Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!
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4.1 • 30 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A page-turning narrative about Marissa Mayer's efforts to remake Yahoo as well as her own rise from Stanford University undergrad to CEO of a $30 billion corporation by the age of 38.
When Yahoo hired star Google executive Mayer to be its CEO in 2012 employees rejoiced. They put posters on the walls throughout Yahoo's California headquarters. On them there was Mayer's face and one word: HOPE. But one year later, Mayer sat in front of those same employees in a huge cafeteria on Yahoo's campus and took the beating of her life. Her hair wet and her tone defensive, Mayer read and answered a series of employee-posed questions challenging the basic elements of her plan. There was anger in the room and, behind it, a question: Was Mayer actually going to be able to do this thing?
Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! is the inside story of how Yahoo got into such awful shape in the first place, Marissa Mayer's controversial rise at Google, and her desperate fight to save an Internet icon.
In August 2011 hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb took a long look at Yahoo and decided to go to war with its management and board of directors. Loeb then bought a 5% stake and began a shareholder activist campaign that would cost the jobs of three CEOs before he finally settled on Google's golden girl Mayer to unlock the value lurking in the company. As Mayer began to remake Yahoo from a content company to a tech company, an internal civil war erupted.
In author Nicholas Carlson's capable hands, this riveting book captures Mayer's rise and Yahoo's missteps as a dramatic illustration of what it takes to grab the brass ring in Silicon Valley. And it reveals whether it is possible for a big lumbering tech company to stay relevant in today's rapidly changing business landscape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Faced by the Google behemoth and by a growing identity crisis, Yahoo was foundering - and then they hired Marissa Mayer. "Yahoo's celebrity, superhero, savior CEO had arrived." Drawing from interviews with over a hundred sources, journalist Carlson tells the story of a woman "fascinating for her contradictions," who started her tenure at the company with a bang only to be taken to task by her employees en masse at a company-wide meeting in November 2013. She had inherited a mess from former CEO Carol Bartz, which she handled deftly and to widespread applause - particularly for her decision to reverse a mass layoff. So how did her team lose so much faith? Beginning with Mayer's introverted, focused, highly ambitious nature and the start of her career as a Google intern in 1999, Carlson draws a compelling picture of an ambitious engineer uncomfortable in the spotlight, but determined to excel. The narrative has the pace and pop of an expos , and readers will find themselves both rooting for and against this complicated leader, whose confident, self-promoting behavior, Carlson points out, is not considered unusual for an executive assuming that said executive is a man. Exciting and informative, and necessary reading for Silicon Valley junkies.
Customer Reviews
Saving Yahoo
The history of this foundational internet company is storied in successes and failures! The reality is the value of all great companies is the ability to change and change fast. Marissa Mayer offers that opportunity, but in reality no one wants YAHOOS to run the world!
The authors storytelling was compelling and very readable. The future narratives created a feeling of repeating the same stories, but in the end you will be understanding of the past, present and potential future of Yahoo!
Puzzling
Book started off well. It was definitely interesting to get a glimpse into the inner workings of a startup and how outside forces shaped the history. Somewhere halfway through I started to get a bad feeling that I could not put my finger on. Then with 41 pages left, the book ends in Sopranoesque finale fashion, leaving me to leaf through tens of pages of bibliography and thank you'd, assuming that my Apple device lost a chapter. I was left wondering about the timing of this book and if there were other reasons/motives/forces behind it. Would have been more interesting if it had been written with a conclusion of some sort.
Marissa Mayer & the Fight to Save Yahoo - Excellent read!
Informative, readable, interesting, current!