Boz Did Not Urge Facebook To Pursue Growth At All Costs. What He Did Was Worse.

I am troubled by the spin that first Buzzfeed and then The Washington Post and others put on the "Boz" memo. There's no question that the memo demonstrated questionable judgment on the part of a Facebook senior executive. But if we are going to put pressure on the company to fix their ills, we have to apply the pressure on the right issues.

The memo is being characterized by many in the media as an appeal to pursue growth at any cost. And that is not at all what it said. To paraphrase, it said something like "our mission is to connect people, and we believe so strongly that that mission is worthwhile that we accept the bad consequences – and there will be bad consequences – because they are outweighed by the good." That is a fundamental statement of moral values – not dissimilar to the idea of the "just war," or many a religion's passionate attempt to convert unbelievers. It is the kind of passion that inspired the Crusaders a thousand years ago and Jihadis today.

The problem with Boz's memo is not that it encouraged "growth at all costs," but that it urged acceptance of serious downsides as the cost of pursuing Facebook's mission, rather than calling on the company to work harder to anticipate and counteract those downsides. I liked The Atlantic's take on the Boz memo, "Why Facebook's 'Ugly' Memo Should Be Praised," far better than most of what has been written about it, but it didn't go far enough. It praised the memo for raising difficult issues, but failed to point out that companies need to do more than discuss the moral issues raised by their products. They must address them!

The point I make repeatedly in my talks is that what Silicon Valley companies do at their best is constant improvement of their algorithms and services, to take into account and to repair problems that they identify. Why was this expertise – which Facebook so ably put to work in service of growth – not put to work to try to eliminate or compensate for Facebook's perceived risks? As my friend Andrew Singer once said, "The skill of debugging is to find out what you really told your program to do instead of what you thought you told it to do." Facebook thought they were telling their programs to connect people, but they were also allowing them to do other things, bad things. Facebook's job was to find and fix those other bad things, not to tell themselves that the end justified the means.

That was Boz's sin: that having identified these major downsides, he urged Facebook to accept them rather than to fix them!

Meanwhile, the stories excoriating Facebook for its relentless pursuit of growth skate by our society's acceptance of and praise for a financial system that demands growth at all costs. And the narrative that excuses that system is very like the one that is being attributed to Facebook in the many headlines and stories published today: "If we reward shareholders and pursue growth and the profit imperative, there will be bad consequences, but overall we believe that the net will be positive."

We can do better than that. 

It is the job of every company to balance the gains and losses from its strategy, and not just the gains and losses to itself, but to all its stakeholders and to society as a whole.

So this memo (and all the articles about it) should be rewritten as a call for every company to look in the mirror, to face up to the negative consequences of its business, and to engage in a constant crusade to do better.

There's a lot more about this topic in my book, WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, and in my Next:Economy newsletter. Read more at wtfeconomy.com.