Name: Leadership Trait
Uploaded: 2015-06-15
Duration: 3 min 3 s
Description: Leadership Trait

[ Opening Music ] What leadership trait have you most struggled to have? I think one of the things is I am just a much better risk manager, so when I think about judgement You know, I joined Chai in 1982 from 1982 until 9 / 11 I had never really seen a black swan event in the economy, you know. US economy grew 3. 5, 4 % every year. Inflation was low. The US economy was the biggest in the world. There just wasn't a lot of what I would call big risk events. In the last decade I've seen a bunch of Taylor- esque events. Right? So if you talk to leaders in Brazil, they say they learned everything about management in the early 90s in Brazil when you had hyper inflation, the currency was devaluing, We don't know anything about anybody in this room, or anybody on Facebook when times are good. We know nothing about you. We only get to judge how good a leader you are when things, you know, the projects are late, something's failing. Somebody's doing something wrong. And that's the way, you know? That's the way you learn. So I would say I'm a much better risk manager. Then it was a decade ago. You wrote in your last letter to shareholders, which you told me that you write that yourself. The whole thing. It's good. It's long, it's good. Nothing worse than a math and physics major writing a thousand words. [ LAUGH ] It's pretty brutal the first couple times. [ LAUGH ] But you did say, that I don't know if you called it a flaw, but you said mistaking tailwind for success, which is this very idea. But it's the mistake of mistaking tailwind for good management, which is the notion of just because you're, the moment you're riding a wave Is the moment when you should be the most paranoid. So the last time I was on this campus it was some micro systems right? So Scott Mckneely was on the GE board, that was the last time I was here. So I keep that in mind for all of the young Facebook team to say that's how fast it goes. And it goes back to your other question. At scale at a big company the role of the GE team for the last decade has been to recreate it. We didn't have momentum. We had to recreate the company, never hiding from fortune. Never hiding from anybody else, but with a company let's say always close to a $ 300 billion marketing cab company, completely transition. That was our job to do, and that's what everybody has to figure out. It's what's the task you have to make your company great in the area you're in. [ APPLAUSE ]