Category: Technology

Posted on

5 Reasons Why Moving to Yahoo Was the Right Choice for Marissa Mayer

On July 16, 2012, Yahoo announced that Marissa Mayer would take the helm as its new CEO. The news of Marissa’s appointment shook the tech world, raising both eyebrows and hopes.

After finishing high school in the Midwestern town of Wausau, Wisconsin, Marissa headed to Stanford University where she specialized in Artificial Intelligence, and obtained both undergraduate and post-graduate degrees. In 1999, Marissa joined Google as its first female software engineer and quickly began her climb through its ranks. By 2001, she had already been promoted to Product Manager, and was promoted again less than two years later to Director of Consumer Web Services. By late 2005, Marissa was appointed VP, Search Products and User Experience, giving her full responsibility for the search engine division. Seven years later and expecting her first child with husband, Zachary Bogue, Marissa has left Google to take on the challenge of bringing Yahoo back to life.

Here are five reasons why the decision she made was the right one:

1. Marissa Mayer Has Built A Stellar Reputation

Having recently celebrated her 13-year anniversary at Google, Marissa Mayer is a talented and accomplished engineer who knows the Internet inside out. With her keen eye for design, she has been credited with championing the search engine’s iconic minimalist layout and was instrumental in developing Google maps as well as Gmail. She is passionate about creating outstanding user experiences and is known for both her laser sharp focus and commitment to innovation. In 2008, at age 33, Marissa became the youngest woman to be listed among Fortune magazine’s America’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business, and has made the list every year since.

2. Marissa Mayer Had Been Overlooked

In recent years, the pace of Marissa’s advancement at Google has slowed. In late 2010, her responsibilities shifted from heading up search services to VP, Local, Maps and Location Services. While dubbed a promotion, and technically giving her more direct reports, the move signaled that she was being overlooked for more significant roles in the upper echelons of leadership. Since last year’s re-appointment of co-founder, Larry Page, as CEO, she has been further shunned, and was excluded from his newly formed “L-Team” of advisers. Mayer’s past role as the Company’s articulate and enthusiastic primary public face has also been visibly diminished. Rumors, although vehemently denied, had continued to surface intermittently suggesting the possibility of Mayer’s departure.

3. Marissa Mayer Was Hungry for A New Challenge

At age 37, Marissa may well have been longing for the opportunity to claim a bigger stage, giving her the increased sense of satisfaction and personal accomplishment winners crave. Mayer was recently appointed to as a director of Wal-Mart, snagging her first Board seat at a public company. Approached by Yahoo in June, Marissa faced a tough choice: stay with the sure thing or jump at the more interesting chance to become head honcho in a more challenging role. And what a challenge it will be. After being one of the first out of the starting block in 1994, Yahoo quickly leapt to Internet supremacy, before being pummeled by Google. In 2008, Yahoo turned down Microsoft’s purchase offer of $47.5 billion. Since then, it has been adrift, in wake of social upstarts Facebook and Twitter.

4. Marissa Mayer Believes She Has the Chops to Get the Job Done

Marissa isn’t just another engineer who has spent her entire career at a single company. She has been a groundbreaking talent, leading Google in some of its most significant wins, and quietly honing all the skills it takes to be a high-caliber CEO. She knows that her technical knowledge and innovative vision are key strengths required for successful leadership in the fast pace Internet arena.

  • She will need to attract and retain high quality engineering talent. Check. Marissa has finely honed organizational skills, as she is used to leading large teams of talented engineers. She has a proven commitment to strategic leadership and is good at mentoring talent, as evidenced by the programs she developed at Google to shape product managers into skilled executive leaders.
  • She will need to bring a renewed spirit of innovation and create great products. Check. Product is what Marissa is good at, and probably the main reason she was chosen to take the helm at Yahoo. Former boss, Larry Page dubbed her a “tireless champion of our users”. Marissa will no doubt make technology and user experience Yahoo’s new top priorities.

 

5. Marissa Mayer Had Nothing to Lose and Everything to Gain

Mayer was quoted as saying “I wanted to work at Google because I felt utterly unprepared”. Management pundits have observed that once female leaders have broken through the glass ceiling, they are often more likely to take up positions which have a higher built-in risk of failure than their male counterparts. Perhaps we are just thrill-seekers! As one of Google’s first employees, Marissa is already a very wealthy woman with a recently estimated net worth of $300 million. While Yahoo has been flailing for years, it is still a giant with over 12,000 employees and an estimated 700 million users. Even if Marissa, like her recent predecessors, fails to revive the company, it won’t be too much of a black mark on her career. On the other hand, if she succeeds, she will scaled a “glass cliff”.

 

Can Marissa Mayer Turn Around Yahoo?

To bring Yahoo back to its former glory, Marissa will have to get back to basics. She will need to craft a clear and compelling vision, and work to restore a sense of purpose and direction. Yahoo doesn’t know what wants to be anymore; it has lost its relevance, still serving as a portal to content, but creating very little user engagement. She will need to answer the all important question: “why does Yahoo exist?”, and inspire her beleaguered troops with the confidence to become a force of innovation once again. She will be in for a long and hard journey; it will take at least three to five years to see good efforts bear fruit. If she is successful in making Yahoo a champion again, she will have a clear shot at what she possibly craves most: to be Queen of Silicon Valley.

 

Please leave me your comments on whether you think Marissa Mayer will be successful.

 

Posted on

14 Leadership Principles from Steve Jobs

© Richard Davies

 

Like hundreds of thousands of Apple fans, I am fascinated by the incendiary brilliance of Steve Jobs and by the revolutionary products he created. I have no fewer than four Steve Jobs biographies in my library. I’ve read the unpleasant stories, and there are many: from Steve’s lack of basic hygiene in his youth, and his initial denial of paternity of his first daughter to the suggestion that he continually duped his long time partner, Steve Wozniak, the real brains behind Apple in its early days, but his luster remains. I am an admitted Steve Jobs junkie. Through his companies, Jobs transformed at least seven industries including animated movies, personal computing and music. I was delighted to find that Jobs has been featured in the April 2012 edition of the Harvard Business Review magazine. Six months after his death, his official biographer, Walter Isaacson, has skillfully distilled what is essentially an executive summary of Steve Jobs’ leadership style, in a brilliant 6,000 plus word article titled ‘The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs”.

Isaacson identifies fourteen leadership lessons, surmising that Jobs “belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney.” Fortune Magazine has also recently named Steve Jobs the greatest entrepreneur of our time. If Isaacson is right, then history is well on its way to remembering Steve Jobs less for his bad behavior and extreme emotionalism and more as an innovator who applied his personality, efforts and energy into transforming technology and business.

Here is a summary of the fourteen leadership principles:

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #1 – Focus

Steve Jobs was famous for his laser-like focus. This natural personality trait was further honed by his study of Zen philosophy; “deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do”. Shortly before his death, Larry Page, Google’s co-founder visited Jobs to ask for advice. Jobs told him to figure out the top five products Google should focus on and “get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down”. Page followed his advice, announcing to Google employees in January 2012 that they would “focus on just a few priorities, and make them “beautiful,” the way Jobs would have done.

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #2 – Simplicity

Steve Jobs focused on annihilating complexity when creating products. He lived and breathed the Leonardo da Vinci tenet that appeared in Apple’s first marketing brochure: “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Ten years ago, the portable music player industry was ripe for a shake up, and Jobs’ quest for simplification led to the revolutionary iPod followed by the iPhone. When setting their sights on what to do next, today’s emerging business leaders need only find products that are more complicated than they need to be.

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #3 – Elegance

Steve Jobs strove to deliver the elegant ideal. “People are busy”, he would say “they have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices.” And so, he took responsibility for the entire user experience, owning what he called “the whole widget”. Hardware, software and peripheral devices had to be seamlessly integrated. The leadership lesson here is to create products and service which reflect a passion for delivering delightful user experiences from start to finish.

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #4 – Innovation

Steve Jobs knew that success was not just coming up with new ideas first, but being able to eclipse previous success through innovation. When he realized that original iMac left their users powerless to download, rip and swap music the way PC users could, he famously said “I felt like a dope. I thought we had missed it”. Instead of just playing catch up, he innovated. The result was an integrated system that transformed the music industry through the iPod, iTunes and the iTunes music store. And then, sensing the threat posed by mobile phone makers adding music players, and at the risk of hurting iPod sales, he created the iPhone. “If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will”.

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #5 – Authenticity

During the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs motivated his team to create “insanely great” products. During his ten-year absence, with John Sculley at the helm, the focus shifted to profit maximization, and product design suffered. Steve Jobs theorized that is was one of the reasons companies decline. “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people… make great products… the products, not the profits, were the motivation. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything”. Today’s leaders and entrepreneurs will do well to stay true to the purpose of their businesses and remain authentic.

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #6 – Vision

Henry Ford once famously said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!” Steve Jobs believed in being passionately committed to delivering products customers would love, but not in asking them what they want. He relied on his own vision. Jobs felt that finely honed intuitive powers could tap into desires not jut fully formed. Sometimes the only focus group leaders need is themselves: We made the iPod for ourselves,” he said, “and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out.”

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #7 – Certitude

Steve Jobs was known for demanding the impossible, his certitude the only guarantee of success. His infuriatingly effective ‘Reality Distortion Field’ led those he worked with to perform extraordinary feats. From having his partner produce a new game in four days, after saying it would take months, to having an engineer who explained it was impossible to shave 10 seconds off boot time deliver a 28-second time savings just a few weeks later. Jobs would stare at you blankly and say with unwavering conviction while demanding the impossible “Get your mind around it. You can do it”.

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #8 – Discernment

Steve Jobs’ early mentor instilled in him the importance of discernment. Mike Markkula knew that people form opinions on companies and products based on presentation and packaging. This became one of Job’s guiding principles. He obsessed over the design of the boxes that held the iPod and iPhone, and insisted on adding a handle when the candy-colored new iMacs were created, adding “unnecessary” expense in order to make the product friendlier.

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #9 – Tenacity

Steve Jobs was known to go back to the drawing board even in the advanced stages of product development. If it felt wrong, he had no qualms asking his designers, development teams and engineers to work nights and weekends to get things just right. He did it with Toy Story, even after Disney had insisted on darker, more mature re-writes; he stopped production to make it the family friendly success it eventually became. The iPhone was revamped even after the design was first approved. He never compromised on consistency of beauty and quality, using the lesson he learned doing carpentry with his father  “a great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.”

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #10 – Selectivity

Steve Jobs insisted on having only the best talent on his teams.  Jobs refused to indulge in what he referred to as a “Bozo explosion”: the creation of passively polite environments where mediocrity is allowed to flourish. Although his selectivity often manifested as stormy petulance, he reasoned “when you have really good people, you don’t have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things”. And did he ever.

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #11 – Collaboration

Despite working in a high-tech field, Steve Jobs relied heavily on the synergy that often takes place in face-to-face collaboration. He was known to take long walks during intense negotiations. The Apple headquarters was designed to encourage chance meetings and maximize person-to-person encounters. He wanted people to engage, interact and brainstorm informally because he believed that sparked a kind of magic. His advice to leaders on the subject of collaboration very well might have been: “forget the PowerPoint presentations and get people interacting”.

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #12 – Detail

In the midst of all his far-reaching plans, Steve Jobs also knew that God is in the details. Even while creating grand concepts for the future of his company, he applied his passion to the small things as well; he was known to fret over the shape and color of screws in the iMac. To leaders, the realization of overarching business strategies might very well depend on never losing sight of the importance of even the tiniest details.

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #13 – Imagination

Steve Jobs was fascinated with concept of standing at the intersection of humanities and sciences. Like Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein before him, he used imagination to bridge the gap between arts and technology. Leaders who can bring right-brain imagination to left-brained fields of science, and engineering will be critical to the business success in the 21st century.

Steve Jobs Leadership Lesson #14 – Non-Conformity

Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1960’s, Steve Jobs was a product of both the hippie anti-war counterculture and the geek-filled, high-tech world of Silicon Valley. His behavior, passions and business reflected the contradictions and confluence of these divergent elements. The pithy maxim, ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish”, reflects the way he lived his life, and the way he positioned Apple, starting it out in his parents’ garage to become the world’s most valuable company at the time of his death. Jobs helped compose the text for Apple’s “Think Different” ad campaign. The words speak for themselves: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels… We see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

Posted on

Today I’m Inspired by: Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg in Vogue

Sheryl Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer at one of the most ubiquitous companies on the planet. Taking home over US$30 million in 2011, Sheryl is the highest paid person at Facebook. Second in command to founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg developed the plan that took the social networking giant from 70 million users and almost no revenue to a user base of 850 million users and annual revenues of $3.7 billion in less than four years.

There aren’t that many role models for women in business. The self-made legends like Oprah and Martha Stewart stand out precisely because there are so few to name. Sheryl Sandberg first caught my interest when I came across an article on her, aptly titled ‘A Woman’s Place’, in The New Yorker last summer. I remember being tickled by her encounters with the not-so-subtle nuances of male domination in Silicon Valley and specifically at Google, where Sandberg once held a Vice President position, before joining Facebook. I could relate.

Poised to be an extremely wealthy woman with an expected windfall of US$1.6 billion when the Facebook IPO goes through, Sheryl Sandberg has not been an overnight success. She was at the top of her class all through high school, before heading to Harvard for an undergraduate degree in Economics. While there, she won the respect of economics professor Lawrence Summers. Summers would become her mentor, employing her as his research assistant when he joined the World Bank. She worked on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness, before going on to attain an MBA from the prestigious Harvard Business School. She then joined Summers once again as his chief of staff, when he became the Deputy Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration.

Sheryl Sandberg now occupies the #5 spot on the Forbes World’s Most Powerful Women’s list, while balancing life as a wife and mother of two young children. It is clear that she is not only exceptionally intelligent and highly educated, but has worked hard and attracted at least one powerful mentor. However, these are not the only factors she credits for her success. In a recent TED talk, Sheryl addresses the reasons for the dearth of women in leadership positions saying, “women systematically underestimate their own abilities”. She offers three key pieces of advice for women striving to make it to the top of their professions:

1. Sit at the table – constantly reach for the opportunities out there.
2. Make sure your partner is a real partner – choose a mate who will be in there with you 50/50.
3. Don’t leave before you leave – don’t be so busy planning for when you have a family that you take your foot off the gas pedal long before you actually start.

When accomplished people talk about success, it’s a good idea to listen. I hope you will take the time to watch Sheryl Sandberg’s 15-minute talk which will inspire both men and women.

Posted on

Thank You, Steve!

David Suchet as M. Hercule Poirot

As a child, between the ages of eight and ten years old, I devoured books. I have a natural love of learning, and the reading program introduced at my elementary school really stirred this. We were treated to weekly visits to the public library, and our parents were given the opportunity to purchase in bulk from Scholastic books. The rich and imaginative world of literature opened up to me as I read classic children’s novels such as ‘Veronica the Showoff’ and ‘The House on the Hill’ and every Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery novel I could get my little fingers on. I read Agatha Christie, and fell in love with Monsieur Hercule Poirot – detective magnifique! I also kept long lists of the books I’d read, and wrote book reports about my favorites in my journal.  I was even selected winner of a book report competition I entered and had the chance to read one of my reviews on the radio.

In my early teens, my insatiable appetite for books seemed to be diminishing. In high school, most of my friends had their noses buried in the Sweet Valley High series and serial romance novels. To me, these seemed like a waste of time, and I only ever managed to get through one of them. My love affair with books had come to an abrupt end.

Throughout my twenties, I read only while on vacation, between jobs or during other periods down time or transition. I had several bookshelves lined with books – most of which I actually did start reading, but never quite got around to finishing.

Fast forward to April 2009. Now in my mid-thirties, I received the gift of a sparkling new iPhone, a white one. Delighted, I quickly learned the truth that belied the catch-phrase “there’s an app for that”. It turns out there was an app to fix my twenty-year reading slump. Using the Kindle app, which I downloaded for free, I could buy and read the titles I wanted, whenever I wanted with just a motion of my finger on a sleek touchscreen. What a relief it was to no longer be at the mercy of the narrow offerings at the local bookstore. No more did I have to wait weeks for international shipping to the Caribbean.

Frisky on one of Antigua's famed 365 beaches

With my iPhone with me all the time, it became so easy to read in my spare moments. I took to reading in all while walking my dog, Frisky, early every morning.  As strange as it may sound, reading while walking my dog was not much of a challenge. As you can see, Frisky is a little terrier, with very short legs. At fifteen years old, she is content to walk quite slowly, pausing to sniff at  blades of grass, rocks or most anything that takes her fancy – every few paces.

When the new iPad was released, reading became even more of a pleasure.

Last year, on August 21, 2010, I added the most powerful weapon to my new arsenal – audible.com. Using Audible, I could now purchase audio books and devour them while driving, washing the dishes or getting ready for bed. Suddenly, the morning and evening commute moved from being largely an exercise in frustration, to real “me time” I could look forward to.

With these new gifts of technology at my disposal, I decided that it was time to catch up on the twenty years of reading I had missed. Even with the demanding job of running a company, I set myself a goal of reading 50 books in the course of the coming twelve months. I committed to reading about one book per week, no excuses.

It’s July, and I’ve surpassed my goal. I’ve consumed 77 books in less than a year. Some of them I have read using the Kindle app on my iPod touch or iPad, and some I have listened to via audible, but none of them has been made of paper. Thank you, Steve Jobs!

End note: If you love reading, but think you’re too busy to do it, now is the time to log on to www.audible.com and become a member. With a monthly subscription, Audible will deliver a minimum of one book credit per month. You will have the flexibility of being able to download and listen to your books on your laptop, blackberry, iPhone, iPad and a range of other platforms. You won’t regret it!