MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Do Founder CEOs Tune Out Their Teams?

Founders need advice more than other managers do, but they are also more likely to ignore it.

Facebook’s user base grew at an exponential rate after Mark Zuckerberg founded the site in his Harvard dormitory in 2004. Remarkably, today Facebook boasts over 2 billion registered users — that’s more than the number of citizens of any single nation, speakers of any specific language, or members of any one religion. Though Zuckerberg guided the company through product development early on, its rapid growth brought new challenges associated with making the business profitable, expanding overseas, and developing an advertising network. To accomplish these tasks, and to comfort outsiders who worried about the young founder’s ability to take Facebook to the next level, Zuckerberg in 2008 hired chief operating officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg and other key executives to assist him as CEO.

About the Author

Christopher Bingham is the Phillip Hettleman Distinguished Scholar and a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bradley Hendricks is an assistant professor of accounting at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Travis Howell is an assistant professor of strategy at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine.

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