This fast-paced, exhaustively reported business narrative by Nicholas Carlson, chief correspondent for Business Insider, tells two intertwined stories: the rise of Marissa Mayer as a brilliant programmer and technology leader at Google, and the growth and then the decline of Yahoo as a central address for the internet. One of the biggest tech stories of our decade has been Yahoo’s decision to hire Mayer away from Google as CEO in 2012 to try to save the company from a death spiral or an eventual takeover, and it’s still unclear whether Mayer will succeed.
Carlson is not a brilliant stylist, and can fall victim to journalistic clichés and to the temptation to end his chapters and sections with a breathless cliffhanger tone. And he’s not interested in the broader social or economic trends of the century; the contrast with Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Steve Jobs is pretty stunning, since Isaacson tries in his Jobs book, mostly successfully, to place Jobs in the context of his times, while Carlson doesn’t look in that direction. Still, the book is worth reading, both for the sake of its inherent excitement and drama, and as a study in business strategy and in how the capital markets work.
Carlson is very good at extracting and explaining the broad set of skills required of a technology leader. Mayer, for example, is a brilliant programmer, extraordinarily user-oriented, incredibly hard-working, and inspirational when addressing large groups. She understands Yahoo’s products, and everyone else’s, almost on an intuitive basis. On the other hand, she is very shy in small groups and can come across as cold. It doesn’t help that she is usually 45 minutes late, or more, for meetings. She has other failings: She can be perceived as a micromanager and, perhaps most important, she tends to be bored with the world of media and advertising.
As Carlson notes, Mayer has a great sense of the technology itself and of what customers want. When she started at Yahoo, she realized that the company needed to build a presence in the mobile web.
“Just as Yahoo’s original success had come from making the early Internet user-friendly for normal people,” he writes, “Mayer believed Yahoo’s renewed success would come from making the mobile Internet user-friendly. The big difference would be that Mayer wanted Yahoo to narrow its product portfolio down from more than a hundred products to approximately a dozen.”
On the other hand, Carlson notes that despite her huge success at Google, Mayer “had close to zero experience in Google’s advertising business,” and that “when Google’s sales executives sometimes invited Mayer to meet with their clients, Mayer would often decline.” One result, he says, is that Mayer, at Yahoo, “was being asked to do a nontechnical job she had no talent for.”
In 2013, Mayer reluctantly agreed to attend a big event in New York where Yahoo was to show off its video programming for ad agency buyers – and she bombed. She read from a teleprompter rather than entertain her media audience. Although she did better the following year, she clearly wasn’t leading from strength.
What does this say to all of us, who will never run a major tech company but can learn from others’ experiences? A few things. Technology knowledge is crucial. but is only an excellent beginning in a business world that is still run by human beings with feelings and foibles. Self-confidence shouldn’t be allowed to veer over into self-importance; being constantly late conveys the impression that other people’s time doesn’t matter to you.
Another possible lesson is that sometimes the facts are not on your side, despite all of your marketing efforts. As Carlson concludes:
Ultimately, Yahoo suffers from the fact that the reason it ever succeeded in the first place was because it solved a global problem that lasted for only a moment. The early internet was hard to use, and Yahoo made it easier. Yahoo was the Internet. Then the Internet was flooded with capital and infinite solutions for infinite problems and the need for Yahoo faded.
So Mayer’s task may be at root an impossible one. Time will tell. She’s only 39 years old and has many business lives ahead of her.
By: Jonathan Groner, PR Specialist and Freelance Writer, for the March/April 2015 issue of the Capital Ideas Newsletter.