Imagine being Mark Zuckerberg, trying to think of your annual ‘personal challenge’ for 2019, after the 2018 that Facebook had. Yet the social network’s CEO is sticking to his guns of choosing a new challenge every January (in the past that’s included learning Mandarin, building an AI for his home and running 365 miles).
And this year? “My challenge for 2019 is to host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society – the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties,” he wrote. “Every few weeks I’ll talk with leaders, experts, and people in our community from different fields and I’ll try different formats to keep it interesting. These will all be public, either on my Facebook or Instagram pages or on other media… I’m going to put myself out there more than I’ve been comfortable with and engage more in some of these debates about the future, the tradeoffs we face, and where we want to go.”
If he’s prepared to include critics in these events, it could be genuinely useful and interesting. That said, there are still some challenges to tackle within his own company: see CNBC’s latest report for one example. It claims that “the company’s leadership and its performance review system has created a culture where any dissent is discouraged” – and where that system “drives employees to push out products and features that drive user engagement without fully considering potential long-term negative impacts on user experience or privacy”. Maybe that’s a good topic for the CEO’s first public debate of 2019…
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Tools: Kaiber
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