I'm really happy for her. Worst CEO has typically been a male dominated category. It's nice see some diversity in lacking empathy and having over inflated egos.
How arrogant do you have to be to think you will overtake the iPad in sales over a single quarter.
I wonder if that is because the skills and values needed to climb the corporate ladder to Executive positions are fundamentally different from those of Founders that formed their ethos in the broader society, outside of the ladder-climbing environment.
This hypothesis has interesting implications for founders that wish their companies to be reflective of their ethos over time. Suddenly the Japanese practice of adopting successors to leadership instead of hereditary succession makes a lot more sense - valuing temperament over bloodline. It also completely bypasses the issues with internal promotions in a hierarchical structure.
Debian is interesting with their use of an alternate operating model and democratically elected leadership.
Given how long-lasting companies can become destructive to the societies that they operate in, it seems to be that Society has a vested interest in solving this problem of companies losing their soul. Maybe there are corporate structures that can be designed to minimize these issues? Anyone aware of research or proposals in this area?
That's a great point. Might be splitting hairs a little bit here - but the question must be asked - if the ethos of the Successors are fundamentally different from those of the Founders, maybe the "change the culture" is deliberate, to align with the ethos of the Successors?
There's an additional factor at play here: age. The Founders of the two companies - HP and Google - were in their 20s at the time of founding. The Successors were likely much older (40s? 50s?) when they took over - it takes time to climb to the Executive positions. How much of an impact that simple number (Age at Founding/Succession) would have had on what culture would be fostered. It would be really interesting to see a macro study on cultures at companies 1-5 years from Founding/Succession, grouped by age decade (20s, 30s, 40s) at founding/succession. Dell and Apple could be case studies onto themselves because their founders left and then came back at a different age.
She is the definite leader in the category of callous CEOs.
Granted much of the appreciation had nothing to do with Yahoo but I'm sure a worse executive would have messed up the Alibaba situation.
She took a dying company, tried a couple of home run ideas which flopped and then effectively returned what value was left to the shareholders. There is no reason to think that Yahoo would have performed any better under another CEO.
She drove Yahoo into the ground with incredibly useless ideas like a new weather app that made them no money.
Basically everything she tried completely flopped and she tanked the value of the company.
What are you even talking about?
Also the value of the company is the stock. She didn't tank it, it went up.
The CEO of a publicly traded company is responsible for carrying out the goals set by the board, which represent the whims of the owners of the company. Typically that means balancing many factors. If the owners of the company care about features and competing, they will set goals accordingly. If the owners feel like maximizing profit for an expedient exit, they will set goals aligned with that.
She inherited an absolutely untenable situation and yes, she failed, but given the atrocious track records of the previous five CEOs, she absolutely didn't do any worse and yes, she did at least get the company through the Alibaba IPO so that shareholders got that value.
Let's look at the tenure of her predecessors: * Jerry Yang: Founder who told Microsoft to fuck off when they offered $45b for a company that was in no way worth that. At least Microsoft didn't get saddled with that shit. Yang also managed to flub the entire Web 2.0 boom despite Yahoo being primely suited for that (and buying early Web 2.0 darlings like Flickr). A year after Yang rebuffed the deal, Yahoo's stock was 60% lower than Microsoft's offer. Truly, this is one of the worst CEO moves in history. Oh, he also turned down a deal to sell the search business for $20b.
* Carol Bartz: Came from Autodesk and had no idea what a consumer web company was like, traded in Yahoo's search stuff (and search deals) for Microsoft's stack (the same Microsoft that had offered to buy Yahoo's search business for $20b just six months earlier) but for very little upfront money and for a deal that was at the high level, only valued at $500m in revenue a year over ten years (which if you do the math, is half of what Microsoft had offered for the search business six months earlier). Didn't understand consumer products at all and let Mail, Flickr and the other acquisitions languish.
* Tim Morse - CFO who served as interim CEO while they found the next replacement. He tried unsuccessfully to sell Yahoo's ad business to Google or Microsoft.
* Scott Thompson - This joker was the OG George Santos, who got caught lying about his education on his resume (which, bro, you're trying to be CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, don't do this) and was fired in one of the most humiliating ways that I can ever recall seeing. He lasted 5 months and didn't achieve anything but making an embarrassment of himself and laying off 15% of the staff. Oh, and he sued Facebook over that ridiculous patent thing.
* Ross Levinsohn - The interim CEO who REALLY wanted the job for keeps but was just keeping the seat warm while the board did the executive search. He didn't do anything wrong per se, but there was a reason he wasn't chosen as CEO. He was a media guy, not a tech guy, and wouldn't have known how to handle what was still ostensibly a tech company. He later went on to lead a bunch of very bad (from a business perspective) media companies, most notably tronc. He's now head of a company that buys once-proud media brands that it licenses out for every dollar it can, killing the legacy and value of those brands along the way.
That's who you were looking at before. Was Marissa successful? Absolutely not. Yahoo spent a lot of money and made a lot of big swings but ultimately came up short. But at least she tried. At least she tried to invest in things like email, search, and content, areas that had the previous five leaders (I guess four is more fair, Ross didn't have a chance to do anything) focused on, the company might not have been in that position.
She also managed to keep things afloat and working so that the Alibaba IPO and Yahoo's stake in that could come to fruition. Given the caliber of the people who led the company before that and the shareholder activism and lawsuits happening before and during her tenure, she did probably as good as anyone in that situation could do.
The bottom line is that Yahoo was not a company that could be saved and she took on an impossible mission, but at least she tried. Yahoo's death warrant was signed in 2008 when Jerry Yang told Steve Ballmer to go fuck himself because he didn't consider $45b a high enough valuation for Yahoo (even tho the price offered per share was a significant premium over Yahoo at the time), mere weeks before Bear Stearns collapsed and the global financial crisis took hold (a position he continued to stick to for months, even when it was clear that the global economy in general was in big trouble).
She failed and milked the company for hundreds of millions. It's hilarious that you want to defend her
Marissa was a very early person at Google, and contributed to a lot of things [1]. Obviously a Wikipedia entry is going to be hagiographic, and some early players are going to be better than others, but there's no reason to believe she wasn't at least on the same playing field as many of the other early landing big names.
And she has nothing acutely toxic or myopic on her record. She was hired by the board of Yahoo to mostly do what she did.
FYI Kamala Harris had a romantic relationship with someone in power who appointed her to positions she was not remotely qualified for, that's an example wherein the unseemly facts are just a bit too real for polite conversation. But I suggest when one wants to throw such tawdry things around, one should not be making arbitrary claims.
Hagiographic
Definition: Excessively flattering
There was literally nothing to oversee. Even in this unadorned search homepage, she was able to keep an unused button (I'm feeling lucky) for more than a decade.
(I suspect keeping the Google homepage "unadorned" took a lot more effort than you'd imagine, too.)
Your point would've been much stronger had you not used this as an opportunity for a political cheap shot; your last paragraph completely nullifies the three preceding it.
Aside from the more vulgar elements, it's immoral and wold be illegal in most circumstances; it's just straight corruption.
To wit, those participating in these actions are Lawmakers and those responsible for the Justice System aka District Attorney, further embroiling the hypocrisy in the situation.
It's understandable people will feel uncomfortable with that reality, because it resonates with a kind of slander that is used to belittle people (especially women), hence my calling out the individual OP for making arbitrary insinuations.
But it's irresponsible to ignore such actions because it doesn't fit either one's political orientation, or triggers one's sensitivities.
What Harris did was bad. Arbitrarily insinuating women are only successful because they 'slept around' is also bad. It's actually not very nuanced at all once you start to think about it.
[citation needed]
> hence my calling out the individual OP for making arbitrary insinuations.
Calling out someone for making arbitrary insinuations while yourself making arbitrary insinuations is blatantly hypocritical and - as you put it - "nakedly callous". Your comments boil down to "if the allegations are against a woman on my team then they're false but if they're against a woman on the other team then they're true". Maybe that ain't your intention, but that's how it reads.
There was zero good-faith reason to bring up Kamala Harris apropos nothing - and in doing so (and in doubling down on doing so) you've obliterated your own argument.
She deserves mild to moderate praise for her brief tenure. Not stellar but also not useless.
For anyone curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Brown_(politician)#Favo...:
> Brown's romantic relationship with Alameda County deputy district attorney Kamala Harris preceded his appointment of Harris to two California state commissions in the early 1990s. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission patronage positions. When the appointments became a political issue in Harris's 2003 race for District Attorney, she responded: "Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work".[57] Brown's relationship with Harris gained renewed attention in early 2019 after she had become a U.S. senator and ran for president.[58][59][60][61] Brown addressed the questions by publishing a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle titled "Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?" He wrote that he may have "influenced" her career by appointing her to boards and supporting her run for District Attorney, but added that he had also influenced the careers of other politicians.
Though I don't think we need to derail this conversation too much away from the fact that though these things do happen, belittling women (or men) arbitrarily for supposedly doing these kinds of things is not nice at all.
And that Ms. Tajeda is holding her own in indicating we can all be a bit insufferable ...
From the outside looking in, it appeared Yahoo! was a ghost ship, sailing under previously established momentum with no wind in the sails. Piecemealing Yahoo! out Gordon Gekko style might have been the only realistic future to save groups/units that could operate without the mothership, so to speak.
The spending/acquisition spree Mayer went on... I'm not certain what to make of that, however.
This is a really disingenuous way of framing her work at Google.
By all accounts she did quite a bit more than just "choosing the colors" at google, but as we all know only guys can do real work.
And then she came into the hugely profitable, exponentially growing yahoo, and turned it into a failure. Yahoo! absolutely was not an already failing business that bought Meyer in solely because the were trying to find some external person who would try different things to turn it around.
JFC.
>On May 20, 2013, Mayer led Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr in a $1.1 billion acquisition.[53][54] In February 2016, Yahoo! acknowledged that the value of Tumblr had fallen by $230 million since it was acquire
She also covered up Yahoo hack, that was one of the biggest in history:
>U.S. Charges Russian FSB Officers and Their Criminal Conspirators for Hacking Yahoo and Millions of Email Accounts
Not easy to achieve that much on a single CEO position, without being forced out from a company
She wanted a color and a font changed.
I was actually grateful that was all she wanted, because it gave me more time to get the features done!
I'd be genuinely surprised if both sexes weren't equally represented in terms of sociopathy and narcissism if we ever got to an even 50/50 split.
People who are pushing for better career paths for women are largely not pushing women (and others) towards careers in trades. I think that’s to the detriment of society in general.
It can't be that I'm giving an explanation as to why you see women pushing for more representation in some fields but not others, it must be that I'm describing the personal lived experience of every single woman on the planet.
Also we absolutely are a hive mind, Beyonce is the current queen who took over after Madonna.
The garbage collection is mostly automated using an arm from the truck, but she can still lift a full compost bin to dump in the truck that’s too heavy for me to lift.
Meant to be sarcastic, made my edit.