Transformation at Yahoo Foiled by Its Leader’s Inability to Bet the Farm
&gt; Instead of making a single big bet that might have focused the company on something completely different and potentially groundbreaking, Ms. Mayer staked out a lot of small and midsize positions, rarely committing to anything early enough to make a difference. For Ms. Mayer, original programming was just one of dozens of products in a portfolio that remains too complex to understand.<p>Other sources indicate that Mayer is very much a metrics-based decision maker (a).<p>I&#x27;m wondering if that&#x27;s the result of putting a metrics-based decision maker at the head of a technology company. For sustaining innovation, carefully finding a local maximum seems fine, but in a dynamic field, you also need to be able to make a big move based on a more qualitative understanding of your surroundings.<p>As a technical contributor, I&#x27;ve been on-and-off frustrated my whole career by quantitative managers asking for promises of real profit before committing to cleaning up technical debt. There&#x27;s no honest way to come up with a good number here. You can&#x27;t solve the problem thirty times and then present a high mean and low p-value. &quot;Keep doing what we&#x27;re doing but maybe 5% better&quot; requires absolutely no proof, in contrast. You don&#x27;t have to prove that COBOL-based system XYZ <i>won&#x27;t</i> blow up in your face or that frames-in-frames webpage mycompany.com&#x2F;abc <i>won&#x27;t</i> eventually look unprofessional and affect the company&#x27;s brand.<p>I&#x27;m wondering if Mayer&#x27;s &quot;inability to bet the farm&quot; is a higher-level version of the same problem... setting the bar too high for definitive proof creates barriers to strategic moves into areas with incomplete information.<p>a) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;how-marissa-mayer-figured-out-work-at-home-yahoos-were-slacking-off-2013-3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;how-marissa-mayer-figured-out...</a>