I like how it's possible to go from contributing nothing to Yahoo (whose value was basically proportional to their share in Alibaba minus a small bit) to being a top contender for CEO at another company.
a) name recognition in the industry
b) past experience managing large companies
Whether they failed or not is almost irrelevant.
Boards would vote for an arguable incapable Marissa Mayer over some super successful but unknown higher middle manager from Google because she is perceived as less of a risk.
I mean, take a look at Leo Apotheker at HP - he was a complete fall-guy.
What? Apotheker wasn't a fall guy - he made plenty of awful, horrible decisions all on his own, like the Autonomy purchase and his ruminations about divesting the PC business.