Global Leadership Report 2022

Running head: GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
Global Leadership
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

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1. Introduction
Leadership in the modern era demands living by enduring the principles that produce
success and then augmenting them with the new behaviours and qualities that can enable the
speed, risk-tasking, flexibility, obsession with the goals and high communication level within
a team or an organisation. 21st century world is all about technology, data, advancements,
innovation and creativity. Technology today is so advanced that it a company needs to plan
about its data protection and privacy first before even planning the business (Mokyr, Vickers
and Ziebarth 2015). The organisational leaders struggle with the challenges in various
different forms for the last two decades and have still to find out some generalizable
solutions. This paper shall elaborate on analysing a leadership situation and a leader who was
involved in it. It would be the situation related to global leadership within organisational
context. A brief description about the involvement of the leader shall be presented in this
report using some leadership concepts and theories. Based on the analysis of the very
situation, certain recommendations shall be developed for the future leadership who wish for
thriving as effective leaders in the modern complex and dynamic global business context. The
chosen situation for this purpose is that of Facebook Privacy Issue in the year 2019.
2. Discussion
2.1. About the situation
The selected situation is that of the very recent event of “Facebook Privacy Issue” that
took place in the beginning of the year 2019. It is considered to be one of the several privacy
issues that Facebook has had to deal with in such a short time of existence (Kulcu and Turkay
2014). The scandal was centred around the collection of personally identifiable information
of about 87 million individuals all around the world by the strategic communication and
political consulting company named “Cambridge Analytica” (Isaak and Hanna 2018). The

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company was able to get access to the personally identifiable data and information by means
of a personality quiz application called the “thisisyourdigitallife”. The information that were
gathered by that application was useful in building some “psychographic” profiles of the
users and adding that application to their Facebook accounts for taking quizzes gave the
creator of the application easy access to the profile information as well as user history of the
users who used to take the quiz as well as their friends that they had on Facebook. The
company as well as the others were easily able to gain all the access to the personal data of
the Facebook users because of the confluence of different factors including lack of safeguards
against the firms that are engaged into data harvesting, very little to absolutely no oversight
of the developers of Facebook, Facebook users agreeing to the overly broad terms and
conditions and the developer abuse of the Facebook API.
According to the researchers this could be used for accurately predicting the different
range of highly sensitive personal attributes like ethnicity, sexual orientation, and
intelligence, use of any kind of addictive substances, political and religious views, personality
traits, happiness, sadness, gender, age, and parental separation. They noted that “less than 5%
of users labelled as gay were connected with explicitly gay groups," but that liking "Juicy
Couture" and "Adam Lambert" are likes indicative of gay men, while "WWE" and "Being
Confused After Waking Up From Naps" are likes indicative of straight men” (Schneble,
Elger and Shaw 2018).
2.2. Leaders involved and their involvement
It is Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook who was responsible for the situation.
He was born in the year 1984 in White Plains, New York (Sorensen 2018). During his studies
in Harvard University, Mark dropped out of college for focusing on a social network project
and it was when he created Facebook, which each and every individual in this world is aware
with today. He is a highly motivated person who keeps a goal-oriented mind-set. He is highly

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focused on leading his team for producing the best social media platform in the entire world.
All these years, it was the leadership of Zuckerberg that has influenced the success and
employee satisfaction of Facebook. He is also considered to be the youngest billionaire on the
planet and the CEO of Facebook, the world’s most popular website.
2.3. The global business context (the concept of leadership)
Seeing Facebook, the world’s most renowned company in the news and newspapers
facilitate the conversations around the leadership of the company, the business practices and
what does the term “privacy” actually means in the modern era. It is to note that Mark
Zuckerberg is a transformational leader and as a transformational leader, he has learned from
his mistakes, took immense risks in his life and has grown and developed his company as a
visionary leader. With the help of his self-determination, self-awareness and the help of his
mentors, Mark Zuckerberg has been successfully placed on the list of top ten CEOs in the
world and has built the most popular social network in the entire world. It is to mention that
transactional leaders always focus on maintaining a normal workflow of business operations,
neither more nor less. They use some disciplinary powers, awards and some array of
incentives for motivating their employees for performing their best. These types of leaders
are also highly focused and determined to satisfy their quotas on a daily basis. They tend to
go beyond their normal activities of daily and focus mainly on the creation of solid team of
employees by means of promoting team building. Firestone (2014) too in this context have
claimed that “transformational leaders motivate their employees through setting goals,
implementing incentives, and providing opportunities for personal and professional growth”.
He is widely known for being a motivator and a mentor who inspire his employees
and staffs with a clear goal and vision on the future of the company. With the same, he also
defines the different steps that are required for achieving those goals. His ideas are highly
disruptive and the level of confidence that he possess is worth applaud. He is a very