
Marissa Mayer Has “Many Enemies” - nikunjk
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/08/marissa_mayer_controversy_what_the_negative_coverage_gets_wrong.html
======
btilly
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...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/ceo-
archetypes-7-joan-of-arc.html) 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.)

~~~
enraged_camel
>>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.

~~~
lambda
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.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>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.

When I said "enemies" I was focusing on people within Yahoo!. Who cares about
what writers and columnists say? They will write anything to get readers.

~~~
cantankerous
This article is about what a specific writer says along with a few different
talking heads. I think it's totally relevant.

------
kenko
"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.

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

~~~
kenko
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.

~~~
mayank
> Maybe so, but the characterization makes little sense.

Sorry, I didn't make it clear that I share this sentiment.

------
jusben1369
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
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
" 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.

------
JulianMorrison
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
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.

~~~
JulianMorrison
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.

~~~
noarchy
In some workplaces, not fitting into the social clubs makes you a poor
"cultural fit". You have to go to the right meetups, drink the right beers
with the right people, and so on. Contract extensions and promotions depend on
it. Thank goodness it doesn't work that way everywhere.

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Spooky23
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.

------
RyanZAG
_" 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.

------
ww520
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
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.

------
etherael
> 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.

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

~~~
j_baker
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_.

~~~
rsl7
> The point I'm trying to make is that there is more to choosing an executive
> than diversity

Oh, thanks for the heads-up.

------
staunch
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
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.

~~~
staunch
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.

------
kmfrk
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.

~~~
sp332
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.

------
jingo
"... 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.

~~~
slurry
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](http://ecorner.stanford.edu/author/marissa_mayer)

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

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

------
WalterBright
I bought some Yahoo stock after reading about Mayer.

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

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

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shawndumas
single page version:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/08/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/08/marissa_mayer_controversy_what_the_negative_coverage_gets_wrong.single.html)

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sp332
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?

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

