The real Mark Zuckerberg is not like the movie character

By Larry Magid

for Mercury News

I recently watched the movie "The Social Network," and a few days later spent some time with the real Mark Zuckerberg. I was on the Facebook campus for a press announcement of some new products, including a "dashboard" to better manage applications and "Groups," which enables Facebook users to interact with subgroups of their friends rather than their entire friends' list.

After the announcement, I sat down with Zuckerberg and a couple of other people for an informal chat and, later that night, saw him again at a screening of "Waiting for Superman" that he co-hosted at a Palo Alto theater.
This wasn't the first time I've met the Facebook CEO, but it was my first encounter with him since watching Jesse Eisenberg play him on the big screen. Eisenberg is an excellent actor and Aaron Sorkin wrote a terrific script. But the Mark Zuckerberg I saw in "The Social Network" is very different from the guy I had lunch with and the person who introduced that other gripping movie later that night.
Unlike the fictional character, the real Zuckerberg is energetic, thoughtful and responsive. He looks you in the eye, listens to what you say and responds accordingly. He is far from the withdrawn and socially awkward character portrayed in the movie. And despite whatever mistakes he may have made in his late teens or very early twenties, he is emerging as a leader not just because of his wealth and success at Facebook but because of his vision, tenacity  and the way he interacts with people around him, including Facebook employees. And unlike many CEOs, when Zuckerberg speaks publicly, he just stands there and talks -- no notes, no PowerPoint and no canned speeches written by PR consultants.
There are some similarities between the real Zuckerberg and the one in the movie. Like the movie character, he has a strong desire to use technology to make social connections. But in addition to building a business that's already made him into a billionaire, he's also focused on trying to find ways to enable people to use technology to tap into and thoughtfully expand their "social graph" in ways that make them want to share information with people who matter to them.
Although most of the lunchtime conversation was informal, I did get Zuckerberg's permission to bring out a voice recorder to capture one sound bite for my daily CBS News radio feature. While often derided for not protecting the privacy of Facebook users, he spoke about ways to limit your Facebook universe to only people you are close to in the real world.
Talking about the new "Groups" product, he said "there are a lot of things you want to share with all your friends at once but there are also things that you only want to share with your family or some co-workers." He added, "If you don't have a way to do that, you just won't share them at all. But now that people have tools to do that very easily, we expect that a lot of people will use Facebook as their tool to communicate and stay in touch with these groups of people that are really important to them."
He also spoke about the very social and human approach Facebook is using to help people identify whom they ought to include in their Facebook Groups. "We could have used algorithms," he said, but instead decided to take advantage of Facebook's strength by letting people's friends help determine who should be in groups. There are no automated systems to suggest groupings. Instead, Facebook lets people tag their friends and uses that data to suggest groupings.
When I listened to Zuckerberg again that night at the theater, I saw yet another side of this complicated young executive. I knew he recently donated $100 million to help beleaguered Newark, N.J., schools, but when he spoke briefly before "Waiting for Superman" started, it was the first time I heard him talk about educational reform.
The movie drove that message home. American schools are broken and in need of radical change. But the movie also offered hope as it profiled schools like Harlem's Success Academy, Washington, D.C.,'s Seed School and Redwood City's Summit Preparatory Charter High School -- all places dedicated to excellent education for low-income youth.
As I watched "Waiting for Superman," I thought about the differences between our schools and a lot of companies here in Silicon Valley, including Facebook. Schools, like companies, have a job to do, and the ones that execute best are typically the ones that will thrive. So in thinking about what it takes to create a good school, it might be worth looking at what it takes to run a great company, and that almost always starts at the top.
What Facebook, Apple, Google and other great companies have in common with great schools are leaders who are energetic, creative and share a strong sense of purpose. They're also willing to experiment and try different approaches until they get it right.
As anyone in consumer products will tell you, success is always related to giving the customers what they need or want. In schools the "customers" are the children and their families, not the teachers, administrators or school officials. As Washington, D.C., public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee said in the movie, it's time for schools to focus on the needs of children, not the adults who work in the schools.
Now that he's paying attention to education, perhaps Zuckerberg can make a difference. Maybe someone will create a mashup between the two recent movies. It could be called "Waiting for Zuckerberg.