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

The “Business Person” heading tells “Megamind” readers about what stories and facts surround the most prominent IT entrepreneurs from all over the world, the value of companies running which exceeds any reasonable limits. We will not be limited only to the “new wave” of businessmen and we will also tell about those who are called the “old school”.

Today, life and history of Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo! Prior to that, she held senior management positions at Google for a long time.
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Marissa Mayer is the youngest among the directors of companies from the prestigious Fortune 500 list. In addition, in 2015 she entered the list of the 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 the city of Boco, in Wisconsin, in the family of Margaret Mayer, a drawing teacher of Finnish origin, and Michael Mayer, an engineer. After graduating from high school in 1993, Meyer was elected governor of Wisconsin Tommy Thompson as one of two state delegates to the National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia.

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

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

Initially, Maier planned to get a degree in chemistry or biology at Stanford and later become a neurosurgeon, but after carefully studying the programs of specialties, she found 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 character systems and a master's degree in computer science with a specialization in artificial intelligence.

In 2009, the Illinois Institute of Technology awarded Meier an honorary doctorate in recognition of her work in the search area.



On December 12, 2009, Meier married a real estate investor, Zachary Bogue. July 16, 2012 it became known that the spouses are expecting the appearance of their first-born 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 life Meyer in detail.

Jobs at Google

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

However, the success of Mayer in Google in the position of the developer were not too impressive. She spent more than a month messing around with the system that Jeff Dean, who had been hired by her, built much faster. Then Marissa realized that she no longer wants to program - but she also does not want to leave Google. She began to search for her vocation, mastering work in all departments of the project. Maier worked in the marketing department, in the PR-service, helped set up the server, wrote speeches for the management, held service meetings.

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

Mayer organized a training program for young managers on Google. There were recruiting promising students from technical specialties - and Marissa taught them the skills of management and management of 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, giving only four hours to sleep.



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

41 shade of blue

In practice, Mayer, according to her former employees, was engaged in “battles for pixels”. She independently tested 41 shades of blue to see which one would look best on the main page. Meyer did not trust the development of interfaces - other teams were engaged in this, but she zealously fulfilled her obligations to approve the appearance of all products.

The editors of Vanity Fair talked with several former employees of Mayer. One of them remarked: “Everything that Marissa did was changing pixels in places. Over the years, she became more and more authoritarian. She could reject the layout only because she didn’t like the color - or she simply had no mood. Dissatisfaction with the team grew with terrible force. "

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

With her meticulousness, workaholism and the desire to trace everything, Mayer probably gained not one enemy in Google. As the former subordinate Mayer notes, this is most clearly shown by the fact that after Marissa’s transfer to Yahoo, not a single engineer followed.

Jobs at Yahoo!

In 2012, Yahoo’s board of directors offered Marissa Meyer the position of CEO of a company in crisis at the time. There were a few more candidates. The top manager of Google caused the board of directors the most doubts: they were embarrassed by her passion for publicity, inexperience in budget management and staff cuts, and the fact that Mayer had worked for Google, where she didn’t care how much money she spent and how This includes advertisers.

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



Marissa held a brilliant presentation. She presented to the management of the company a well thought-out plan for bringing Yahoo out of crisis, which affected all aspects of the corporation’s activities.

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 leadership position, did she admit to the board of directors that she was in a position - but this did not seem like a big problem.

Good / evil leader

First of all, Marissa Mayer took up the transformation of the company's corporate culture. She introduced free meals and prohibited employees from working remotely. Gave each employee Jawbone Up fitness bracelets and handed out to all employees on a smartphone on iOS or Android. The satisfaction level of Yahoo employees has reached the highest level since the company arrived, according to the Glassdoor research agency, on a scale of one to five, after Mayer arrived, the estimate was fixed at 3.7.

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

Meyer, by her example, showed the staff how to relate to work - having given birth to a child, after two weeks she left the maternity leave. The office was equipped with a nursery, and to take care of the baby, Meyer hired a nanny.



However, in Yahoo, Marissa has not changed her “bad” habits. According to one of the designers who quit the company, Meier once 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 she does not allow herself this at meetings with ordinary employees). In 2012, Meyer scheduled a meeting with the company's management, at which the interlocutors intended to discuss Yahoo's budget for the next year - and overslept her for three hours. Many managed to leave before it finally appeared. Such situations were repeated further.

Yahoo! output out of crisis. Attempt number 1

Marissa redesigned most Yahoo services, updated her homepage, news portal, and Fantasy Football.

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

Meyer 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 deems necessary, and investors should pay attention to how much profit she returned to them in two years and how much the stock price rose during her tenure as CEO.

For the first year of Meyer’s work in the company, the value of Yahoo’s shares rose by 71%. June 15, 2012, the day before the appointment of Meier, the price of one share was $ 15.36. June 14, 2013 - $ 26.28. In February 2015, Yahoo’s stock cost $ 42.57, which is 2.77 times more than the day Meyer took the post of CEO.

Analysts, however, were not sure that Yahoo's revenue growth was entirely due to Marissa Mayer. A big role was played by the IPO of the Chinese giant Alibaba, whose shares are held by Yahoo, and the growth of the Yahoo Japan branch, in which Yahoo also has a stake.

Investors are so unhappy with Maier's activities that at least two of them offered to the AOL CEO to think about buying Yahoo and asked him to head the merged corporation.

On December 10, 2015, amid a heated debate about the plight of Yahoo !, it became known that Myers had the birth of twin daughters, Mariell and Silvana.

Yahoo! output out of crisis. Attempt number 2

The strategy to promote mobile advertising, video and advertising in social networks, which Myers introduced in 2014, was unable to increase the company's revenue. Advertising revenue in the search engine continued to decline.

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

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

If immediately after the arrival of Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, many investors and analysts predicted profit growth and positive changes, now their attitude has changed. Some of the investors directly accuse Mariss Meier of “burning out” more than $ 3 billion in recent years. The head of Yahoo has repeatedly spent unreasonably large amounts of money on non-obvious 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 dropped significantly as costs increased.

Closing offices and downsizing staff is one of the four points of Yahoo’s new development strategy. As part of the new strategy, Yahoo will focus on interacting with users. The company will partially get rid of Internet assets - as a result, search, email and Tumblr will remain.

According to Yahoo, these measures will help reduce operating expenses 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 advisors, and Cravath, Swaine & Moore were selected as legal advisors.

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 about the formation of a separate committee to assess the prospects for the company, Yahoo shares rose 2.26% to $ 30.09. Also, analysts believe that Yahoo is inclined to sell its business, and not to restructuring, which influenced the increase in the value of shares.



It is noteworthy that Marissa Mayer returned to discussing the sale of business against the background of rumors about a possible change in the head of Yahoo, so there could be a simple attempt to remain at the head of the company, despite previous unsuccessful decisions and investor discontent.

On March 10, in an interview with PBS, Maier said that she still believes that she can lead the company to "greatness." During the interview, the interviewer repeatedly hinted Mayer to rumors about her possible withdrawal. Yahoo! CEO has repeatedly responded to this, that would like to head Yahoo! and further. The emphasis on the subjunctive mood leads to the conclusion that her confidence in her prospects for the post of general director of the company is no longer so strong.