Mark Zuckerberg hates meetings, too

What does Mark Zuckerberg love? His AR glasses that tell him how to behave like a human, gold chains, manosphere podcasts, and smoking meat.

And what does Mark Zuckerberg hate? Meetings and managing people, apparently.

On Tuesday, at a fireside chat during Stripe’s annual Sessions conference in San Francisco, Stripe co-founder John Collison, the moderator, asked the tech mogul for “the Mark Zuckerberg management book,” or where his leadership style might “differ from the orthodoxy.”

The line of questioning came up, in part, because of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s appearance at the same conference last year, where he outlined some of his unconventional leadership decisions, like managing 60 direct reports and personally maintaining zero work-life balance. (Fun!)

But Huang is Huang, and Zuckerberg is Zuckerberg.

Since founding Facebook in 2004 as an undergrad, Zuckerberg’s shifting public personas—from boy genius in Adidas slides to aforementioned gold chain wearer—and his stilted mannerisms have often taken center stage ahead of his management style. (During the chat, Zuckerberg acknowledged he was “famously awkward,” and we’re not about to argue.)

So, does a “famously awkward” man run his company any differently than a CEO famous for his notably cool leather jacket collection? (And can CFOs, be they awkward or cool, learn anything from it?)

“I don’t have 60 direct reports,” Zuckerberg said, in reference to Huang’s unique move. “I don’t even like managing people,” he continued, to laughter from the audience. See above: famously awkward.

Instead, the company, like many, is organized “thematically,” he explained, where all app-related workflows, for example, report to one person, and the same goes for ads, infrastructure, and on.

“Obviously, those people are brilliant, and I work with them super closely, but I also go directly to the people who are running whatever the thing is that I care about,” he said. “We’re very non-hierarchical in that way. I think of our management team as not really just my direct reports; it’s sort of like this broader group of 25 to 30 people who I try to include in everything.”

So…he has 25 or 30 direct reports? “Probably more,” Zuckerberg acknowledged, to more laughter from the audience. But don’t expect him to treat them as traditional direct reports.

“What’s the point of having direct reports if you’re not going to do one-on-ones?” he asked, still contemplating the prospect of having 60 instead of 30-ish immediate underlings. Then, he answered his own question: “Well, I actually don’t do one-on-ones with the people that report to me either.”

But that’s not to say he isn’t communicating with this core group.

“When I say I don’t have one-on-ones, I don’t have recurring, scheduled one-on-ones,” Zuckerberg added. “I talk to all these people constantly, more than they want to talk to me, I’m sure. But I do it when I have something that I want to talk to them about, or if they want to talk to me; I try to generally keep a bunch of time open, so that way stuff is pretty dynamic.”

That’s part of a broader philosophy for this core group. “I really try to minimize standing meetings,” he said. He only has two per week with the smaller group: “an open-ended strategy discussion,” and then an operational meeting about company priorities. “And that is it,” Zuckerberg clarified.

The setup allows him to actually prioritize the most important tasks on a given day—even when they’re constantly shifting.

“I get really frustrated and [in a] bad mood if my whole day is scheduled, and there’s a thing that I know is really important, and I don’t get time to do it because I’m sitting in other things that are not the most important thing to be doing,” he said. “You have too many days like that in a row and I just explode.”