The Adventures of Marissa Mayer
sanfranmag.com
sanfranmag.com
As the company increases in size, the meritocracy of ideas fades and being a good politician becomes more important. While it's not the primary reason I left after five years, it was certainly a consideration.
Whenever you're doing something for somebody else, they're going to want to see two things from you: 1.) that you understand their problems and concerns and 2.) that you're doing your due diligence to address them. It doesn't matter whether it's Google, some other big corporation, your own startup, or a consultancy. If it's your startup, your customers will want to make sure that you understand their problems and do your due diligence before they fork over their money. If it's your consultancy, your clients will want the same.
I've found that teams that understand this, grok Marissa's way of thinking about the world, and are willing to put in the legwork to iterate on their ideas and make them as good as possible have quite a bit of latitude to do what they want. Those that just spit some <div>s onto the page and come unprepared tend to be the ones that gripe about how Marissa blocks them from getting anything done. Many of the teams I've seen that had problems with Marissa also had terrible UIs, and I'd really hate to inflict them on the user.
In many ways, this is just another way of saying the same thing you did - if you want to be successful, you need one of the decision-makers to back your play. But that's the case anywhere. I've been fond of saying that entrepreneurship is just trading one boss for many bosses - it's great if you hate your boss, not so great if you hate your bosses. Which is a good reason to pick a company or market whose bosses you fundamentally agree with.
Also, speaking as someone who let his startup die because pretty much everyone with social influence over me expressed doubt - if you give up because of what other people think, it'll severely limit your ability to get anything done. If senior executives don't like your project, the best thing to do is listen to them, figure out if they have a point, and if they don't, go do it anyway. The worst thing that happens is that they fire you, and then you're in exactly the same boat as if you quit to found a startup, except that you've been learning about the problem domain while drawing a paycheck the whole time.
That said, my point was simply that it's a myth that to be successful at Google is to just have good ideas. You have to play the social game as well, as it's an environment where reputation plays just as much a role as innovation.
For what it's worth, I didn't mean to attach this specifically to Google. It happens at every large company, almost by default. It's just that many folks are surprised to find that Google is so "corporate", especially many Googlers that started straight from graduation.
It was quickly pulled from the site and reposted with the current, more boring title.
Indeed, Mayer invokes her mother a lot, which makes sense, given her steadfast devotion to the ease of the end user.
At around 11 a.m., Mayer went into the company kitchen for a snack. Peering into the fridge, she sensed she wasn’t alone. She turned around and saw Page standing in a small nook. Startled, she asked what he was doing. “I’m hiding,” he said. “The site is down. It’s all gone horribly awry.”
She made it home that night at around 3 a.m., typical for the hours she would keep. As she climbed into bed, she thought, “It’s not exactly confidence building to see the CEO hiding in the kitchen, saying everything has gone horribly awry.” She gave the company a 2 percent chance of succeeding.
I mean, that's pretty good content, really.
I've never read an article about a male luminary that focuses so much on looks.
“Marissa is surprisingly pretty in person,” says Valleywag blogger and editor Owen Thomas. “That in itself is a rarity in Silicon Valley, and you’d have to be naïve to think that doesn’t color people’s views of her.”
For gossip websites like Valleywag, Mayer is an easy mark... and (so they say)... uses her looks for publicity.
are followed in the next paragraph by:
Mayer manages 150 product managers, who direct the efforts of nearly 2,000 software engineers; levels criticism and praise with the same cool gaze; and is an arbiter of much of what goes before Page, cofounder Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt, who trust her as their gatekeeper. Just about everything that goes on at the Mountain View company, which is more valuable than the U.S.’s three largest traditional media companies combined...
OP seems to be undermining the other publications which were undermining Mayer. The substance of the article refutes the pettiness of Vallywag et al.
Marissa is very, very sharp. She can rub many people the wrong way (including myself) because she's almost always completely certain that she's right. However, she is right a good portion of that time, certainly more than most people I've met. And when she's wrong, she'll always listen to data that proves her wrong, and the issue gets dropped. I can respect that.