Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

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This is not something to be upset about.

Shareholders want near zero executive risk, and so they are willing to pay top dollar for proven executives...

That way, if things do fail, they can be confident that scrimping to save a few million in comp wasn't the reason they lost billions.

We overpay for quality in many areas of the economy. Neurosurgeons are one example. Roughly 0.5 people from each of the the graduating classes of the top 10 medical schools becomes a neurosurgeon. Supply is very, very small because the bar is so so high. Why? Because when someone is doing surgery on our brains we are completely fine with having a 10x overqualified doc doing the surgery.

This is similar to how the price of achieving each additional "9" of reliability is exponentially greater than the last one.

Yet systems with 99.99999% reliability still fail, some neurological procedures fail, and some highly paid CEOs do not lead their companies to glory.

Yahoo's shareholders decided to hire Marissa instead of many other, cheaper options. Nobody was duped, fooled, or scammed. Kobe misses the winning three pointer to lose a game now and then. Mayer is the closest thing the valley had to a sure bet for a company in need of product execution, so it's hard to fault Yahoo for wanting to recruit her.

It's too bad it didn't turn out, but let's hope she does something risky with all the money :)

>Yahoo's shareholders decided to hire Marissa

It was the Board of Directors who hired her, the shareholders are asked to approve (essentially a rubberstamp)

She was far, far from a zero-risk hire. She had only worked for one company, had zero executive experience at the level required at Yahoo.

Enough with the celebrity cult we shower on CEOs - leave it to reality TV starlets.

She'd been responsible for one of Google's most successful products, and had been praised by the founders as a key early hire.

She'd also helped create and shape Google's culture and arguably brought with her to Yahoo several billion dollars worth of Google's trade secrets and operational strategies, not to mention her knowledge of key players inside google who Yahoo might be able to poach to accomplish specific initiatives.

Yahoo had already tried a media exec and its own founder, neither of whom could figure out a recipe for success.

1. Being a good Product Manager does not a CEO make.

2. Her poaching Google stars? She hired and, 15 months later fired, Henrique De Castro, whose "severance package, estimated to be more than $60 million, was one of the largest golden parachutes ever given to a terminated executive" [1]

3. >neither of whom could figure out a recipe for success

Steve Jobs turned around Apple after a couple of disastrous CEO before him (Sculley, Amelio, etc)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrique_De_Castro

Perhaps Jobs could have turned around Yahoo, perhaps not.

So she arguably had all this going on and still couldn't save Yahoo. This must speak of the dire nature Yahoo was in or her incompetence(both maybe?). Though it doesn't seem like her performance was stellar.

Could it have been the entire team(very good) she worked with at Google that made her seem like such a superstar?

I think it says a lot about the early environment at Google. Mayer herself began to plateau at Google after a while, which is why she ended up going to Yahoo instead of running Google.

Major successes take a great team and a fair bit of luck and good timing. This is (I think) why very few highly successful people manage to do it again when starting from scratch (even with the advantages of lessons learned the first time).

I think one problem with human society is that we want so badly to respect success and put individual people on a pedestal, which creates an unfair expectation of genius, when in fact it was likely partly luck and partly timing.

In leadership roles, where the development of a cult of personality is helpful (Mayer, Trump, Clinton, etc.) the name brand of the leader is part of the value proposition, but it reinforces the idea of genius which is usually not remotely true. But it can work because of the desire of humans to align behind chieftain and themselves avoid risk of failure.

I personally think the "leader as servant" model would have been most useful for Mayer, but instead she immediately ended some perks and reined in remote workers. This suggests that she fell into the trap of feeling like she was entitled to authority she (as a leader) hadn't yet earned.

Except she didn't perform well. She made constant awful decisions through the course of her four year tenure.[0]

[0]: http://pxlnv.com/linklog/swisher-interview-nymag/

That's always easy for us to say in hindsight.

.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

I was upset. No point

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