41 shades of blue: Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer and her “non-female” stories - under the heading “Business Person”

The “Business Person” column tells the readers of Megamind about the stories and facts surrounding the most prominent IT entrepreneurs from around the world, the value of the companies under whose management exceeds any reasonable limits. We will not be limited only to the “new wave" of businessmen, and we will talk about those who are usually called the "old school."

Today, a close-up is the life and history of Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo! Prior to that, she has long held leadership positions at Google .

Marissa Mayer is the youngest among directors of companies from the prestigious Fortune 500 list. In addition, in 2015 she was included in the list of 50 most influential women in the world according to the same Fortune magazine.

Place of birth, marital status, education

Mayer was born on May 30, 1975 in Boco, Wisconsin, into a family of Finnish-born art teacher Margaret Mayer and engineer Michael Mayer. After graduating from high school in 1993, Mayer was elected Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson as one of two state delegates to the West Virginia National Youth Science Camp.

Marissa Mayer is a workaholic, and she always has been, remember classmates and classmates of the current CEO of Yahoo. In an interview with Vogue magazine, Mayer said that every day after school, she studied in circles: ballet, figure skating, swimming or debate.

After graduating from high school, Meyer has applied to 10 of the largest universities, including Stanford, Yale and Harvard. In all 10 she was accepted. Then she ranked educational institutions according to a number of criteria (including, for example, such as the average score of accepted applicants). Stanford stepped forward, and Marissa Mayer decided to study there in a specialty unique to the university - “symbolic systems”. The program included the study of philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics and programming.

Initially, Meyer planned to get a degree in chemistry or biology at Stanford and become a neurosurgeon in the future, but, having carefully studied the programs of specialties, she discovered that she would study the same thing as students of "secondary" universities - and decided to choose a more interesting profile.



Mayer graduated with honors from Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in symbolic systems and a master's degree in computer science with a specialization in artificial intelligence.

In 2009, the Illinois Institute of Technology awarded Mayer an honorary doctorate in recognition of her research work.



On December 12, 2009, Mayer married real estate investor Zachary Bogue. July 16, 2012 it became known that the couple are expecting the appearance of their firstborn son on October 7 of the same year. Their son, McAllister God, was born on September 30, 2012.

experience

The list of places where Mayer worked includes only four companies - UBS (Ubilab) in Zurich (Switzerland) and SRI International in Menlo Park (California), Google and Yahoo! (works there to this day).

But the last two jobs say a lot. Especially if you get acquainted with this period of Mayer's life in detail.

Jobs at Google

Mayer joined Google in 1999, becoming the company's first female engineer.

However, Mayer's success in Google as a developer was not very impressive. For more than a month she was busy with the system, which Jeff Dean, hired by her in pair, built much faster. Then Marissa realized that she no longer wanted to program - but she also did not want to leave Google. She began to search for her calling, mastering work in all departments of the project. Meyer worked in the marketing department, in the PR service, helped set up the server, wrote speeches for management, and held business meetings.

For 13 years at Google, she was an engineer, designer, product manager, and executive.

Mayer organized a training program for young managers at Google. Promising students from technical specialties were recruited there - and Marissa taught them the skills of managing and managing various projects. At the same time, she continued to lecture at Stanford.

Marissa's workaholism “progressed” - in her own words, she could work 100 hours a week, allocating only four hours a day for sleep.



As a result, Mayer took the position of vice president of search products and user interfaces of Google. In theory, she was supposed to be responsible for how all the company's products look to the user, the latter to assert their appearance.

41 shades of blue

In practice, Mayer, according to her former employees, was engaged in "battles for pixels." She independently tested 41 shades of blue to figure out which one would look best on the main page. Mayer was not entrusted with the development of interfaces - other teams were engaged in this, but she zealously carried out her duties to confirm the appearance of all products.

Editors Vanity Fair talked with several former Mayer employees. One of them remarked: “All Marissa did was swap pixels. Over the years, she became more and more authoritarian. She could reject the layout only because she did not like the color - or she simply did not have the mood. Discontent in the team grew with terrible force. "

Another former colleague, Meyer, explained - Marissa always believed that she was right, even if it was not so. She became a real obstacle for employees. Since it was through Mayer that any details of the interface were to be coordinated, workers had to stand hours in line at the door of her office. She talked with everyone for a long time - from this, the line only grew.

With her pedantry, workaholism and desire to follow everything, Mayer probably made more than one enemy on Google. As former Mayer subordinate notes, this is most clearly demonstrated by the fact that not a single engineer followed her after Marissa went to Yahoo.

Jobs at Yahoo!

In 2012, Yahoo's board of directors proposed to Marissa Mayer the position of CEO of the then-in-crisis company. There were several more candidates. The Google’s top manager was most in doubt about the board of directors: they were embarrassed by her passion for publicity, her inexperience in budget management and staff reduction, and the fact that before that, Meyer worked at Google, where nobody cared, how much money she spent and how it includes advertisers.

Another problem for Marissa was that when she received the offer, the top manager was already pregnant - if the board of directors of Yahoo knew about this, it would be very difficult for her to convince its members that she was still suitable for the position of general directors.



Marissa made a brilliant presentation. She presented the company’s management with a well-thought-out plan to get Yahoo out of the crisis, which affected all aspects of the corporation.

According to one of the former members of the board of directors, those present were pleasantly shocked. She assured the leadership that she would surround herself with strong people who would help her overcome her weaknesses. Only in June, having already taken a leading position, she admitted to the board of directors that she was in a position - but this did not seem to be a big problem.

Good / evil leader

First, Marissa Mayer set about transforming the company's corporate culture. She introduced free food and prohibited employees from working remotely. I gave Jawbone Up fitness bracelets to each employee and gave them all employees using a smartphone on iOS or Android. The satisfaction level of Yahoo employees has reached the highest level for the entire time the company has existed - according to the research agency Glassdoor, on a scale of one to five after Mayer’s arrival, the rating was fixed at 3.7.

The confidence level of Yahoo employees in the new CEO a year after her arrival was 84%.

Meyer, by her example, showed employees how to relate to work - having given birth to a child, she left maternity leave two weeks later. A nursery was equipped at the office, and Mayer hired a nanny to take care of the baby.



However, at Yahoo, Marissa has not changed her "bad" habits. According to one of the designers who quit the company, one day Meyer argued with him for a long time about how wide the frame should be on the page - and “brought” him by asking to justify what is best for the interface - three or five pixels.

She still kept people waiting. Marissa is always late for meetings with top managers (it is noteworthy that at meetings with ordinary employees she does not allow herself this). In 2012, Meyer planned a meeting with the company’s management, at which the interlocutors intended to discuss Yahoo’s budget for next year, and slept for three hours. Many managed to leave before she finally appeared. Such situations were repeated further.

Conclusion Yahoo! out of crisis. Attempt number 1

Marissa redesigned most of Yahoo’s services, updated her homepage, news portal and Fantasy Football game.

As Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer began buying up startups and their teams. For two and a half years of work, Mayer acquired about forty young companies. Some of them integrated with the Yahoo team, some remained independent (for example, Tumblr). Meyer herself claims that she is acquiring startups in order to rejuvenate the audience of the company's products and pour fresh blood into the Yahoo team.

Mayer was not going to stop - she said this in her speech in response to public criticism from one of the investors. She noted that she would buy as many startups as she saw fit, and investors should pay attention to how much profit she had returned to them in two years and how much the stock price had risen during her tenure as CEO.

In Mayer's first year at the company, Yahoo's stock price rose 71%. On June 15, 2012, the day before Mayer was appointed, the price of one share was $ 15.36. June 14, 2013 - $ 26.28. In February 2015, Yahoo was worth $ 42.57 - 2.77 times more than the day Meyer took over as CEO.

Analysts, however, were not sure that Yahoo's revenue growth was entirely due to Marissa Mayer. An important role was played by the IPO of the Chinese giant Alibaba, whose shareholder is Yahoo, and the growth of Yahoo Japan, in which Yahoo also has a share.

Investors are so dissatisfied with Mayer that at least two of them suggested that the AOL CEO think about buying out Yahoo and asked him to head the merged corporation.

On December 10, 2015, amid heated debate over the difficult fate of Yahoo !, it became known that Myers had twin daughters, Marielle and Silvana.

Conclusion Yahoo! out of crisis. Attempt number 2

The strategy for promoting mobile advertising, video and social media advertising, which Myers introduced in 2014, could not increase the company's revenue. Search engine advertising revenue continued to decline.

Industry experts even expressed the opinion that Mayer has long given up - and waiting for an opportunity to leave the company. To survive, Yahoo! should be a service for video streaming, Mayer must be removed from his post, investor Eric Jackson believes.

A few months after the beginning of 2015, dozens of top managers left the company. To stop the mass departure of employees, in Mayer gathered a large meeting and asked top managers to sign an agreement according to which they should work for the company for at least three more years, two participants in the meeting told The Wall Street Journal. According to them, some top managers openly refused to sign such a document.

If immediately after Marissa Mayer came to Yahoo, many investors and analysts predicted profit growth and positive changes, now their attitude has changed. Some of the investors directly accuse Marissa Mayer of “burning” more than $ 3 billion in recent years. The head of Yahoo has repeatedly spent unreasonably large sums of money on unobvious things - for example, on corporate employees for $ 7 million. As a result, for 3.5 years under the leadership of Marissa, the company's profit decreased significantly with increasing costs.

Closing offices and downsizing is one of four points in Yahoo’s new development strategy. As part of the new strategy, Yahoo will focus on user interaction. The company will partially get rid of Internet assets - the result will be search, email and Tumblr.

According to Yahoo, these measures will help reduce operating costs by $ 400 million per year.

Arbitration Committee

The company's board of directors hired consultants to study potential segments of the company's development. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and PJT Partners were hired as independent financial advisers, and Cravath, Swaine & Moore were chosen as legal advisers.

For the fourth quarter of 2015, Yahoo reported a loss of $ 4.43 billion, which was a record in the history of the company. The main reason for such losses was the write-off of many assets, including Tumblr, absorbed for $ 1 billion in 2013. In addition, the company's revenue decreased from $ 1.27 billion to $ 1.25 billion year on year.

The appointed committee can evaluate all these indicators and name the best option for the company and its shareholders. After the publication of a statement on the formation of a separate committee to assess the company's prospects, Yahoo shares rose 2.26% to $ 30.09. Also, analysts believe that Yahoo is inclined to sell its business, rather than to restructuring, which has affected the increase in the value of shares.



It is noteworthy that Marissa Mayer returned to the discussion of the sale of the business amid rumors about a possible change in the head of Yahoo, so there may be a simple attempt to remain at the head of the company, despite previous unsuccessful decisions and dissatisfaction of investors.

In a PBS interview on May 10, Mayer saidthat still believes that he can lead the company to "greatness." In an interview, the interviewer repeatedly hinted at Mayer rumors about her possible departure. Yahoo! CEO repeatedly answered that she would like to head Yahoo! and further. The emphasis on the subjunctive mood allows us to conclude that her confidence in her prospects as CEO of the company is not so strong.