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'One-trick pony' Zuckerberg yet to prove CEO worth

Show me the money... bitch

Mark Zuckerberg’s CEO abilities are glorified and the Facebook boydroid is yet to prove his worth, according to IT analyst house Forrester.

George Colony wrote on his 'The Counterintuitive CEO' blog yesterday that Zuckerberg was “a one-trick pony – a leader who has expertly refined and polished one very, very big idea – remaining unproven beyond the borders of that idea.”

In recent months Zuckerberg’s media profile has rocketed with the release of David Fincher’s Hollywood movie The Social Network, which the Harvard drop-out has largely dismissed as a fictitious account of Facebook’s early years.

Furthermore, the Zuck one leapfrogged Apple boss Steve Jobs in September to become one of Forbes’s wealthiest Americans, taking the number 35 spot in the top 100 list.

It said the 26-year-old had a net worth of $6.9bn, of which $4bn was dropped into his piggy bank this year.

But, as pointed out by Colony, he’s not actually worthy of such accolades yet.

“The great CEOs in technology navigate their companies through product change, brutal competitive threats, shifts in architecture, and highly fickle customers,” he wrote.

“Steve Jobs is not important because he had one creative moment. He is important because his creativity has yielded important products across three generations of customers and four unique generations of computing.”

At present the valuation of Facebook is “irrational” said Colony, because the world is still waiting for Zuckerberg to turn his business into a “monetary engine”.

The young upstart has a long way to go by Colony’s reckoning. Zuckerberg could yet become a CEO as respected as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or else he might simply turn out to be more like Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang. In other words, a chief whipping boy for the Web2.0 generation. ®

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