Carol Bartz comes to Yahoo! from Autodesk. During her (1992-2006) tenure there, she guided the company?s evolution from a founder-driven, single product company to one offering a wider portfolio and greater heights, including the spot of a world leader in 2D and 3D design software, and a tenfold increase in stock prices. This was in the face of the early nineties? slump, the dot-com crash and even a market share scrap with Microsoft. At Yahoo!, she faces similar challenges. Not only does the economy remain weak and ad spends continue moving south, Yahoo! still sports bruises from the takeover battle last year when Microsoft offered it $33 a share. Yahoo! shares have since dropped to around $12, with profits having fallen in ten of the last eleven quarters.
Will Carol Bartz be able to reverse Jerry Yang?s ill-fated decision to hold out against Microsoft? Soon after Yahoo! announced her hire, she said: ?It?s no secret that Yahoo! has faced challenges over the past year, but as I look around here today, I see a powerful global brand.? Its search engine, after all, is still the second most popular one after Google. Whether or not Microsoft makes another offer, and whether or not Bartz accepts it, she is better positioned to make hardheaded decisions than Yang, who was sentimentally bound to what he had founded as a graduate student.
Bartz is also one of the few female CEOs in the business world, with only 12 Fortune 500 companies having women in the top job in 2008. She had spoken on this issue when I interviewed her around a year ago: ?It was tough to grow in the corporate world; and there were ceilings, sometimes even mental. Still, I was fortunate to be in the tech arena, because tech was growing so strongly and had different values and it was a really good place to be.? As for how one could increase the odds in favour of women making it to the senior ranks, she highlighted two things in particular: encourage more women to study engineering and science, and make work places more flexible so that we aren?t completely exiled during our child raising years.
pragati.verma@expressindia.com