Let the great fire sale of Yahoo’s assets begin! I have been watching Yahoo’s decline ever since they made the mistake of hiring Ms Mayer as CEO. It was only a matter of time, but there are lessons to be learned. Here are the key lessons from the demise of Yahoo…
1ne: Hire the right CEO/leader – Hiring Ms Mayer was a huge mistake, not because she is a woman, but because she was not the right person to turn around the struggling giant. Ms Mayer, by all accounts, is, was not a “business person” but rather someone who got mired down in minor details of design. Her poor choices of acquisitions never returned any value and hiring people like Katy Couric was a dumb idea.
2wo: Why Yahoo? At its core Yahoo never gave anyone a reason to visit its site/homepage. There are opportunities galore, but Yahoo instead focused on minor details like the look and feel of their mail app.
3hree: Bad hires. Yahoo’s VP of sales lasted what, 6 months? He left with a golden parachute while Yahoo employees were losing their jobs.
4our: Failure of leadership. Yahoo employees often made fun of Ms Mayer and rumors about her exorbitant parties circulated within the company and media while more people were being let go.
5ive: Departure of key executives. When your key, hand picked, team starts to leave, you know the ship is going down. It got so bad that Ms Mayer requested that executives sign a pledge to stay with the company.
I believe the company could have been turned around with basic marketing and business skills, but Ms Mayer made it more about her than the company. She was often seen on the Today show and attending high profile parties, but frankly she just didn’t have the business skills. For her failure she will get a payout worth tens of millions of dollars. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=”null”]Nothing like rewarding failure.[/inlinetweet]
