Five years. This is how long did Sheryl Sandberg imagine she would spend on Facebook, now called Meta, when she took over as chief operating officer and Mark Zuckerberg’s very enthusiastic partner in 2008. Enough time to modulate the company’s boastful culture in something sustainable, build a highly successful advertising business and establish a political operation in DC. And establish itself as an international standard for women executives. Then he would leave, perhaps to run for office or to run a giant company like Disney.
But it wasn’t until today, 14 years later, that Sheryl Sandberg announced she would leave the company. For an ambitious corporate superstar like Sandberg, 14 years in the same position, and not the superior, is an eternity. Most observers pointed to her as leaving some time ago, either forced by the company’s reputation as a result of relentless scandals of privacy and content management, or simply tired of having to defend everything. time. But it lasted so long that even the name of the company changed.
So who can deny the flowery prose of his 1,529-word farewell message, suitable for an average “I have personal news” essay, but posted faithfully on the blue Facebook Feed app, where he thanked his colleagues profusely. And boasted of everything. the good things your business did for your users and small business owners. He even cited a random woman in Poland selling stuffed animals on the platform. Like any other public communication from it, it was carefully crafted, to the point that it was hard to tell that the company was among the most punished in the world. The biting part of the news did not come in his optimistic resignation letter, but in Zuckerberg’s farewell.
Sandberg’s tenure would always be overshadowed by the agreement he made with Zuckerberg when he joined. While reporting to Zuckerberg, the then 23-year-old CEO gave him enormous autonomy over certain parts of the business: the non-product-related domains that least interested him. It made sense for Sandberg to take over selling ads. But according to The Deal, his world also included communications, lobbying, politics, and other non-engineering areas. At one point, the security chief informed the attorney general, who informed Sandberg. When things went awry after the 2016 election, problems in Sheryl’s world took a long time to find their way to Zuckerberg. The consequences were disastrous. Zuckerberg later explained to me that he did not see The Deal as a mistake, but a necessity. “It would have been impossible, without having life experience in all of these areas, to internalize all the different parts of what it might be like to run a business,” he told me.
In his post today, Zuckerberg gratefully praised his outgoing director of operations. But while Sandberg’s essay painted his tenure in the most rosy tones imaginable, Zuckerberg’s statement was a giant corporate course correction. He proclaimed that Sandberg’s departure was the end of an era, and then ordered changes to Meta’s organization to make sure nothing like that happened again. Sandberg’s putative successor, Javier Olivan, will take on “a more traditional COO role,” he wrote. Olivan, who cut his teeth at the company’s rampant growth organization, will not run parts of the company on his own, as Sheryl originally did.
Part of that had already been in motion. The first major change came last year when Zuckerberg handed over responsibility for politics and communications to senior vice president Nick Clegg, who previously briefed Sandberg. Legal director Jennifer Newstead was also transferred to a direct report from Zuckerberg. But today, even though Zuckerberg was celebrating Sandberg, he broke his organization and put it more directly under his control. HR chief Lori Goler will also report to him. This puts Maxine Williams, the director of diversity, also in the domain of Zuckerberg.
