"As the public bayed “Where’s Mark?”, his right-hand woman, Sheryl Sandberg, has avoided much of the scrutiny, despite the fact that she is the architect of Facebook’s data-centric advertising business and a highly skilled communicator.
As the social network faces its biggest reputation crisis yet, critics are asking if the author of Lean In, a book about leadership in business, is choosing to lean out of the limelight.
“It’s truly remarkable that Sandberg hasn’t come under greater public scrutiny for this crisis, since she is widely perceived to be the ‘adult’ who was hired to manage these kinds of political situations in a savvy way for the company,” said Kara Alaimo, assistant professor of public relations at Hofstra University.
Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist who said he encouraged Mark Zuckerberg to hire Sandberg, and who helped poach her from Google about a decade ago, pointed out the executive had long been “applauded for Facebook’s extraordinary growth and profitability”. “Now that the dark side of that success has been exposed, she needs to do a better job of accepting responsibility for the consequences of the choices she makes,” he said."
