I was reading this article from The Economist about Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, and the challenges she has had turning around Yahoo. Despite her efforts, the Internet company has continued to shrink under her watch. As I was reading, I happened upon this sentence: “Some onlookers say it was a mistake to hire someone with no experience leading a company and without expertise in or appreciation for the advertising business.”
There are two immediate things about that sentence that annoyed me, and I thought it would be a good jumping-off point for us to consider our language and our approach to risk.
The first thing that I hated about that sentence was the cowardly phrase “some onlookers”, which is the way critics take a shot at someone while avoiding the messy business of taking responsibility. While a fair use when a journalist is talking about what various stakeholders are saying, particularly about a company as large as Yahoo, it reminded me to be vigilant against the sloppy practice of hiding behind weak phrases like “some onlookers say…”, “I’ve heard that some people think that…” etc.
The second thing is that Yahoo got hugely flanked by Google and others long before Ms. Mayer arrived at the scene. Actually, when Google was out-innovating Yahoo Ms. Mayer was a key part of the Google engineering team, which is one reason why the Yahoo board hired her in the first place.
So she takes a big “step-up” job (a term for job changes which are a “step up” to much greater responsibility). More than taking a big step-up job, she takes command of a ship that, if not completely sinking, was taking on water and bailing pretty hard. So we might assume that the odds were stacked against her for the big turnaround.
Many years ago I had the opportunity to work with a US Army Colonel who made a big impact on my development as a leader and a person. He told me that one of the things he did during his career was to take the thankless jobs nobody else wanted. He told me it made him a better leader.
To be sure, being CEO of a huge internet company isn’t exactly “thankless” (I presume Ms. Mayer is not working pro bono), but most would say that the challenge was huge. And as for any missteps Yahoo has made in the advertising space, I assume Yahoo has more executives on staff than the CEO and had plenty of advertising expertise involved in forming strategy and executing on the plan.
Takeaway: it is easy to hide, to diagnose from a distance, to be smart after the fact. The world is filled with people like that. But astute readers of this blog (yes, you!) aren’t like that. They commit themselves to the tough job if the reasons for succeeding are right. Since they don’t shy away from the tough job – the particular challenges of which they understand better than outsiders – they are slow to criticize others who have tough jobs because they know that in that case, they are the outsider.
Hey – if you take the big job that involves some tough odds, it’s not always going to work out the way you hope. Take the leap anyway, and keep it positive.
Good luck!