to contract as things normalized.

Zuckerberg is not alone in focusing on fiscal sobriety. “After years of emphasizing growth, many executives have turned their focus inward in recent months, looking for any chance to improve operations and speed up decision making,” WSJ writes, citing executives from Ford Motor Company to Salesforce stressing increased productivity on recent earnings calls. Zuckergerg’s approach hints at a return to the company’s roots.

“Meta intends to remove multiple layers of management and convert many managers into employees with no supervisory responsibilities. Those employees will then report to almost every layer of the organization … to improve communication across the company,” WSJ reports, noting “low-priority projects will be killed. Internal tools will be strengthened to help software engineers write code faster.”

As a result, “people will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling,” Zuckerberg wrote, noting that “since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster. In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects.”

The New York Times podcast “Hard Fork” notes that after the 2022 layoffs Meta still had about 76,000 employees. With the newly announced cuts “they have now cut more people than Twitter ever had working for it,” revealed a conversation on the podcast that suggests Zuckerberg is achieving what Twitter CEO Elon Musk was attempting.

Engadget says this latest round of layoffs “might take until the end of 2023 to complete.”

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