Sheryl Sandberg deserves much blame for the bad decisions at Facebook but, with most criticism directed at her, Mark Zuckerberg largely escapes scrutiny
Perhaps it's only fair that, as women like Sheryl Sandberg rise to power, they pay the price for failure.
Context & Ripple Effects
This op-ed lands days after the New York Times' own interviews with more than 50 people detailed how Facebook stumbled through successive crises and how Zuckerberg and Sandberg initially tried to obscure the failures. It extends that reporting into an argument about who pays for it: Sandberg, whose role had already been shown to expand after the delayed Cambridge Analytica response in WSJ sourcing on her growing responsibilities.
The framing matters because the Zuckerberg-Sandberg paradigm — a brash founder CEO paired with an operational COO cleaning up around him — has been Silicon Valley's template for divided leadership. The piece argues the template now functions asymmetrically: shared decisions, but the criticism flows toward the COO.
First-order effects
- Public blame for Facebook's crisis mismanagement concentrates on Sheryl Sandberg, even though her own earlier admission was that she and Zuckerberg jointly underinvested in safety and security.
- Mark Zuckerberg retains his position as the less-scrutinized half of the leadership pair, with the criticism directed at the COO rather than the founder who controls the company.
Second-order effects
- Other companies running the founder-plus-COO model face pressure to show their operational executives are not absorbing blame designed to shield founders, a question LinkedIn commentary has already raised about the paradigm itself.
- Facebook's crisis communications become harder to manage when its two leaders are publicly positioned against each other in accountability terms, raising the cost of every subsequent disclosure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Silicon Valley's governance debate shifts from individual executive conduct to structural accountability — whether founder-controlled boards can insulate founders from consequences that fall on lieutenants, a question regulators and investors may eventually test.
The trend: Silicon Valley is reassessing whether the brash-founder-and-fix-it-COO division of labor has become a mechanism for deflecting founder accountability.