The Empathy Advantage

Part IIIRethinking Your Leadership

“I'm CEO, bitch …”¹

The storied tagline on Mark Zuckerberg's early business cards, made famous in the 2010 docudrama The Social Network and confirmed by the designer who created the card, speaks volumes about the young founder and the culture of leadership he created. “It's no secret that Mark looked up to Steve Jobs,” Andrew Bosworth wrote in response to a question about the tagline on the query site Quora. Zuckerberg ran meetings “in that classic ‘aggressive’ Steve Jobs‐style. It was during one of those meetings where I remember him first uttering the phrase, ‘I'm CEO, bitch …’”

Boswell recalls Zuckerberg's business cards as “an excellent representation of the company culture at the time. Their [eventual] replacement reflected the changes a young Facebook needed to go through in order to be where it is today.”

Whether grounded in insecurity or arrogance or something in between, young Zuckerberg's story echoes across generations of leaders who presume that to lead is to be the unquestioned boss, the one with all the answers, and all the authority. It's a tall order to be the one in charge, and many leaders, feeling they aren't up for the challenge, overcompensate with a business card, a booming voice, an intemperate management style. That “impression management,” first described in 1959 by Erving Goffman in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, is the conscious or subconscious behavioral adjustments in order to present oneself ...