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Don't Pay for Your MBA: The Faster, Cheaper, Better Way to Get the Business Education You Need

Page 20

by Laurie Pickard


  To broaden and deepen his perspective on the world in the middle of Facebook’s historic rise to global influence, during his 2015 A Year of Books, he read a book every two weeks (including the likes of Vaclav Smil’s Energy: A Beginner’s Guide, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford and Orlanda Ruthven’s Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day) and actively discussed them with the nearly 700,000 followers of the project.

  To get closer to both his own extended family—Chan’s grandparents are Chinese—and the culture and business of the world’s most populous market, he spent five years learning Mandarin and then used it in conversations with Chinese politicians and for entire lectures at Tsinghua University in China where he is a member of the Advisory Board of the School of Economics and Management.

  To show why he felt the new Facebook Live video product was so valuable, he hosted the likes of President Barack Obama, comedian Jerry Seinfeld and the astronauts of the International Space Station on his own Facebook account—with its 70 million fans—and got more viewers than the vast majority of television shows.

  And to face his discomfort with public speaking, he instituted in 2008 a weekly company-wide Q&A—he prefers the hard questions—which to this day remains the heart of Facebook’s culture.

  Just when we thought Steve Jobs’ famous reality distortion field would be the standard by which all future change-makers would be measured, Zuckerberg offers us an approach that may look slightly awkward to the average observer but gives up nothing to Jobs in its effectiveness. Zuckerberg’s doing does more for getting what he holds dear to jump from him to others at Facebook—and beyond—than any keynote. His Facebook is less a “cult of personality” (he is no Jobs, Oprah Winfrey or Bill Clinton) reliant—and waiting—on a single person than it is a “cult of mission” where employees (down to the intern shipping code for a hundred million users in her first week), partners (entire new media companies like Vice and Buzzfeed have been built on Facebook’s distribution) and users (from Egyptian activists to Vin Diesel and his 100 million fans to Southeast Asian micro businesses reinventing commerce, and from the joy of Chewbacca Mom to the profound fear of Diamond Reynolds) can see Zuckerberg’s example and feel not only part of a community but like they can make contributions that may change the world.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pickard, Laurie, author.

  Title: Don’t pay for your MBA : the faster, cheaper, better way to get the business education you need / Laurie Pickard.

  Description: New York, NY : AMACOM, [2017] | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017018326 (print) | LCCN 2017038072 (ebook) | ISBN 9780814438497 (eBook) | ISBN 9780814438480 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Master of business administration degree. | Management--Study and teaching (Higher)

  Classification: LCC HF1111 (ebook) | LCC HF1111 .P53 2017 (print) | DDC 658.0071/1--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017
018326

  © 2018 Laurie Pickard

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  Printed in the United States of America.

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