How Mark Zuckerberg Effectively Communicates Facebook’s New 5-Word Mission Statement

Author: Carmine Gallo / Source: Forbes

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• Zuckerberg’s slide summarized the vision in just five words.
• Ineffective leaders under communicate the vision by a factor of ten.

Facebook is a service that connects friends, families and groups. At least, that’s the way founder Mark Zuckerberg promoted the platform for its first ten years. Today he’s creating a new vision to guide the company for the next ten years. And he’s using an effective leadership method to do it.

Speaking in Chicago at Facebook’s first Communities Summit, Zuckerberg said, “For the last decade we’ve been focusing on making the world more open and connected…We have a responsibility to bring the world closer together.” Zuckerberg then introduced the company’s new mission statement, a vision that will act as the company’s guiding light. Zuckerberg, said Facebook, will exist “to give people the power to build community to bring the world closer together.”

Zuckerberg’s slide summarized the vision in just five words.

Bring the world closer together

One month ago, Zuckerberg articulated the vision in his Harvard commencement speech. The word ‘communities’ appears sixteen times.

“In our generation, the struggle of whether we connect more, whether we achieve our biggest opportunities, comes down to this — your ability to build communities and create a world where every single person has a sense of purpose,” he told the graduates.

As a former Harvard student and a current student of leadership, Zuckerberg might be familiar with the work of Harvard professor John Kotter. Kotter wrote a major paper on why business transformations often fail. Kotter concluded that one critical error that leaders make is failing to communicate a clear and concise vision.

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