Marissa Mayer Has “Many Enemies”

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/08/marissa_mayer_controversy_what_the_negative_coverage_gets_wrong.html

by nikunjk • 13 years ago

98 79 13 years ago

slate.com

JulianMorrison2• 13 years ago

I hadn't thought the original piece was a takedown - she came across as sharp-elbowed but effective. But well done this author for pointing out how it's basically a grumble piece by the stuffed suits she is deposing.

pnathan• 13 years ago

The piece set itself up as "nuance", but there were a lot of nasty little digs there about the geek who didn't bother fitting into the social club.

Svip• 13 years ago

When was the last time you read something 'nuanced'?

JulianMorrison2• 13 years ago

Why would she bother? I guess, I didn't read those as digs. I don't especially bother to fit into social clubs either. It may be a blind spot.

jfb• 13 years ago

I liked this piece, too, but I thought the comparisons to Steve Jobs were misplaced and detracted from the overall argument. I do think that there's a lot to the argument that the tone of much of the criticism about her is a function of the fact that she's a woman who's also a technician.

wsc981• 13 years ago

From what I've read, I had the impression that she has many Jobsian (for lack of a better word) qualities. Especially with regards to product design: apparently she was a perfectionist at Google, going so far as to even care about subtle color differences and the effect these had on people.

As an engineer, I've always had more respect for managers with a technical background compared to managers with "just" an MBA, so in that regard I'm definitely interested in how Mayer's leadership will shape Yahoo - I think I would respect her as manager as I can only appreciate the opinions of people I respect in a work situation.

ww520• 13 years ago

I'm rooting for Mayer. Sounds like she's on the right track. She must have stepped on a lot of toes to get things done. Hope the Yahoo turnaround story is like the Apple turnaround story, and she will go down as a legend in the valley.

throwawayyyz• 13 years ago

She's doing great IMO. This time next year $YHOO will be trading at $50. This company is way undervalued with her at the helm.

kenko2• 13 years ago

"There was one interesting thing I learned from Carlson’s article: Mayer was inspired in high school when she read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with a great teacher. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know it’s about a wary ingénue in the corridors of corporate and imperial power who encounters a grotesque, power-mad egomaniac with delusions of grandeur, who has set up a personality cult around himself despite having deserved nothing of what he’d come into in his career, until he is overthrown by the “brutes” he’d attempted to control and suppress.

Remember that the next time you read a business-press takedown of Mayer."

It is literally impossible to tell what this is supposed to mean. When we remember this, what are we supposed to make of the memory? Is Mayer Kurtz, here, and the business press the brutes? That would sort of make sense, but why would Auerbach say that? Is Mayer Marlow? That doesn't make much sense. Also, what's so all-fired great about being inspired (he doesn't by what, or to do what [1]) by Heart of Darkness?

I respect David Auerbach a lot, but he seems pretty susceptible to Slate Disease.

[1] Elsewhere I was told that she was inspired ... to decorate her classroom in a jungle theme. Whoop-de-do.

mayank4• 13 years ago

He's trying to spin a character, which isn't very useful to someone looking for analysis.

kenko2• 13 years ago

Maybe so, but the characterization makes little sense.

ETA: maybe the idea is supposed to be, since Mayer read this book, she would never succumb to similar sins: she's sure to be cognizant of what she's earned vs. what's simply come to her; she wont be delusional but will rather have a clear head on her shoulders; she won't just attempt to control and suppress her subordinates and won't even think of them as mere brutes.

It would be beyond absurd to draw a conclusion like that based on a person's high-school enjoyment of a novel.

btilly3• 13 years ago

She's a woman. She's a CEO. She's guaranteed to have a target on her back. See http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/ceo-archetyp... for a description of what is still reality in the working world.

That said, people I personally know who have worked with her are luke-cold. But I'm sure that the same people would prefer her over the average Yahoo exec in a heartbeat. And I'm more optimistic about Yahoo's direction now than I was before she came in. Morale is up, traffic is up, motherhood has apparently not distracted her. (To be honest, I was one of the doubters when she came in. A qualified doubter, but a doubter.)

mayank4• 13 years ago

All she has to do is bring a little of Google (the corp, not the employees) into Yahoo and you should see earnings rise. Anything over is the cherry on the top. If Yahoo can't innovate, then it has a solid, profitable niche in Internet services that are reliable and don't change too much over the years (which has always been Yahoo's clientele.)

enraged_camel3• 13 years ago

>All she has to do is bring a little of Google...

No thanks. The last thing we need is more tech giants selling their souls to the NSA.

enraged_camel3• 13 years ago

>She's a woman. She's a CEO. She's guaranteed to have a target on her back.

I don't think her being a woman is terribly relevant here. All CEOs regardless of gender, race, nationality, etc. have enemies. That's what it takes to rise to the top in corporate politics. People smile in your face and stab you in the back at the earliest opportunity.

One could make the case that she has more enemies due to being a successful woman in technology, but I think that would pale in comparison to the number of enemies she has due to her job title alone.

btilly3• 13 years ago

Read the article again. Notice how many of the ways in which she was being criticized were things you could only really say about a woman?

Having enemies comes with the job. Your enemies will attack you as they can. Being a woman gives them culturally acceptable ways to attack you that they can't use against men.

lambda3• 13 years ago

I think it's incredibly relevant. Many of the criticisms she's received seem quite gender biased.

Let's see. One of the big ones is "she had a baby." Well, that's something that only a female CEO could do. And she took two weeks of maternity leave for it; no more than many CEOs take for vacation. That entire criticism seems to be "she's a woman", and wouldn't be applied to a male CEO who took a similar length family vacation.

Time claims that she has a "princess problem". Would any male CEO be described the same way? And they go on to say "She is one of only 21 female CEOs in the Fortune 500. Doesn’t she owe it to us to tell us how she got there?" Um, why would she owe anyone anything just because she's a female CEO?

The problem isn't that she's made enemies in the business sense. The problem is that lots of writers and columnists seem to focus more on her gender, and apply criticisms simply because she's female.

sp3324• 13 years ago

That's true, but somehow Meyer having enemies is newsworthy whereas for any other CEO it's not really remarked.

karnajani2• 13 years ago

is there any reason to believe that Yahoo had not already shared information with government agencies?

VLM• 13 years ago

"She's a woman. She's a CEO."

The bad news is Carly Fiorina. The good news is Carly Fiorina.

The bad news being she's also a woman leader in tech and the most famous one from a decade ago was a disaster.

The good news being she's a woman leader in tech and after a certain HP CEO a decade ago, she doesn't have to accomplish very much to rise above the bottom of the barrel and raise the bar for those of her kind.

Across any group, half of everyone is always by definition below the median. She seems, at the absolute minimum, to be in the upper half of leaders, so there's not really much to complain about.

btilly3• 13 years ago

Is Carly more famous in tech than Meg Whitman?

But I will say, if a female CEO starts generating public comparisons to Carly Fiorina, that would not be a good sign. :-)

swamp40• 13 years ago

Mrs. Hauge is a great writer. She should write a book, but I guess she's still too busy. Thanks for sharing that link.

Spooky23• 13 years ago

Good. If you're in the business of transforming and disrupting a business, having "friends" (who are really not friends, but people with shared interests) is a bad thing. A "friend" at that level is someone looking for a quid pro quo. (ie. "You protect me/my fiefdom, and I smile and say nice things.")

If you're an exec and want to try to marginalize your boss in the press by complaining about her "princess" ways, recall that the sword cuts both ways -- in the old days, annoying a princess landed you in the dungeon or gallows.

jusben1369• 13 years ago

Well she's got everyone talking about Yahoo again and that's something no one else has been able to achieve for 5 + years (unless it was as a footnote to how not to do things)

She's paid by stockholders to improve the value of the company. Not win popularity contests. So that's the way she will/should be judged.

jneal• 13 years ago

I totally agree. Yahoo has risen back into my mind and before her I was always like 'Meh, it's yahoo...' but now I actually think positively about Yahoo. Well, at least until I signed in the other day and found my account was removed for inactivity. They almost had me back...

johnward• 13 years ago

" but now I actually think positively about Yahoo" I think that may be a bit of a stretch. Sure they are being brought up which is good since they haven't been relevant for years. They still have a long way before I could say I think positively about them as a company or their products.

wwweston• 13 years ago

She's paid by stockholders to improve the value of the company. Not win popularity contests.

I'm not sure these two things are exclusive.

rhizome• 13 years ago

Yahoo has been a butthurt-engine for over a decade, the complaints are best thought of as noise.

staunch2• 13 years ago

Anyone know how many people (% of employees) that Steve Jobs fired when he returned as CEO? How did he get rid of the cruft of poor performers that had accumulated? Gradually? Or did he magically turn them around too?

I'm curious because it seems like Mayer has already doomed herself by not raising the caliber of the average Yahoo employee. Nothing hurts morale and productivity like working with colleagues you don't respect, in my experience.

nickconfer• 13 years ago

Not sure how you can make this assertion. You don't know how many employees she's let go, how many Jobs let go, and there is no evidence that the new hires Yahoo has made are not high quality employees.

staunch2• 13 years ago

It doesn't seem like too much of a leap to suggest that Yahoo's average (NOT peak) employee quality has waned over the years. I know Steve Jobs believed Apple's had, which is why I'm curious how he solved the same problem so successfully.

shawndumas• 13 years ago

single page version:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/08/...

RyanZAG2• 13 years ago

"If technical women can do the work of male businessmen, we might not need male businessmen anymore!"

Oh come on, as if anybody actually thinks this.

"Jim Heckman knows a lot about sports. He is, according to evidence, a macho blowhard. He wanted Yahoo to be “like a cable TV provider.” He is your worst nightmare as a boss."

I don't know him, and I doubt he is perfect (or anyone is), but this feels like a hit article on everyone who has disagreed with Marissa about Yahoo's direction? This article feels incredibly biased and has gone a good way to making me doubt Marissa's direction for Yahoo if she needs articles like this one to defend her. Not that I have anything (or want anything) to do with Yahoo, so maybe I'm not the target market.

kmfrk• 13 years ago

If people say Mayer comes off as a bad person and CEO in the Carlson article, you can tell they didn't bother reading it to the end.

sp3324• 13 years ago

This is mentioned in the article, and the author comments that most people will have made up their minds and stopped reading by the time Carlson's article stops being negative.

sp3324• 13 years ago

The original title, which you can still see in the URL, is "marissa_mayer_controversy_what_the_negative_coverage_gets_wrong". I wonder why they changed it?

j_baker2• 13 years ago

I'm kind of reminded of John McCain choosing Sarah Palin as his VP candidate. Sure it was a great, forward-thinking thing for him to choose a woman, particularly when running against a black man. But that doesn't mean it was a good idea. Likewise, I expect that Mayer's detractors will be dismissed as "Silicon Valley Sexists"... for a while.

Honestly, it seems like Yahoo is more interested in having big names than substance, and Mayer is certainly a marketable CEO. Does that mean she's a competent CEO? Time will tell.

dylandrop• 13 years ago

I think it's insulting at best to compare Mayer to Sarah Palin.

bishnu• 13 years ago

Yet another example of gendered criticism of Mayer. How often do male CEOs get compared to inexperienced, hopeless Republican politicans? Just a coincidence I'm sure.

j_baker2• 13 years ago

Please. I hate nothing more than a male-dominated work environment. The point I'm trying to make is that there is more to choosing an executive than diversity. Diversity is necessary, but not sufficient. The reason I brought Sarah Palin up is to illustrate that sometimes the results of focusing on diversity above all else sometimes produces painful results.

Beyond that, Yahoo has a history of making bad choices in terms of executive leadership. Perhaps they finally made a good choice this time, but I'm skeptical until I see proof otherwise.

Honestly, I fully expect that Mayer will set equality back.

api• 13 years ago

"He wanted Yahoo to be “like a cable TV provider.”"

So she's firing aggressive, narcissistic, horribly overpaid morons. Clap, clap, clap...

etherael• 13 years ago

Mayer is portrayed as “robotic, stuck up, and absurd in her obsession with detail,”

Normal people saying this about technical people is usually a good indicator that the technical person is doing just fine.

WalterBright• 13 years ago

I bought some Yahoo stock after reading about Mayer.

jingo• 13 years ago

"... who likes to code."

What language does she prefer? Does she prefer complexity or simplicity? Is her code verbose or terse? So many questions.

Does any of this matter? If you're into coding, then the answer is "Yes", in my opinion. In fact, when it comes to software, I really do not care about what the coder looks like, what clothes the coder wears, the coder's personality type, etc. In evaluating software, these things are all irrelevant to me. I only care about the coder's code sensibilities and tastes, and the quality of the code.

Anyway, can we see any code samples to back up her statement? I will believe it when I see the evidence.

No matter what he says or does in real life, and even if he wears cheap suits and ugly ties, I will always have an appreciation of one well-known, former CEO as a coder. Because lex is one of my favorite programs.

slurry3• 13 years ago

The information you're curious about does not seem to be in the public record. It's not easy to convey things like that through journalists, especially business journalists. Some of it may not even exist: some of the best coders I've ever known don't really have a favorite language. Knew a math PhD from MIT who used to just churn out Perl and C++ all day happy as a clam. I asked him if he'd prefer Lisp or something but he didn't really care - all about the algorithms for him.

Anyway, there are still good indications that Marissa Mayer has kept up both an academic interest in computer science and suspiciously coder-like habits well after her ascension to upper management.

Mayer was still teaching CS classes at Stanford after becoming a Google executive.[0]

She uses a terminal-based email client.[1]

And uses plain text for all her personal organizing.[2]

[0]http://ecorner.stanford.edu/author/marissa_mayer

[1]https://twitter.com/marissamayer/status/327200020128489472

[2]http://lifehacker.com/265651/google-vp-organizes-her-life-in...

squozzer• 13 years ago

Blessed are those who have a smattering of enemies, for they shall them a (s)hero.

Marissa Mayer Has “Many Enemies”

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