Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!
Nicholas Carlson
Hachette
Rs599
Pp 336

Yahoo’s past has already been documented by various authors through books and magazine features, which makes one wonder whether there was a need for Nicholas Carlson to rewrite the same in the first 135 pages of his book, Marissa Mayer and Her Fight to Save Yahoo!

So did we really need a book at all to reach the conclusion that Marissa Mayer hasn’t delivered much in terms of her performance at Yahoo? Here, we have a 300-page book on the theme that fails to tell you where the company is headed and whether it will be saved at all. From that perspective the book fails, but still the Yahoo CEO’s story has fascinating elements.

Carlson admits upfront that Mayer had refused to cooperate with him on the book but had constantly interfered with his research. Hence his sources remain largely anonymous—something that takes the sting out of the book.

At the start, the book takes us on a Yahoo tour, explaining the dramatic past of the company and connecting it to the entry of a celeb CEO of the Silicon Valley—Marissa Mayer. Carlson portrays Mayer as an over-ambitious person and this point is explained fairly well through the infamous incident at Google (where she was employed earlier) when she clashed with engineer Amit Singhal over Google’s search product. She was

demoted since.

When Marissa Mayer was chosen to be the CEO of Yahoo, the employees and investors welcomed her with huge expectations, hoping that she would bring back the company to what it was before. In 2012, there were posters of Marissa Mayer on the walls of Yahoo’s California headquarters, on them was one word— HOPE. But according to this book, a year later, she sat in front of the same employees who now questioned her plans and her ability to run a $35-billion company.

The author dedicates one whole part of the book for Yahoo, its past and the series of CEOs it had until Mayer showed up. Mayer’s early life, her tenure at Google and her entry into Yahoo are explained beautifully in the second half. The seamless and dramatic transition from one part to another makes it a compelling read in parts.

Carlson first mentions about Mayer in the prologue where he talks about her arrival and how within a year she managed to bring sweeping changes in the company and then towards the end of 2013, the employees who once admired her were left to wonder why she was coming up with policies which aimed at bringing down her goodwill. Carlson says, “They wondered, more seriously that at any time since she joined, if Mayer was actually up for the job of saving Yahoo.”

Carlson uses only 100 pages to pen down her journey in Yahoo so far. And within those 100 pages, he manages to give a detailed account of her failures and achievements as a CEO. For instance, he dwells on the several steps to ensure transparency in a bid to win the trust of her employees; one such step was the staff meetings that she initiated where she and her executives answered questions posed by the employees. Her decision to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion helped Yahoo stay relevant to some extent.

One of the major challenges that she faced was to reduce the bloated workforce of the company. She struggled to solve this issue which made her commit a series of mistakes. As per the author, Mayer ended up demoralising her workforce by introducing concepts like the QPRs (quarterly performance reviews) that forced the executives to grade a certain set of their employees as under-performers.

A few of the employees at Yahoo, as per the book, term her as a manipulator, but again the source of this information remain unidentified. Apart from this, her decision to abolish Yahoo’s work-at-home policy turned into a public-relations disaster, the book states.

The book lacks a strong finish and although the book concludes Mayer was a failure to some extent, Carlson is still seen hedging his bets by pointing that Steve Jobs only launched the first iPod in the fifth year after he returned to Apple.

However, in the epilogue, he also mentions about the recent campaign launched by a new investor to sell Yahoo to AOL, which makes us want to think whether she will get a second chance to prove herself, especially when the experts are calling for her resignation this year.

The book ebbs and flows and never satisfies you with the kind of revelations and answers it offers.

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