CEO, Yahoo
About The Leader
About The Leader
Marissa Mayer is a visionary leader who likes to work on challenging problems with strong focus on execution made possible by talent and organizational culture.
Marissa Mayer is an American businesswoman and investor as well an early employee at Google.
She is an IT executive and co-founder of Sunshine Contact. Mayer formerly served as the president and chief executive officer of Yahoo!, a position she held beginning in July 2012. It was announced in January 2017 that she would step down from the company's board upon the sale of Yahoo!'s operating business to Verizon Communications.
She graduated from Stanford and had more than 14 job offers. She chose to join Google and was responsible for growing their search team.
Her Purpose
Marissa Mayer is a visionary leader. Marissa Mayer's intent was to pursue challenges that were truly a stretch and fully commit to solving them to drive great impact and results.
After graduating from Stanford, Marissa Mayer had about 14 job opportunities ranging from consulting to startups. After a lot of deliberations, she decided to pursue a riskier option early in her career with the aim to work on challenging problems with smart people. At Google, she was responsible for building some great products for the web and mobile devices.
With facing challenging problems still guiding and motivating her decisions, she later moved to take up a a lead position at Yahoo, a company whose business lines were all declining. She almost worked through building it back to success before it was sold to Verizon.
Case for Change
Case for Change
When I moved to Yahoo!, it was a really challenging time. We had 10 business lines and all of them were losing money. We were losing almost $500M in each business.
Growth Gap
Growth Gap
There was tremendous pressure from investors to stop Yahoo's revenue losses. I reached out to executives at Yahoo to figure out if any of the businesses had the potential and the necessary scope for turnaround of Yahoo's balance sheet and it unfortunately there was not.
Investment Portfolio
Investment Portfolio
I soon realized that growth would come from new ventures and businesses.... We decided to double down on mobile. We were late to race, but it was still something which could help grow the business. We acquired lot of companies to ensure that Yahoo would grow quickly.
Her Leadership Qualities
Her Leadership Qualities
Marissa Mayers was a visionary who loved solving hard challenges with a strong focus on execution and collaborative culture.
Talent & People
Talent & People
Marissa Mayer strongly believed that it was imperative for people to decide whom they work with and use their network to challenge themselves and learn from each other. She believed that people should surround themselves with smart people who challenge them while helping to achieve outstanding success. Working in that contect can only help employees to excel.
Key Actions
Key Actions
Mayer often worked hard to create teams that were both strong and smart as she embarked on her journeys with Google and Yahoo!. As she took over as the CEO of Yahoo!, she made numerous acquisitions of smaller companies just for their talent and teams.
Leadership Behaviors
Leadership Behaviors
Mayer had enormous ability to hire, retain and grow high-performing teams to drive outstanding results. Taking experience from her time at Google she understood that high performing teams often attract more like-minded candidates driving outstanding results
Lesson Learned
Lesson Learned
Mayer understood that to ensure success as a leader, she needed to be surrounded with able and talented people who could drive her in the right direction.
Partnership to Succeed
Partnership to Succeed
Marissa Mayer strongly believed that the company does not need to own all the assets and capabilities it employs and should tap into strong partnerships to succeed.
Key Actions
Key Actions
When Mayer took over as CEO to transform Yahoo!, her initial objective was to focus on mobile as a way to drive growth in the company. When an engineer from her team came to her and told her about missing capabilities in Yahoo's mobile offerings, Mayer was quick to point out an opportunity to drive growth through strong partnerships in mobile.
Leadership Behaviors
Leadership Behaviors
Rapid execution & Results
Collaboration & Partnerships
Action-oriented
Lesson Learned
Lesson Learned
Mayers took over the role of CEO of yahoo with a strong urgency to turn the company around.
She believed when speed and execution was most desired, companies who lack the capabilities should not shy away from partnerships and collaboration opportunities.
Execution Focus
Execution Focus
Mayers believed that innovation was not useful for a company unless it was equally adept at execution. She believed that innovation was necessary for the success and survival of the company but once the company had figured out its goals that it was time to create a strong focus around execution. While driving growth at Yahoo, she moved her focus to policy and decisions with the goal of improving current products for strong adoption on the web and on mobile.
Key Actions
Key Actions
When Mayer was tasked with the goal of turning around Yahoo, she started with the looking at strong growth in mobile to move all the Yahoo! tools and make it compatible for mobile. Once the goal was finalized, she quickly marshalled resources to ensure effective collaboration, a strong focus on execution, and a quick execution for results.
Leadership Behaviors
Leadership Behaviors
Rapid Execution
Power of great partners
Teams & Collaboration
Lesson Learned
Lesson Learned
Mayer believed that it was not always important to build in-house capabilities
She believed that building a culture that drives collaboration and problem-solving could have a great impact.
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