On what basis are you claiming that? Do you have any idea about how the other CEOs before her did?
Disclaimer: I worked at Yahoo for several CEOs, including Mayer. I think she was the best CEO at Yahoo in a long time. So please, enlighten me why my impression of her is incorrect.
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/top-10-management-mistake...
https://qz.com/314225/everything-we-learned-from-marissa-may...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemyatt/2015/11/20/marissa-ma...
http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/262704/why-wont-anyone-tal...
http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happened-to-all-of-marissa-may...
https://www.thestreet.com/story/13332877/1/yahoo-ceo-mayer-i...
http://variety.com/2016/digital/features/marissa-mayer-yahoo...
http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2015/12/30/worst-ceos-20...
http://www.growthbusiness.co.uk/the-worst-ceos-in-corporate-...
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/272469
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-wh...
Do you want more?
I was there. I saw the sea change she brought into the company. Morale skyrocketed, after the company was just drifting around for years. Compared to Carol Bartz, she was a CEO extraordinaire.
I remember reading Eric Jackson's screeds and he was clueless as hell.
All B2B industrials; not consumer tech companies that get reported on ad nauseam in the media. Lockheed's product lifecycles are measured in decades; Yahoo's in months. I don't think it's a fair comparison.
Agree that Yahoo had really shitty product focus, but that was true 10 years before she joined. Like you said, Yahoo had been warned about MD5 nearly a decade ago -- security had obviously been deprioritized for years before she arrived.
What did she do? She stopped the bleeding long enough to get a sale done. She basically acted like a private equity CEO. If you view her job as extracting the most value out of Yahoo, she did a pretty good job of that.
The criticism against Mayer was due to a combination of her age, gender and "celebrity" status (celebrities tend to be attractive, successful and wealthy). A man would not have had a media circus around him due to the fact that he chose to start a family while being a CEO (a choice that she informed the Yahoo board of before taking the job). Mayer also looks about 10 years younger than she is in most photos; which IMO leads to a lot of armchair executives criticizing her as inexperienced (lol, she was a key member of the team that built the product that destroyed Yahoo, so I'm pretty sure she's experienced).
IMO Mayer is a great example that having kids doesn't have to derail your career as a female executive. While she may set an unrealistic standard for other women (damn Stanford overachievers!) I can't fault her for figuring out a way to make the various elements of her life work for her.
Will she show humility for failing at turning the company around? Will she claim success for a coincidental share price increase she had nothing to do with? Will she claim nobody could have done better? This will allow for a better judgment of character.
Mayer was a bad CEO – take Alibaba out of the equation and Yahoo became materially worse off expressly because of the decisions she made. Look at the ridiculous acquisitions, look at the brain drain. What the hell is Yahoo’s product? Email? They can’t even keep that secure – compromising a BILLION accounts. They were warned about MD5 in 2008. Yahoo’s Security team was treated like second class citizens – requests being denied because of cost too much or they were considered a low priority. Who set those priorities? Mayer. A a billion accounts got compromised as a result. There is a direct cause-effect.
Complaining about her salary is completely valid – not because it was “high” but because she got such an incomprehensible salary for running the company into the ground. Nobody complains about Tim Cook’s salary because nobody cares – Apple is extremely profitable, which is the entire point of a CEO. Tim Cook is a liberal gay man – so if the idea that people are harder on Mayer is because of her sex – imagine how hard they should ostensibly be on Cook. Yet Cook is actually doing a good job. Nobody cares what someone has between their legs if the share price is good.
Mayer is criticized because she was horrible, ineffective and engaged in substance-poor grandstanding and she got paid enormously for essentially crashing the ship into an iceberg before Verizon came along like the Carpathia. Sure, Yahoo was the Titanic before Mayer arrived, but she knew that and yet still went full-ahead sailing Yahoo into the ice field or irrelevancy.