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Comment by chasing | Hacker News Reader

The metaphor doesn't hold: Yahoo! didn't have a fatal disease, it had failing businesses. This oncologist literally cannot cure certain terminal ailments.

A better metaphor might be: Yahoo! was like an old rusted out car. You hire someone who tells you how they can fix this car, you pay them a lot of money, and then they leave the car in worse shape than when you hired them. How much blame do they deserve?

Which is to say: A new CEO absolutely can turn a failing business around -- that's what she was being paid tons and tons of money to do. If Meyer did feel like Yahoo! was a completely lost cause or that she would be incapable of fixing its problems, then she should not have taken their money. As an extremely wealthy person to begin with, she had that luxury.

In short: She absolutely has culpability in the failure of Yahoo!.

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I don't blame her for making $80M+ just by being herself. I blame the people who hired her for their magical thinking approach to technology.

She wasn't Yahoo!'s mascot -- she was their CEO. If you're CEO, part of your job is accepting blame when things go badly for your company.

Nobody is blaming her for making $80M. She is blamed for not doing things that would have made it better business.

A CEO absolutely can turn a failing business around? Are you sure of that? I don't feel any cognitive dissonance in my belief that, yes, Mayer is responsible for Yahoo's ongoing failure, but also it's quite likely impossible to turn Yahoo around.

Maybe my phrasing was off, but you're misunderstanding my comment. Stepping into a CEO role means you're saying "I can turn this company around." If you fail at that, then you accept the blame. Don't want to catch blame? Don't accept "impossible" jobs.

Also: Yahoo! had a ton of resources in a rapidly-growing industry. I highly doubt turning Yahoo! around would be impossible. Hard, maybe. And maybe many people had already sort of given up the game and moved on to better things. But, again: If you're CEO, it's your responsibility to turn the company around. That's why you get the big bucks.

I think you're misunderstanding my comment, I explicitly stated that yes, Mayer is to blame.

What I was commenting on was the implication that any company can be turned around. I don't think that's true.

The point that is trying to be made by chasing I think is that Yahoo had a better chance then your average "any" company would have to make a turn around possible.

CEOs get the credit when the company does well and they get paid extraordinarily well. Either they don't deserve that credit and shouldn't get paid nearly as well as they do, or they should get just as much credit when the company fails. None of this heads I win, tails you lose bullshit.

How are you disagreeing with what I said?

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