By Ekaterina Walter

Dave Thackeray
Jul 25, 2017 · 2 min read

Once I’d read this book I decided I would be happy to sacrifice my humanity to become the spirit animal of author Ekaterina. It would be a hideous manifestation; half hyena, half Rhodesian ridgeback. But I’d be loyal and lap up whatever it was she put in front of me.

Everything espoused formulaically by Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg is bang on in accordance with my heart values.

We hear that Facebook’s mysterious chief builds his world around these elements:

  • Passion
  • Purpose
  • People
  • Product
  • Partnerships

Anyone who’s followed me for even the shortest time will know I have a major crush on passion, purpose and people. I haven’t yet invested much time cogitating on the last two because I have never created (aside from my book, Sharing Superheroes, and a ten-part guide to making incredible web video) what I would describe as a product. And partnerships, well, that’s what you do when you want to get stronger. It’s part of life. I didn’t imagine that deserved its own section in a book.

Yet far from being vanishingly useful, Walter’s entry on Partnerships makes you think in a whole new way about the power of growing your network with meaningful alliances.

Whenever I hear from Zuck’s right-hand woman, Sheryl Sandberg, I glean that he is obsessive about harvesting the very best from his people. He has supported her intensely through her recent chapter of grief, and together they are a machine that is unparalleled, in strength, and in alignment in values and objectives, anywhere in Silicon Valley.

His passion is clear. Zuck has devoted half his life to date on connecting the world through Facebook. His purpose, publicly, is abject: to make civilisation more civil, and free. So the People section in Walters’ book makes absolute sense; it’s a corollary to the other four aspects of what makes Zuck, Zuck.

Walters is a formidable journalist and she’s brought together some of the finest intelligence on Zuck to make a book that’s fascinating as a study but light on ideas for practical execution by the reader.

But don’t miss it if you, like myself, are fascinated by how we’ve got where we are. And why Facebook is borderline immoveable when it comes to its position as king of our technological world.

Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg is available now on Amazon.

Book reviews

Mostly business, sometimes fiction, almost always both

Dave Thackeray

Written by

Founder of Word And Mouth | Host of #Thacknology

Book reviews

Mostly business, sometimes fiction, almost always both

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