Can anyone share the article? cp /wsj/article /hn/comments
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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge
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Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge
#22"Ms. Mayer called a meeting with senior executives in August and asked them to sign a written agreement to stay with the company for at least three more years, according to two people familiar with the meeting." Is such an agreement enforceable? Or is this some meaningless pledge? If you want people to stay, give them a decent financial incentive.
You'd assume that if a CEO were asking you to sign such an agreement, they would offer some sort of incentive in return. Otherwise it seems more like an ultimatum for you to declare your loyalty.
Actually, contractually that gets really interesting.
Basically, for a contract to be valid both sides have to give something, this is referred to as "consideration".
Now, normally, with work-related contracts the consideration is "continuing to employ you", but with senior mgmt (golden parachutes, stock options, etc) I bet the waters are murky.
Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge
#23"Ms. Mayer called a meeting with senior executives in August and asked them to sign a written agreement to stay with the company for at least three more years, according to two people familiar with the meeting." Is such an agreement enforceable? Or is this some meaningless pledge? If you want people to stay, give them a decent financial incentive.
It's not enforceable. In the US, you can't enforce an employment contract if it involves forcing someone to work for you. This was partially legislated as a legal defense against indentured servitude.
Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge
#24Sometimes, well it actually happens quite often, a company just runs its course and is better off just winding things up and closing shop.
IMHO it looks like the likely end game for Yahoo is:
- taken private by a Private Equity firm
- divest Yahoo Japan and Alibaba
- any divisions that aren't making an actual profit, (tumblr, flickr, fantasy sports, etc, will be shopped around and sold if possible, or shuttered if not possible.
- search, email and the yahoo front page will be sold to Microsoft
Yahoo has done everything by the MBA book to turn around the company, they are at the step of brining in Mckinsley consultants, never a terribly good sign.
Sometimes, time just passes a company by and you can't do much to turn it around, its not the leadership's fault or the engineers fault. The market just says the company is no longer needed.
This doesn't mean the company is un profitable. Corel was a company in the early 2000's that went this route. A company can circle the drain, making slightly less and less profit each year, slowly laying off people which causes them to miss their next quarter, which necessitates more layoffs and the circle continues until someone buys them out.
I think this is the likely fate of Yahoo.
The next step is to engage an investment bank to find them a takeover partner if Silver Lake doesn't want to be the one to take them private.
What other possible route is there?
They've brought in 4-5 CEO's each with their own vision of what yahoo should be and all of them has failed to turn the company around.
What is Yahoo's area of expertise that they make money at and can do better that Google, Microsoft, Facebook or Amazon?
Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge
#25Can anyone share the article? cp /wsj/article /hn/comments
Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge
#26The morale problem is a symptom of bad leadership. It's not going to be fixed with more bad leadership.
Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge
#27Has Yahoo! stopped the lay-offs?
Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge
#28You can bypass the paywall with this link: http://bit.ly/1XdzZgO (Google search the original URL in quotes in future)
Sounds like she's in a tough spot. You're pretty much forced into a situation of focusing on the good numbers when you're a public company or you'll get beaten up by the shareholders and shorts. So it's difficult to shine sunlight on the bad stuff to disinfect because that's not what public investors want to hear.
Going into search? That's just crazy talk. Google has the space completely wrapped up.
I think Yahoo has some excellent properties like finance.yahoo.com which is amazing and could unlock a deluge of cash with the right biz model. Retail investors visit the site in droves daily. Right now it's an advertising disaster. Prime space taken up by spammy link-baity ads injected into the main center content: "10 most popular fitness models on the planet". And prime spaces on the right taken up by amazon ads. The most targeted ads by etrade, scottrade and ameritrade are the smallest ads on the page with tiny icons on the left. They relaunched yahoo finance in September and sounds like their users hate the new site: https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/315477-finance-dd-3
The WSJ article isn't going to make life at Yahoo any easier unfortunately.
Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge
#29I would recommend anyone interested in this story to also read the Forbes article about Mayer's problems and potential exit at Yahoo (http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/11/19/the-last-...).
On top of stories about large number of executives have left over the course of 2015 (http://recode.net/2015/10/19/yahoo-talent-exodus-accelerates...), the lack of vision/planning that contributed to executive discontent:
> But perhaps none of these incidents damaged morale more than Mayer’s reorganization of Yahoo’s product teams. When Mayer launched the effort last fall, everyone agreed the existing structure had outlived its usefulness—for instance, mobile products was partitioned from other groups. But Mayer embarked on the process without laying out a grand vision for it. Instead, she began sketching out different scenarios in one-on-one meetings with various executives, floating one plan by one exec and a different by another. Unable to make up her mind, the process dragged on for months. “She went through 20 different permutations,” says an executive with knowledge of the process. “The product guys were twisting in the wind, not knowing what they were going to run.”
> Product releases slowed to a trickle, and a turf war brewed as executives became concerned with their futures. Jon McCormack, a star executive who had joined Yahoo in January from Amazon and was promised a broad engineering portfolio covering critical areas like mobile, landed in the vacuum created by Mayer’s indecision. He was gone by the end of February and now works for Google. When Mayer announced the new structure in April, it was too late. “That was the beginning of everyone losing faith,” says another senior executive. “That’s when people started to look for other jobs.”
I don't consider being the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company that's still trying to figure out where it fits in the 21st century a job anyone could possibly do, but it seems like Mayer's strategy has been a little all over the place with no real gain in any segment. From the WSJ article:
> As her strategy has shifted, Ms. Mayer has variously cast Yahoo as a challenger to Netflix Inc. in online video content and as a threat to Google Inc. in Web search, but has made little progress toward either goal.
I'm just not sure where she's trying to push Yahoo towards. What is their vision?
Re: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Faces Morale Challenge
#30I see a lot of parallels between Marissa Mayer's tenure at Yahoo and Dick Costolo's tenure at Twitter. Dick left two quarters ago and Twitter is still struggling to meet investor expectations. I have a feeling that there are structural problems at Yahoo, like Twitter, that even a unicorn CEO would have difficulty fixing. A lot of analysts and investors seem very leadership oriented in their blame anyway.
Jack was just named CEO on October 5th, it will still be a little bit before we see how the Street reacts. The next quarterly earnings should be telling.