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Comment by waterlesscloud | Hacker News Reader

" Every Monday at 3 p.m. Pacific, she asked her direct reports to gather for a three-hour meeting. Mayer demanded all of her staff across the world join the call, so executives from New York, where it was 6 p.m., and Europe, where it was 11 p.m. or later, would dial in, too. Invariably, Mayer herself would be at least 45 minutes late; some calls were so delayed that Yahoo executives in Europe couldn’t hang up till after 3 a.m."

This is completely unacceptable behavior from anyone aspiring to be an actual leader.

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It seems there's a pattern in how she sees other people.

* Trying to design the Yahoo logo herself in a weekend (how hard can it be?)

* Reading a children's book to a room full of employees, to stunned silence

* Disallowing remote employees but building a nursery for her child + nanny. (Do other people get Yahoo! daycare too?)

* Requiring extensive credentials for other people [Gwyneth Paltrow better have a degree!] but not bothering with background reference checks for people she wanted (Henrique de Castro, who cost Yahoo over $100M for a year's worth of shoddy work).

Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here.

>Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here.

It seems that Marissa's feeling was that if her users don't already like the exact same things that she likes(as a millionaire living in a fantasy world), then they should learn to start liking them.

Yes, which stems from vanity/narcissism: "I have exquisite taste, and people want to be me (a millionaire I-can-have-it-all mom/career woman), so everything must reflect my personal aesthetic."

Contrast with her hero Jobs.

It works for plenty of people. That's why professional celebrities like Kim Kardashian can become successful "fashion designers" based on their fame alone. The only caveat is that you do actually have to have good taste to be successful.

I would disagree with your conclusion there.

Unlike fragrances and clothing, nobody (very few?) chooses their email app based on a personality. The celebrity link is just too vague; it isn't "Marissa Mayer's Yahoo!", it's just Yahoo!. Even if it was, millions more people look up to Kim K or Paris H.

Also, the investment is way too high to be celeb-driven. It's easy to buy a perfume or a purse or suit or shoes because you like the link to $CELEB. But switching email providers or default search engine? Never happening.

Celebrities with fashion labels or fragrance lines don't design anything, some company that already does those things just licenses their name

Victoria Beckham is one exception to this

For example, they better like eating cake instead?

that is what worked for jobs, like to admit it or not.

he failed most products. he got a few right. he had lots of cash to burn until he got it right. He cursed anyone who wanted a tablet when he wanted the iphone.

meyer is doing the same. just didn't have the luck jobs had yet.

"Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here."

Yes. It's often said that Steve Jobs was an asshole, but that he was an asshole for the right reasons. He was the guy in the room who cared more than anyone else. He wanted everyone else to give as much of a shit as he did, even when it came to seemingly tiny details.

I don't mean to paint a rosy, revisionist, hagiographic coat over his entire legacy, because plenty of his actions burned people in horrible ways. But when he was being micromanager-in-chief, he was usually doing it for a reason.

Dude straight up stole money from the guy who made his life possible (Steve Wosniak). Tell me the right reason for that?

He obviously wanted the Woz to care about money as much as he did. You see his generosity of spirit now?

I admire Jobs for his drive and his vision and his ability to get the best work out of amazing folks but his methods were often terribly inhuman when you really look at them.

He was the idea guy.

And we all know here how much an idea is worth.

In Apple's case - about $200BN or more. Anyone could build an iPhone. The proliferation of other platforms (Android, Windows, Ubuntu, ...) proves it. However, nobody but Steve was thinking out of the box at that time. It was just an idea (with a brilliant execution, admittedly).

First touchscreen phone was the LG Prada, not the iPhone, fyi.

And it was an amazing phone executed so well that they couldn't keep it on the shelves. /s

Seriously. Are you that dense?

Are you? Where was the thinking outside the box exactly?

There are no prizes for doing it first time. But there are prizes for doing it correctly.

Modern design with multitouch and capacitive screen, perhaps. First touchscreen phone was the IBM Simon in the mid-90s, and my Kyocera 6035 was one of many Palm/phone hybrids that predated LG by years. There were also Symbian and Windows Mobile PDA/phones.

I give more credit to Jonathan Ive on restoring Apple's place in the industry than Jobs.

As I said, "plenty of his actions burned people in horrible ways." There is no excuse for that, nor did I suggest there was. I made a pretty decent effort in the second paragraph to caveat what I'd said in the first. Steve Jobs was no saint, and he certainly doesn't get a pass for how he treated Woz (and many, many others).

(Also with a disclaimer that Steve was no saint)

Wozniak was happy to tinker and "just be an engineer at HP". Jobs pushed him to create something that could be marketed and made Woz rich.

What? He made the apple I by himself with no prodding from Steve Jobs. He was showing other people how they could make their own, and Steve convinced him to sell it. Jobs may have made him rich, I don't know how that absolves him of being an amoral thief when they weren't. I don't know that making Wozniak rich really made him any happier anyway.

You complained about Jobs stealing money from Woz. It's true, and it was a slimy move. I'm simply pointing out that the thousands of dollars stolen were monetarily ameliorated by the wealth created by Apple Computer.

And Apple computer wouldn't have happened without Jobs. Get past your hatred of the man as a person -- he was a driving force and made shit happen. Art != Artist.

> Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here.

The word empathy to describe Steve Jobs is not the word I would use at all. Maybe "in tune"?

I would go with "lucky guess."

While I'm not a fan of Steve Jobs on account of him being a dick, I think he was right too often to just call it a 'lucky guess'. OSX, the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad were all hugely successful. I don't think luck can get you that far.

> I think he was right too often to just call it a 'lucky guess'

Why not? With enough different people flipping coins there'll be somebody gets a hundred heads in a row.

Except it wasn't really a case of coin flipping.

Flipping coins suggests everybody is playing the same game with roughly equal odds.

So what is the game here? Releasing new consumer products randomly and hoping they become popular?

When Apple really broke out, PC and electronics manufacturers were still competing with one another based on spec sheets (MHz, RAM, GB, benchmarks, etc. -- whoever has more wins).

Apple went in a different direction, putting more effort into product design and user experience and marketing than its competitors. So it wasn't really a case of coin-flipping, because Apple started playing an entirely different game.

Or perhaps the coin flipping is at a higher level, e.g. trying different broad strategies to get ahead (like putting greater emphasis on design/UX)? Again, nobody else was really trying new strategies, everyone was playing the specs sheet arms race. So, in this case, there weren't enough people flipping coins to invoke the metaphor.

And let's not forget all of the work he put into tilting the odds in favor of success- such as convincing the music industry to change their business model. To say he had some sort of special genius for aesthetics isn't really fair- he also was very strategic. That may be the part the Ms. Mayer hasn't caught up to yet.

.5 ^ 100 is 7e-31. If everyone in the world did nothing but flip coins all day long, how many years before you would expect to see 100 heads in a row?

Generally speaking, I don't admire Jobs all that much. But comparing SJ to MM is really closer to an April's fool joke.

The problem is that she is not a founder but behaves like one.

Its unacceptable behavior from anyone even expecting to continue being an employee. Those meetings, when couple by her habitual tendency to miss meetings with people that weren't even a part of her company are ridiculous. It boggles my mind how someone so irresponsible, self-centered, and inconsiderate has managed to get where she's at.

Is this the most expensive cargo cult in history? Yahoo board deciding on new CEO: "Steve Jobs was rude and inconsiderate, Marissa is rude and inconsiderate...."

and nobody said "Steve Jobs built a bunch of revolutionary/innovative/transformative things from scratch - Apple, Next, Pixar, iPod, iPhone, and Marissa was an employee who made a successful way up to mid-level executive at a Big Co". These people couldn't be more different :).

And by the way, Marissa is rude and inconsiderate only to the people under her while she has been very polite and considerate to her superiors where is Steve Jobs has never had superiors :)

I will give you Apple and Next, but not Pixar, iPod, and iPhone.

I agree that Jobs doesn't deserve credit for Pixar's success. He acquired them for technology that he intended to use elsewhere, and he supposedly looked at them like a burden until all of a sudden Toy Story blew up.

No. You are wrong. He was extremely proud of PIXAR and mostly the people. It is true that he is unsure as to how PIXAR will turn out, he never doubted the talent. Ed Catmull in his autobiography - Creativity Inc. explains Jobs in detail.

I'm reading Catmull's book now, which is not an autobiography by the way. From reading that and other sources, I would agree that he was proud of the people but not the company. Jobs looked to unload Pixar more than once and didn't fully support the idea of it being an entertainment company until it was obvious that Toy Story was going to be a hit.

Regardless, I'll never give Jobs more credit on the success of Pixar than Catmull, Lasseter, and others who are the true sources of success for that company.

>Marissa is rude and inconsiderate only to the people under her while she has been very polite and considerate to her superiors

Did you read the article? She routinely left people hanging that were often(in terms of social hierarchy) her equals or betters.

>Steve Jobs has never had superiors :)

Steve Jobs had superiors, he just pretended that he didn't. While things clearly worked out for him in the end, this attitude resulted in some hard lessons at different points in his career.

>Did you read the article? She routinely left people hanging that were often(in terms of social hierarchy) her equals or betters.

i don't think she considered them "higher" or even equals. I'd like to see her letting the Yahoo board hanging dry for an hour next time they convene to discuss the results :)

>i don't think she considered them "higher" or even equals.

She might not consider them to be important, but some of them most certainly were by any objective standard. An executive from one of the largest advertising agencies in the world publicly asked her why she never returns his emails. He was exactly the type of person that the CEO of Yahoo should consider important. If she doesn't someone should show her the fucking door.

The external piece is the surprising one. I've seen successful executives ignore the internals of their company in order to fully ingratiate themselves with customers. It's frustrating, but brings in revenue. It sounds like she's just completely overwhelmed.

> It boggles my mind how someone so irresponsible, self-centered, and inconsiderate has managed to get where she's at.

Despite her other failings, she is obviously very smart. People talking about the early life at Google all agree on that.

Good thing the smart are incorruptible by power. Oh, wait.

You just made Ayn Rand roll in her grave.

Which was an action she freely chose to do, of course.

Don't forget Plato

That a titan of human thought could in any way, shape or form be associated with that poor PTSD victim from Russia - is just proof that we indeed live in an imperfect sublunar realm, deprived of all genuine existence, mere shadows on the wall of the real, ideal forms up there.

In a manner of speaking. :)

I'm confused. :)

What does what I said have to do with Ayn Rand?

I'm also curious about how Ayn Rand and Plato were thrown into the same group. I remember well that Plato went on and on about his Utopia of the State controlling the lives of everyone, people going to college until they're 32 and so on. Those two are pretty much opposites. And Plato was a titan of human thought? He misunderstood everything Socrates was about and it took us Aristotle being born to somewhat set us back on track. Maybe whoever said that is really into geometry of solids.

Anyone care to throw me a bone? What did I miss? Why did I make Ayn Rand roll in her grave?

Plato's utopia would be ruled by a philosopher-king, in contrast to the Athenian democracy in which he lived. This could be considered an example of the idea that "the smart aren't corruptible".

I can't speak for the other poster but I imagine that Rand's heroes would not be corruptible, for example, refusing government subsidies on moral grounds or sacrificing their artistic vision for commercial reasons

From what I remember of Atlas Shrugged, Rand only creates fantasy worlds where bad guys can be tempted. Good guys are simply never put into the situation, because whatever law or principle they might break has already been recast as intrinsically evil.

> It was said that Nat Taggart had staked his life on his railroad many times; but once, he staked more than his life. Desperate for funds, with the construction of his line suspended, he threw down three flights of stairs a distinguished gentleman who offered him a loan from the government.

Exactly my point. Nat Taggart is being shown as incorruptible, within the standards of "corruption" that the author has placed into her Mary-Sue-Universe.

He doesn't just say "no", he throws the guy down three flights of stairs!

>he throws the guy down three flights of stairs!

And for some reason she seems to think that the attempted murder of a liberal is an honorable act.

And for some reason liberals think that the attempted extortion of money from people within a certain radius of a certain situation is an honorable act.

I'd throw a bone, but you look like you'd need a herd of cows instead.

This is completely unacceptable behavior from anyone aspiring to be an actual leader.

Seems more appropriate for crisis mode than ongoing management. In general there seems to be a modus operandi of "My time is more valuable than yours, so you wait." While this may be true, it's a poor way to manage creatives.

It's a poor way to manage anyone, period, and an even poorer way to deal with people outside of the company. An anti-pattern if I ever saw one.

> This is completely unacceptable behavior from anyone aspiring to be an actual leader.

Someone at her level should not be aspiring to be a leader, but should be a leader from the start.

Depends on the reasons why she was late and if they were legitimate or not.

"Depends on the reasons why she was late and if they were legitimate or not."

It really depends on how "invariably" she was late. If she was late almost all the time, and by 45 minutes or more each time, then it's patently irresponsible. She should have set a different time for the meeting every week. Or she should have blocked out her schedule to make the time. On the other hand, if she was late maybe 25% of the time, that's a different story. The CEO of a huge corporation is going to be late to a lot of meetings. It's the nature of the job. There isn't enough time in the working day for all the people, situations, and projects she needs to handle.

Having worked every now and then with C-level executives at huge companies, some much bigger than Yahoo, I can tell you that they're often late to meetings. Staff meetings especially, because staff meetings are standing, and standing meetings usually lose in an ad-hoc triage battle against spur-of-the-moment meetings. Almost axiomatically, anyone or anything important enough to hijack a CEO's time is going to be important enough to win the priority battle against a standing staff meeting.

All of that said, "invariably" needs to be defined here. Especially given the circumstances, i.e., requiring all direct reports in various timezones to be there every Monday on Mayer's clock. If it was, indeed, "invariable" -- as in, she was always at least 45 minutes late -- then she should have found a new time for the meeting. That's completely unacceptable.

Having meetings at a time that suits you with people that may be considering going to bed, and actually are outside any kind of office hours whatsoever should be unacceptable behaviour of any leader.

I agree completely, but to me, this speaks to an organizational design issue as much as a scheduling issue. If you have direct reports in N different timezones, and there's almost no functional overlap between some of those timezones and your own, then why are they your direct reports? You are fundamentally incapable of directly managing them, and they are incapable of directly reporting to you. Put a better org structure in place, and shed whatever reasons you have for insisting on those people's directness -- be they playing to people's vanity, an overreaching desire to be "flat," or something else entirely.

(Obviously, this is easier said than done. At that level, the politics of moving around direct-reporting lines is going to be a nightmare.)

But I do agree. The complexity of scheduling increases dramatically as the number of timezones N increases. You try the best you can to schedule a standing meeting that accommodates everyone. Someone's going to have to make a sacrifice in convenience. As the leader, you should try to find a time that makes a sacrifice on your end, provided it's not too ridiculous.

At the very least, start the standing meeting at 7-8 am California time. That's the decent way to run a global organization from the West Coast.

Yeah, it would have been better if the article went into detail about its use of the term "invariably". I don't know if the author was just loosely using the term or if he actually meant that she was habitually late.

Still, I don't see that as "unacceptable" behaviour. It's something to be frowned upon for sure and it would be great if she could be punctual all the time, but being the CEO of an incredibly large and diverse organisation, she could be forgiven if she was late due to some other meeting or work-related issues.

Also, remember she's getting only about 4 hours of sleep everyday and practically lives at her workplace, so I doubt she's being late on purpose.

I'm with you on all of this. I use the term "unacceptable" as a conditional. If "invariably" actually means close to 100% of the time, then I think it's unacceptable. And if not unacceptable, then certainly inconsiderate.

I am using conditional logic here because, like you, I have no idea what "invariably" really means here. Writers have a tendency to throw around words that sound good, without always considering the true extent of their meaning. As a sometime-writer, I suffer from this problem myself. "Invariably" is a tall claim, which is why I'd like to see the evidence for it before rushing to conclusive judgment.

I'd suggest it's practically impossible for anyone to get by on 4 hours sleep a day and remain even remotely sane.

Sleep deprivation is classed as torture. Even if you're a Type A personality, 4 hours is not enough to avoid issues with basic cognitive competence (at best) and general mental health (at worst).

See e.g.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.htm...

Tell that to my manager :P

There's been a really unfortunate (and pseudoscientific) meme going around in the tech world these past few years, about the supposed abilities of "extremely high-performing people" to make do on little to no sleep. It's possible that Mayer herself buys into this myth, or at least that she cultivates it as part of her personal brand.

While it's true that not everyone requires the exact, same sleep schedule or regimen, there is no human on Earth who can successfully go years and years on 4 hours or less every night. You'll pay that debt eventually, with interest. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, and maybe 20 years from now. But you'll pay it back. Often in the form of a heart attack, a stroke, or brain damage.

Was anyone claiming that she remains even remotely sane?

No job is worth that. Also consider the performance and morale damage from being forced to deal with that at the start of every week. Thanks but no thanks.

Everyone is late once in a while. Some executives are late pretty often. But every single one of them that is worth anything at all will at least send a text or a phone call letting you know they aren't going to make it.

Unless someone is on their way to the hospital, there really isn't a reason to leave someone hanging.

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