Sheryl Sandberg & Dieter Zetsche: Meeting of the Giants | me convention

Are you all excited for our next session? Yes, me too. So our next guests really need no introduction, so please join me in welcoming Cheryl and Dieter. Welcome, Cheryl. I'm so happy that you accepted the invitation. I think it's a great opportunity between these two companies, 13 years, 130 years, to exchange notes. It's true. Thank you. Thank you all. I've never been to a car show before, so this is the biggest and the best, and it's great to be here. And you're exactly right. We are 13 years old. You are 130 years old. We would love to make sure we're around that long, but you never know, and so it's a great opportunity for me to join you but also learn from you. Well, that should have been my line. Obviously, we are coming from different venues, different industries, and as we just heard, different lengths of existence. But I think we are having much in common as well. When you were facing the change from the laptop to mobile devices, your business model was in question. I think it was kind of disruptive, so how did you deal with that? Well, this industry started with bicycles and moved to cars, so I answer this question knowing we have not made the biggest shift. But for us, it was a really big shift. Facebook was started 13 years ago, and we were started as a desktop app. And then the shift to mobile started happening, and it happened way faster than we ever could have predicted. And as Mark Zuckerberg, our CEO, said, had we been started just a few years later, we would have been started as a mobile app. But as we were making that shift, we actually bet on the wrong technology. We made the wrong decisions, and there was no way of knowing that. But our apps were slow, not native. They were not working. And so we had to make a really hard decision, which is to make a really hard shift to mobile. And one of these shifts are easier to say and harder to do. So what Mark did is we have all-hands meetings for our whole company. Our company was small then, and still is relatively small. We have a little over 20,000 people. Only 2 billion customers. But from a company point of view, Mark did a big all-hands, and he said, we're going to be a mobile-first company. Mobile-first. And do you know what happened and what changed? Nothing. Nothing changed. People marched into Mark's product reviews, and they had their slides, and they had their product, and they had 20 desktop screenshots, and then the last page was mobile. And so Mark said, I'm not going to do this anymore, unless your mobile screenshot is first. And so really, Mark didn't have many product meetings for the next week or so. Everyone canceled their meetings. We're like, we don't know how to draw that. We did not have mobile engineers. But Mark had to say, we're going to go mobile first, and you had to make a real shift. And I think all of us know this. Very few companies fail by moving too quickly. Companies fail much more often by moving too slowly. And so one of the questions we ask ourselves all the time is, are we moving quickly enough? Are we adapting quickly enough? There's a shift to mobile. There's a shift to video. There's a shift in how people are communicating, and we want to make sure we stay up to date. And I know everyone in this industry is working on so many forward-leaning things that have the same goal, to be up to date on the technology and deliver the very best products to consumers. There's definitely a big similarity for us. It's four areas right now where there's kind of disruptive change. This is the connected car, which obviously is all digital. It's the autonomous car, which is based on artificial intelligence and digitalization. It's sharing, and it's electrification. In all four areas, take sharing. Of course, we love to sell cars. So we could have said, let's try to avoid people using car sharing. We were convinced if it's disruptive, it's better that we disrupt than being disrupted. And that's why we are today with Catego, the largest car sharing offer in the world. And we are not making much money with that yet, but it's definitely the right way to go where the customer demand is, and then learn how to make that successful over time. And so I think that is a real similarity between the two companies. It might be even more difficult after 120 years to go for these kind of, then 130 years, these kind of changes. But you're saying it's not easy either, one year. No, it's not easy in anyone in this audience. And you really have to go all in to do it. So when we think about the way we partner with companies, and I know we do some great work with your great company, or what I hope is great work with your great company, you get to judge that. We think about how you reach your consumers and how you talk to your consumers. And the lines are crossing. People are still watching a lot of TV, and TV remains very important for marketing. But in Germany last year, the average person watched an hour of 3 1⁄2 hours of TV and 3 3⁄4 hours on digital, two hours of which is on a mobile phone. And that is the part that's growing really quickly. And so the question we have is, are companies trying to reach their consumers and putting their marketing energy and time and resources against where consumers are spending their time? And I think if you look at how most organizations review their marketing from the biggest company, usually the biggest, not always the smallest, they start where they always started. It's always TV first, radio, print. And that's still really important. Companies should be doing all of that. But consumers are spending an increasing amount of digital. And if digital and mobile and social is always the last thing in the review, it's always going to be the last thought. And one thing we suggest to companies is, you should be doing all of this marketing, but you should look at where your customers are spending their time. And you should map your time and your attention to where your customers are spending their time and their attention. Good news is that certainly we have much more potential to grow in this regard. But on relative terms, not too bad. We are now the number one of companies and the last fiercest competitor we had to reach the number one position in clicks, in likes, in followers, was not BMW, was not Audi, was not whoever. It was Victoria's Secret. But now we have beaten them as well. We are really happy. And obviously, the car is a very emotional product too. And cars are important products, right? I mean, cars are important on a personal level. Cars are often a deep part of people's identity. Cars are also a part of people's daily lives in a very fundamental way. Cars have also, you know this, this audience knows this better than I do, a huge impact on society. And in many ways, while we work in very different industries, I think our industries have had some similar, us for a much shorter period of time. Again, we are in awe of your longevity and ability to do it over 100 years. But cars change the way people connect to each other, as does the technology we work on. Both organizations change the way jobs are done. Both organizations have a real impact on small business. We have small businesses, the Mittelstand here, using Facebook to grow. And this is everything from a very technically savvy company to a furniture maker, to the baker, to the cupcake store. There are 300 million people in the world that have connected to a company in the Mittelstand in Germany, or to a large company in Germany. And the Mittelstand in Germany have told us that 13% of them are making more than half their revenue from Facebook. That's because technology, just like the car, is changing how people are doing business. And I think one of the areas we both work on is the impact we have on people's lives. We know we have a really deep responsibility, not just to connect people, but to help connect people for good. To be a responsible company, to be a good citizen, a big investor in Germany, as well as around the world. And that's something we take really seriously. I mean, that exactly thrives us. Our founders obviously have changed the world by inventing the individual mobility with the automobile, giving more freedom, more range to people. And the conundrum is that this tremendous success of the vehicle is its biggest enemy, because this creates all the traffic jams. That's even though one vehicle has almost no emissions, if you multiply it by all the vehicles, you get an issue with this as well. So our mission is to overcome these problems, have accident-free driving, have emission-free driving, and to make sure that with new technologies we can maintain the freedom of individual mobility without sacrificing the environment or society at large. And that's again where we connect people in different fields. And beyond that, 20 years ago, your industry was kind of in the beginning and we hadn't much to do with each other. Today, the digital world and the automotive world is totally merging and integrating. Perhaps we are the biggest smartphone on wheels and we have more line code in S-Class than Android or iOS or any other operational system has. So we are coming closer and closer, and therefore there's tremendous opportunity in working together. And we're grateful for that opportunity. It's definitely the case that technology is infiltrating everything, that the car has so much code. When I first learned how many lines of code just the average, you know, these cars have, it's pretty incredible. And I think the responsibility you talk about to society is so important. One of the things we think about is that we are a very global company. So we have 2 billion people using our product. We started in the United States in California, but more than 85% of the people who use Facebook are outside of California. And so Germany, for example, is a really important country to us. And we want to be great corporate citizens here. So we've made a lot of investments. One of the reasons I was here, it was really exciting. We got to announce that we were joining the Mobility Hub, which is a program here to really invest, bringing academics, all of us together. I know you were part of this. We're grateful for the participation of so many people in this audience. When I was here in January, we announced that we were working with a digital learning school. And this is a really exciting program because it's teaching children, refugees, and the elderly, people who are not part of the technical revolution. They're teaching children to code, and importantly, girls as much as boys. They're working on a lot of girls learning to code. Teach your daughters to code, everyone. A little side message. Yeah. It really matters. But they're also teaching people who are older how to literally use smartphones. And I got to visit them yesterday because we announced yesterday that we're making an even bigger investment because it's paying off and working so well. And what you have in these programs is you have refugees coming over. I know that's been a real thing for this society. And they're actually very digitally sophisticated, but they don't speak German. So they're teaching these older citizens how to use phones. And in turn, those citizens are speaking to them in German. And so they're learning a language that's going to help them succeed. And they're passing on digital skills. And why this matters for us is we don't want to leave anyone behind. We know digital skills are so important. And so we want to make that investment here with local partners so that no one is left behind. We also announced yesterday that we're working with Code University. We signed the papers right here at the IAA to help students, and importantly, students of all financial backgrounds, because it's going to be tuition free until you graduate, really help study computer science. And again, with an eye towards getting people, there's so many talented people here. And we've seen from the car industry that when people get the skills, right? Apprenticeships, I believe, started here, or one of the early large-scale adopters of apprenticeships for the car industry. If we teach people the digital skills, it moves the German economy forward. It moves the United States economy. It moves all of us forward. And that's something we're very serious about investing in here. You have written the book, Lean In. I've read it. And obviously, thank you. Let's start there. I like to read it. And I think we are faced with the same challenge that altogether we don't have enough people to decide for learning how to code and so on. But especially we don't find enough young girls to decide for that direction. We're having initiatives like Genius, for instance, where we're going to the schools, to the kindergartens, to the higher schools and have information about technology, about simple things in the beginning and then more complicated things, and try to create excitement for technology, for IT, and especially for girls. But still, in German technical universities, we have like 10% female participation, whereas in other courses, we have 50%, 60%. And we need them. We need them desperately. We're now on our board with 25% women, higher than any other tax company. But altogether, I'm pushing every year one percentage more of women in our leadership ranks. And we are succeeding. And so in 100 years, we will be 100%. No, we're already at 20%. But what is your experience? What can we do to be more successful in exciting girls, women to this direction? Well, it's such an important question. I'm always doubly happy when a male CEO asks me that question. So I really want to thank you for bringing this up. So I'm going to ask a question. Men only, please, men only. Please raise your hand if you were called bossy as a little boy. Only men. Women, raise your hand if you were called bossy as a little girl. So we know that little boys are just as aggressive and assertive as little girls. In blind studies, often more so. Why do we call girls bossy and not boys? That's because when a little boy leads, we expect it. But when a little girl leads, it goes against our expectations. And as human beings, this is men and women. I want to be clear. These biases are just as much held by women against women as men against women. We don't like it. And so it goes against our expectations. Fast forward so many years, and that's why we are where we are. It's interesting to be on the stage with someone from Germany. In politics, you guys have done a fantastic job. Right? I have a friend. She had a five-year-old boy. They live in Berlin. He said, well, I can't be chancellor. I'm not a girl. You know? Is that a forecast for the upcoming election? No kid in America. I stay out of this. No kid in America has ever said that. Your upper and lower house are 37% and 39% women. It's got to be one of the very, very, very best numbers in the world. We don't have any of that. We're 20%. The corporate sector, Germany is not doing as well. You know, we're at 5% of what is the Fortune 500 CEOs. You're at zero. Zero percent. The pipeline to those jobs are just kind of 25% to 30% in America. You're at four. So that means that your 20% numbers you're citing seem very good. But let's be clear. It's the same challenge. This leadership challenge is so real. Now, because it's culture, it means we can change it. Ready? This weekend, everyone here, you go out to a playground. You see a little girl called Bossy, probably by her parents. You walk right up to her and you say, that little girl is not Bossy. That little girl has executive leadership skills. So wait, wait. It's okay. I'm going to pause and double click on that as we say at Silicon Valley. Ready? Let's try it the other way. That little boy has executive leadership skills. There's no humor. And that's been true in every audience. I've now done this hundreds of times around the world. Now, why is that? Because humor is what we don't expect. We laugh because it's unexpected. So even today in this room with all of these amazing leaders, women's leadership is funny. And that's what we can change. We can change by encouraging little girls to lead, encouraging little girls to go into computer science, and encouraging them to lead. Go through all your performance reviews at work. Do literally a search for the word aggressive. And what you will find is more women are being told that than men. Take that out. Go through your performance reviews at work and look for the word ambitious. He's ambitious. That is a compliment. She's ambitious. That is an insult. Just right here on the stage, you can change that. The people in this room, you can change that in your companies today. And while you're at it, make sure you're paying women the same as men for the same level of performance and the same jobs. I agree with all what you said. And I think we made quite some progress in this regard. And that's why we are moving forward with the results as well. But, of course, we have somewhat different conditions in the societies as well. For instance, the school in Germany typically is half day is an issue. Which makes it more difficult to take care of your kids. Which still has been done more by the mothers than by the fathers. So there are processes and tools which we have to address as well. We have in all of our locations places to take care of the kids from zero to three. And this is not just you give them there and then they are kept for you. But we have the bilingual teachers looking after them from zero to three. We are looking at their nutrition. We are looking at how they move, how they deal with each other. So they are very well being taken care of. And that's why their mothers and their fathers are relaxed and happy. And knowing they're doing the best for the kid and they can grow themselves as well. And these things I think are important too. That's really great. Childcare is a huge issue here. It's a huge issue around the world. The division of labor in the home is a huge issue. Women in Germany and heterosexual couples do three to four times the amount of childcare and the amount of housework their husbands do. The gap is not that big in the United States but it's still there and it's still real. And one thing that's worth knowing is that an equal household where little girls see their fathers doing more household chores really benefits those children. So at any income level, anywhere in the world, this is important. Little children, boys and girls who see, who have more engagement with their fathers, they do better. They do better in school. They do better in jobs. They do better emotionally. They have better connections to both parents. So this is important for your marriage. Marriages that are more even are more stable. Lower depression rates for women. Less divorce. And I hope it's okay to say this, more sex. So I tell men all over the world, if you want to do something great for your wife tonight, don't buy flowers, do laundry. Now... You can do both too? Yes, so I said this on one of the late night TV shows and the head of FTD, it's the largest flower delivery service in the world who I'd never met, sent me the largest bouquet you ever saw and it said, can't you tell men to do laundry and buy flowers? And so I have to change my message. Gentlemen, laundry and flowers. But if you're only going to do one, pick the laundry. And I want to share a really important reason why. By the age of 14, little girls who see their fathers do household chores, this is very important. You can't just say, oh, darling, you can be anything you want to be, as your wife does all the work. You have to see your father do household chores. Those girls have broader career aspirations than others. So if you see your father do household chores and you're asked what you can be, you will say the traditional female roles plus an astronaut, plus a scientist, plus the CEO of BMW, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz, the CEO of Chrysler. If you do not see your father do that, no matter what your parents say, you will actually limit your career goals by age 14 to the more traditional ones. Go home and do laundry for your daughters, gentlemen. It's going to work. I have three kids. I've done a lot for them. Mostly not laundry. Not too late. And no, absolutely not. Let's talk about leadership in a more general way. We are, in our company, 10 years, 20 years ago, the board, we knew how to build an axle and we could tell people how to do that. We get in great access or whatever with a car. When it comes to digital, almost everyone in the company knows more about that than we in the board. So I think it's very important that we reflect that in our leadership. structures, that we do understand that we are setting the framework and that we're getting much more empowerment and more agile workforms, more networks, teamwork and not these top-down hierarchic strategies. We are working very hard in this transformation and again when with this age there are some ingrained habits which to overcome is not that easy but we make tremendous progress. But I would like to ask is what we see as ideal all day at Facebook or are you seeing challenges in this regard as well? Well there are always challenges, right? We try to be a really open and transparent workplace internally and we try to be very transparent externally. We try to run our company in many ways on our products. So we have a version of Facebook that's now available to other companies called Workplace where we share really openly. So at Facebook we have no offices, we're organized in an open floor space with everyone else. We do a company Q&A, anyone can ask any question and we are using internally you know controlled within our IT system so only people who work at Facebook can be on there. We're using Groups, we're using Messenger, we're using our own product and I would really encourage people to think about how you're with your colleagues and your employees because however you're communicating will be reflective in the products you build. And that's one thing we do and I know again you guys have been around a lot longer so we have a lot to learn from you about how you grow a company. These are now 290 000 people and therefore you cannot talk to every single one and convince him or her about what you want to go. What was extremely successful for us in this cultural change is that we decided we cannot as the result should be more bottom-up dynamics, we cannot instill this program top-down. So we asked about 150 people, we asked everybody who wants to join and there were thousands who wanted immediately work. We had 150 working together virtually in the beginning because they were all around the globe, men, women, directors, kids who started just before in the company from all venues and we gave them the task you develop the culture of our company in 2020 and there are no limitations. You can't be bold enough, just make a real revolutionary change in your proposal. And then after we sent them on that message and that was only three months they had we thought oh this is crazy, there's no chance that they can succeed with this tremendous task which we couldn't stamp and we were totally overwhelmed that three months later they came and presented to us an overall program with 150 significant elements which were clustered into eight game changers addressing all fields between the education, the work form, swarm organization, crowdfunding for innovation internally, open sources, many many things which are now one and a half years later I would say 50 percent implemented and the good thing is as it started bottom-up we don't have to tell people you have to do that but this is spreading almost automatically. People do understand even though we are more successful than we ever were before we have to change faster than we ever changed before because of all these disruptive developments and people are open for change and I have never seen so much momentum in this way we work together than it's today and that's really encouraging and again some of the examples we are taking are of course some of the companies in the valley. Well obviously that's a great example and I know so many people here are facing these changes. One thing we talk about a lot is that the times only get faster. What made you a child prodigy in math or on the violin when I was a child does not make you a child prodigy today. What made you I met an amazing female formula one driver where is she I don't know if she's here right before she's here somewhere anyway whatever I know very little about this even though I'm oh there she is wave yeah it's pretty cool hello exciting to meet her but she's the wife of Toto Wolf our head of our formula one racing teams and but she's a racer herself and whatever the time and she's now retired but whatever the times were when she was racing I'm sure the times are not not slower now they're faster and that means that whatever the bar is your company hits today will not be sufficient going forward you need to get better and we hold ourselves to that we don't always get better we we need to improve we need to learn we also need to rapidly iterate from mistakes we make we need to make sure that that when we have challenges we're learning really quickly and one of the things I wrote about in my new book is building resilience in companies. Resilience is something that's personally very close to my heart and something I've really needed in the last few years and we don't just build it in ourselves we build it in our companies and one of the most important ways we build resilience in our companies is we embrace and learn from failure rather than sweep it under the rug when the mistakes happen we get together in a room and we debrief and we openly say here's what I could have done better here's what I could have done better here's what I needed to do and we're really trying to live that at Facebook. That is a very important topic for us and a challenging one when we build the next generation s-class our aspiration is to build the best car in the world and our aspiration is that it's perfect and when it comes to the customer that's what we want the customers to tell us so we cannot say well great we had a beautiful failure and everybody loves it so that is the one we do not want to change this this drive which is following the claim the best or nothing on the other hand when it comes to the apps we are building to all the new startups we are starting we only can be fast if we try things and they don't work and then we try it again and we go with a better version to the first customers are giving us feedback and then we continue so that is more the approach you are taking and now we have to bring both together to say this doesn't mean that it doesn't matter anymore if you have a perfect quality at your s-class but it's still important that you're willing to accept the risk to go for something new which can fail which which can produce results which are not sustainable and having both in one company and help each other to to go this direction is a very big challenge but i'm glad that we are more and more seeing both of it coming together now it's definitely it's definitely important to figure out what has to be perfection close to confection and how we learn on the way there on the way to that launch absolutely absolutely what do you see as the biggest or one of the biggest challenges for facebook moving forward let's say the next five years we've thought a lot about this we had a mission that we still deeply believe in for a long time which is about connecting people the world got smaller when people had the power to share and connect and we still believe in that there's billions of people who are not yet connected to data and we believe that connecting more people is truly important but when we hit two billion people on facebook something we never dreamed would happen in our wildest dreams we realized that connecting wasn't enough we had to connect for good and so led by our founder mark we changed our mission and he came out with a new mission which is give people the power to build community and and and share in that way and when we think about who we are as human beings and i think this goes to the importance of the car as well it is about connecting when we drive somewhere we are going towards something and that something is almost always a someone it is a person on the end of that road and when we think about who we are as human beings you notice it up here i am a facebook employee and colleague i'm a mother i am a friend i am a daughter right and in any of those aspects i have a community around me i'm on a mom's group on facebook i have a group a messenger i i message all the time with my childhood friends my friends i whatsapp all day with my sister and we want to help people not just share but really connect on a human and deep level i will never sit up here and say everything that happens on facebook or whatsapp or instagram is for good we know that's not true we're working hard to get anything that's not for good down and down before it even gets launched and we're doing better but we have a ways to go with so many people using our platform we take but we take our responsibility to society very seriously it's why we're making so many local investments in germany but it's also why we changed our mission to be a company that's about community about helping us share on a personal level and you know part of it that's what brings us all together today we come from very different industries but as you said industries that are coming closer together this is another form of a community and we think the more we affiliate with communities the more we can share who we are and what we care about the smaller and better the world becomes i mean i definitely experienced that personally i was born in istanbul turkey and my family was living there for four years and it was on its own so there was no connection to germany that was far away and it took six weeks to send a letter or have a fax with two lines that was already expensive and now my my kids are living two of them in the s and and one somewhere else in germany but not next door and we are together all the time based on the ways you can communicate today all the time but i think there's a risk as well and we're discussing about that sometimes that people start to think that the virtual world is the only world left and that's where i do believe that it's as important to keep mobility so that we can have personal contact which still adds another element when you feel each other when when there's all around you which you cannot transport via facebook or whatsapp or facetime and that is where our mission lies that we help people to keep in control of their own physical destiny and be still able to move from a to b and that goes as far that we're saying now we have invested into a company called startup volocopter where we'll be able in these cities which are jammed with cars to still go from a to b just using the third dimension and there lies our main mission to have this connection of people in a physical way continue to be possible without or with lesser and lesser downside as far as accidents and emissions are concerned and that's a great goal so thank you so much everyone thank you thank you very much it's a pleasure thank you thank you that was great thanks all right another big round of applause that was fantastic so just one quick housekeeping note wanted to mention that at 1 45 pm the sessions start up again so you have a few minutes to get a coffee downstairs a light snack the room again will be divided and we will see you back in here in a little bit thank you so much