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Marissa Mayer On Turning Around Yahoo
An anonymous reader writes For the 20th anniversary of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer discusses how she's trying to reinvent the company. In a wide-ranging interview, Mayer shares her vision for fixing the company's past mistakes, including a major investment in mobile and a new ad platform. Yet she's been dogged by critics who see her as an imperious micromanager, who criticize her $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, and who fault her for moving too slowly. The company's executives explain that the business could only return to health after she first halted Yahoo's brain drain and went big on mobile. As one Yahoo employee summarized Mayer's thinking: "First people, then apps."
Anyone who claims to work 130 hour weeks is quite simply a liar. There's no way that person is producing anything resembling 'work' for more than 18 hours per day, 7 days a week. She may have been in the office for that long, but she sure as hell wasn't working. What is it with this fetishism about long work weeks? What's next, claims about a 170 hour week?
At some point, Yahoo will be parted out, sold, or rolled up. Any one of these options will lead to a nice payday for Meyer and Yahoo's biggest investors. That's what this is all about. The same thing happened at hp, and is happening now, at IBM. This is an old story in Silicon Valley - company comes out of the chute like gangbusters; low barriers to entry eventually lead to competition; the company falters; someone is brought in to "save" the company (and paid a LOT of money); the company is parted out or limps along for 10+ years while a succession of "in-people" make a pile of $$$ in options, perks, etc. etc.
she was promoted pretty high in the food chain at Google
She was dating Larry Page.
http://gawker.com/214051/utter...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
She is very ambitious, thus she constantly self-promotes herself.
Claiming to work 130 hours a week is part of this self-promotion.
From a 1990 essay comes the insight
"The ability to get ahead in an organization is simply another talent, like the ability to play chess, paint pictures, do coronary bypass operations or pick pockets. There are some people who are extraordinarily good at manipulating- organizations to serve their own ends. The Russians, who have suffered under such people for centuries, have a name for them-- apparatchiks. It was an observer of apparatchiks who coined the maxim, 'The scum rises to the top.' "
http://bobshea.net/empire_of_t...
It is as insightful in its own way as "The Mythical Man-Month".