MARISSA MAYER AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE YAHOO!
Nicholas Carlson
Richard Bernstein
Twelve; 357 pages; $30
One day in 2012, Marissa Mayer was whirling around Yahoo's office in Sunnyvale, California, directing a redesign of the home page and the company's uncool but still widely used email application. The next, she was the proud mother of her first child, who was nicknamed "BBBB" in the hospital, for Big Baby Boy Bogue (her husband's last name). This would hardly be considered extraordinary if it weren't for the fact that she had recently been named the company's chief executive. Female chief executives typically live in glass boxes where every move they make is held up for intense public scrutiny, and most get themselves there through brutal amounts of work and by avoiding anything that draws attention to the fact that they're women. Yet right after starting her job running a troubled $30-billion technology giant, Ms Mayer announced that she would be taking a maternity leave, albeit a stunningly short one. (She took two weeks.) The audacity of the move - accepting a top executive job knowing that she was five months pregnant and then taking so little time off - prompted an internet outcry ("The Pregnant C.E.O.: Should You Hate Marissa Mayer?", Forbes asked in one representative example), in which even progressives grumbled about the privilege involved, including Ms Mayer's household staff and in-office nursery. And so it was that her upsetting of the women's-issues industrial complex became all that most people know about Ms Mayer. Yet there is much more to the picture.
As Nicholas Carlson demonstrates in Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!, a vivid account of her vertiginous career climb, Ms Mayer is worth paying attention to for reasons that transcend gender. Mr Carlson presents her as a complex personality who defies most stereotypes. "Marissa Mayer is fascinating for her contradictions," he writes. "Onstage, in front of hundreds or thousands, she is warm and charming and laughing. But in a room with just a few others, she's cold and direct and impersonal." She also "calls herself a geek, but she doesn't look the part", he points out, the result of an understanding of personal branding that she developed early in her career; since then she's embraced haute couture and posed for a Vogue photo spread. Not looking the part has only amplified her appeal.
Most important, Mr Carlson argues, Ms Mayer earned her shot at running Yahoo through years of innovative thinking in an industry that prides itself on novel ideas. She was one of the early engineers at Google and had a central role in building the company into the success that it is, playing the hidden curator behind the clean, uncluttered "look and feel" of Google's sites and products. Written in a chatty, bloggy tone that may work for some readers and grate on others - it grew out of several pieces for the financial news site Business Insider, where Mr Carlson is the chief correspondent, and it is loyal to the style found there - the book is likely to appeal most to Silicon Valley obsessives, as well as anyone who is curious about what lies behind Ms Mayer's coating of sunny confidence. The author brings juicy scenes and new details to Ms Mayer's story, whose major turns are well known, although the lack of detailed source notes (there is a bibliography) makes it difficult to evaluate some of the information he presents.
The question hanging over the narrative is whether Ms Mayer can save Yahoo, or even make it great, and the answer is far from certain. It's a brand that had been neglected or mishandled for years by those who were in charge before her, and almost half of Mr Carlson's account retraces the well-worn history of Yahoo, which began in the 1990s as an internet directory and then morphed into a web "portal" that became overly dependent on dot-com companies for its advertising revenue before the bubble exploded in 2000. The story becomes much more interesting when Ms Mayer takes centre stage. The daughter of an art teacher-homemaker and an environmental engineer in a tiny town in Wisconsin, Ms Mayer was programmed to achieve, loaded up with extracurricular activities in school, like Tracy Flick. She joined Google right out of a graduate computer science programme at Stanford and thrived, ultimately becoming one of its most influential executives. She generated resentment, though, especially among colleagues who were jealous of the extraordinary amount of press attention she got - not that it was her fault she was a photogenic female computer nerd, a breed as rare as a ghost orchid. "There was nothing especially abhorrent or uncommon about Mayer's behavior as an executive," Mr Carlson writes, hinting at the sexism that seems to have motivated some of her enemies. "She was headstrong, confident, dismissive, self-promoting and clueless about how she sometimes hurt other people's feelings. So were many of the most successful executives in the technology industry."
Ms Mayer was handpicked by Daniel Loeb, an aggressive hedge fund manager and a Yahoo investor who seems to have informed long stretches of Mr Carlson's narrative, to take on the role of Yahoo's saviour. She tried to make the company's workforce more productive and to focus the company on making applications for mobile phones, with some success. Two years later, even though Ms Mayer managed to prevent mass layoffs and invigorated the culture of the company, Yahoo is still in deep trouble. In the end Mr Carlson himself seems unconvinced that she can turn things around: "Maybe not even Marissa Mayer, with her incredible work ethic, genius sense of what made an Internet product usable, worldwide fame and talent-attracting charisma, would be enough to save Yahoo." Ms Mayer deserves to be remembered as someone more than just the woman who took a big job in a male-dominated industry while pregnant, even if it means being known for failing to save Yahoo.
© The New York Times News Service 2015
