entremet
Member
Pretty fair article on Mayer's tenure at Yahoo, which honestly, would have been a miracle to save.
I think Mayer was definitely overhyped, given her lack of experience running a company before. But I also think she got more scrunity than your average white male baby boomer CEO.
This quip summarizes it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/technology/yahoo-marissa-mayer-compensation.html?_r=0
That's not to say that she didn't make poor choices--killing off remote work, buying Tumblr, and many others. But the way the game is rigged, she played it well, tripling the stock price.
So why did Ms. Mayer receive more than $900,000 a week? The answer, like so many things about Yahoo, is surprisingly complicated. It is rooted partly in the never-lose structure of modern executive compensation packages, but also in two farsighted investments made long ago by one of Yahoo's founders, Jerry Yang.
By Wall Street's most basic yardstick — Yahoo's stock price — Ms. Mayer earned every penny she got. Yahoo's share price more than tripled during her tenure. After the $4.5 billion sale to Verizon, shareholders will still own an investment company with $57 billion of stock in two Asian internet companies, Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan.
Ms. Mayer's pay was mostly in stock and stock options, and she reaped the rewards alongside the other stockholders.
”The only sign you can point to when evaluating a company over a long period of time is how shareholders have done in the exchange," said David Wise, who heads North American sales at Korn Ferry Hay Group, a firm that advises companies on executive pay packages. ”Over the last five years, Yahoo shareholders couldn't have done a lot better than this."
More than most chief executives, Ms. Mayer was working for those shareholders.
She was essentially hired by one hedge-fund manager, Daniel S. Loeb, who got her predecessor fired and won three seats on Yahoo's board in 2012. Mr. Loeb was particularly interested in finding a way to unlock the value of Yahoo's stake in Alibaba, which was already shaping up to be one of China's leading internet companies. He pushed the board to recruit a star like Ms. Mayer to get people excited about a company that had been stumbling for years.
I think Mayer was definitely overhyped, given her lack of experience running a company before. But I also think she got more scrunity than your average white male baby boomer CEO.
This quip summarizes it:
”She was an attractive, high-visibility C.E.O. trying to bring some excitement and glamour to Yahoo," said Martha Josephson, a senior partner at the recruiting firm Egon Zehnder, who helped Ms. Mayer find several of her top executives. ”As hard as the job was, she didn't get a break. If she were an ugly man, she'd be a hero."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/technology/yahoo-marissa-mayer-compensation.html?_r=0
That's not to say that she didn't make poor choices--killing off remote work, buying Tumblr, and many others. But the way the game is rigged, she played it well, tripling the stock price.