Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer on Selling a Company While Trying to Turn It Around
Boy, I disagree with Mayer&#x27;s take on sustained crunch =&gt; success.  But she seems to repeat it.<p>&gt; <i>When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom</i><p>This is fine in spurts but doing it on a sustained basis is actually suboptimal.  Crunch time for extended periods is <i>bad</i> for problem-solving and for productivity.  There are critical periods where it can be productive... when the team is all obsessed in tackling a crisis or timely opportunity.  But sustaining this for more than several weeks a year at most in total is actually detrimental.<p>&gt; <i>I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success</i><p>No.  This is not true.  At best, this is a gross oversimplification.<p>And it&#x27;s disheartening to see Mayer hammering this single point over and over.  It almost seems like a point of pride for her... which leads to:<p>&gt; <i>There was a moment when someone said to me, “Wow, you might be the busiest person on the planet.” In the Midwest, where I grew up, you shrug off a ­compliment like that and think a lot of people in the world are really busy, like President Obama. And then President Obama started posting YouTube videos for fun.</i><p>Alright, douchey-ness of this humble brag (let alone humble-brag in even glancing comparing yourself to the POTUS) aside, this underscores again the obsession with hours worked.  I just vehemently disagree with this.  Valuable output and quality matter most, not hours worked.  It&#x27;s highly questionable to claim that more hours worked leads to greater overall value of output.  Beyond some threshold (which I believe varies person by person), there is an asymptotic incremental contribution to total valuable output.  And at some point, total value of output declines, where the incremental contribution of more time worked in a given period is <i>negative</i>.<p>This is an unhealthy and unhelpful view.<p>Moving onto totally different topics...<p>&gt; &gt; <i>Does it bother you that your parenting choices were criticized?<p>&gt; In my view, there’s just entirely too much judgment over motherhood...</i><p>Here, here!  Totally agree.<p>&gt; <i>I would never have a five-year plan. If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan when I was 18, I would have missed every great thing that ever happened to me.</i><p>Agree very much again.  I think you can have high-level achievement goals, but not a specific destination or path laid out for getting there. Having fungible plans is usually wisest because every day you have more information than you did before and every day you have a chance of encountering a previously unknown opportunity.  Need to be open to leveraging that information and those opportunities when it&#x27;s called for, as opposed to sticking to a rigid plan.<p>&gt; <i>We had shareholders with two different priorities. We have some people who owned Yahoo stock because they really cared about digital advertising and the internet and a possible turnaround there. And we had another set of stakeholders who owned it because they saw a lot of positive transactions that could happen with these very large, lucrative Asian assets. And we had duties to both as the executive team of the company.</i><p>That is totally fair.  I think Mayer&#x27;s biggest failing was not recognizing this early enough and not being proactive enough about resolving it.  It was a disaster waiting to happen.  She and the company seemed very focused on the turnaround early on, and overly committed to holding the assets together.  Recognizing from the get go that Yahoo had different shareholder groups -- and in particular that Yahoo was or easily could become the target of activist investors -- it is surprising that this wasn&#x27;t addressed boldly, head-on, quickly.<p>It seems the company (and Mayer) could have landed in a much better spot if they&#x27;d been proactive in selling off or restructuring assets.  If they ended up in a spot where they&#x27;re splitting up assets amyway, it might have been better to do that from the get go and use it as a way to clean up the shareholder base at the same time.  <i>Plenty</i> of PE and IB firms would have been interested in helping to do a structured deal around Yahoo&#x27;s investment assets and this might have positioned Yahoo much, much better to execute the turnaround Mayer seems to have clearly wanted to focus on (stronger balance sheet, less ammo for activist investors, opportunity to clear out unhelpful shareholders, perhaps even an opportunity to go private, if that would have been helpful).<p>Shame this didn&#x27;t happen.