Sheryl Sandberg's Tarnished Golden Bullshit
Here, from Bloomberg (via Ad Age), is a sample:

In October 2017, Facebook was preparing for its first-ever congressional hearing on Russia's interference in the U.S. presidential election. Before the public grilling, Sandberg wanted to make a personal visit to Washington D.C., thinking she could smooth things over behind the scenes. But the company didn't have much to say about how it was fixing holes in its system that let Russia run its manipulation campaign, and it didn't have satisfying answers about why it failed to catch the operation. So the company's policy advisers asked Sandberg not to go. And if she did go, they suggested she listen more than talk, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sandberg went anyway, with plenty of talking points. It didn't work. She mostly told lawmakers that Facebook should have moved faster to find problems, and promised to do better. In some cases, like in a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus, the lack of substance backfired. Members of the caucus told the media afterwards that they wanted concrete changes, not promises.

It was the beginning of a campaign that focused largely on the perception of Facebook, not the reality of its flaws. The company said Sandberg took this approach, however unsatisfying, because world leaders were interested in hearing from people in power at Facebook, and it seemed better than not showing up. But The New York Times detailed how Sandberg's side of the organization obfuscated and denied problems. That included hiring a firm that helped Facebook smear critics behind the scenes, in part by linking a Facebook protest group to the billionaire George Soros, who is often the subject of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Duff McDonald writes at Vanity Fair about how Harvard B-school grad Sheryl Sandberg fooled people for quite a while with her stylish veneer of integrity -- but like others in the "leadership" industry (versus the former business culture of developing "managers"), she lacks a "functioning moral compass":

Facebook's leadership culture, as should be clear by now, has been anything but open, transparent, or authentic. A true leader would not have had to write a post defending herself in light of her company's hiring of a P.R. firm, Definers, that leveraged anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about George Soros to deflect attention from Facebook's own missteps. ("I did not know we hired them or about the work they were doing, but I should have," wrote Sandberg, who was hired, in part, to manage Facebook's Washington relationships.) A true leader would not have overseen the company's rampant abuse and sale of user data, after promising the Federal Trade Commission that it would be more responsible about doing so. A true leader would not have spent five whole days staying silent after The New York Times reported on Cambridge Analytica's access and exploitation of Facebook user data in March 2018, only to later claim that she and Zuckerberg had previously asked the source of that leak to destroy said data but had failed to confirm that they had done so. Sandberg and Zuckerberg--another Harvard alum--included the same line in their respective mea culpas: "We have a responsibility to protect your data--if we can't, then we don't deserve to serve you."

That's a hilarious statement for those familiar with the serpentine argot of America's ruling class. Consider the use of the word "serve"--that's the kind of nonsense they spew at McKinsey, working "in service" of their clients when they're just as mercenary and self-interested as the next M.B.A. Does Sheryl Sandberg, the C.O.O. of a company whose primary product is user data, want us to believe she's been trying to "protect" it all this time?

Perhaps on some level, Sandberg, like Zuckerberg, still believes Facebook are the good guys. "They're in Silicon Valley, surrounded by their white liberal friends, peddling their version of how great for society they are because they've been connecting people," a prominent female C.E.O. of a New York-based firm told me. But, she explained, "There's also a kind of entrepreneurial delusion that seems unavoidable when you get that big, that fast. They were too focused on making every sale, making Wall Street happy, raising the stock price, and making themselves rich and self-satisfied. When you get that wealthy, you start to buy your own bullshit."

...Especially when it comes to moral issues like privacy, around which both Sandberg and Facebook have a history of demonstrating poor judgment. While H.B.S. is correct in its assertion that it produces people who can make decisions, the fact of the matter is that they have never emphasized how to make the right ones.

Consider investment banker Bowen McCoy's "The Parable of the Sadhu," published in Harvard Business Review in 1977, and again 20 years later. It addressed what seemed, at least to the H.B.S. crowd, to be an ethical dilemma. McCoy was on a trip to the Himalayas when his expedition encountered a sadhu, or holy man, near death from hypothermia and exposure. Their compassion extended only to clothing the man and leaving him in the sun, before continuing on to the summit. One of McCoy's group saw a "breakdown between the individual ethic and the group ethic," and was gripped by guilt that the climbers had not made absolutely sure that the sadhu made it down the mountain alive. McCoy's response: "Here we are . . . at the apex of one of the most powerful experiences of our lives. . . . What right does an almost naked pilgrim who chooses the wrong trail have to disrupt our lives?"

McCoy later felt guilt over the incident, but his parable nevertheless illustrated the extent to which aspiring managers might justify putting personal accomplishment ahead of collateral damage--including the life of a dying man. The fact that H.B.S. enthusiastically incorporated said parable into its curriculum says far more about the fundamental mindset of the school than almost anything else that has come out of it.

Nobody's expecting business to go all touchy-feely/never mind about the profits. But the difference here is between the veneer of running a much better sort of company and the reality.

RELATED: Here's my piece on Sandberg's book from the New York Observer, "Science Says 'Lean In' Is Filled With Flawed Advice, Likely to Hurt Women."