6 ms·

Do you fault the oncologist that doesn't cure advanced metastatic cancer? Or the patient who ignored the signs for years before quitting smoking?

jfoster 10y ago
Depends on what was promised, doesn't it?
existencebox 10y ago
As someone who normally attributes large amounts of fault to CEOs, that's a fascinating rebuttal, (both in that of the many arguments I hear, it's not often among them, despite making me have to think hard about my stance) so let me try to counter it: Do I fault the oncologist? Depends. Is there any reasonable expectation of success? Was the failure mode that ended up panning out one that could have been avoided with known courses of action? Was there any "user error"? Similar questions could be asked of Yahoo, and while I realize that I + most people not in a yahoo boardroom probably don't have sufficient visibility or background to answer decisively, never felt the external signals (her management decisions) I've seen demonstrated a course of action I would have been confident in. Now, that could in and of itself be debated, but I think it's only a peripheral argument to the core point: Is compensation commensurate to the work done? (Which frankly I often think is the subtext in these CEO discussions) This is where a large amount of my personal issue lies, since regardless of which direction I think Yahoo could move, the course of action taken was "iffy" and the compensation extreme. Winding down a lost cause? Could have been done without nearly as much expenditure, and likely with greater shareholder value. Reviving a faltering company? Clearly has not happened. Nevertheless, she is pocketing hundreds of millions for what is by all standards a failed job. So again, do I fault the oncologist (CEO) for failing to treat the terminal cancer (business failure), if all other options are undesirable? Probably not more than as the parent said, they "share a hand" in it, but to me that does not necessarily entail a declaration of aggressive "fault". Do I pay them exponential multiples of a typical salary to do so? Probably not. I realize that from this 10000 foot view it's a very subjective argument, but to go into line items requires a good deal more time than this post before work allows, and I hope this conveys the idea sufficiently even so.
- karmajunkie 10y ago
  Thanks for a well-reasoned reply. I think there are two issues here, which I don't often see cleanly separated: * She took the helm of a failing company; is it reasonable to think that she was going to be able to turn it around, from any rational perspective? * She was paid a lot of money to turn it around; is a CEO essentially paid to "take the blame" when a company fails /for whatever reason?/ The former is a question of business physics, if you will, and my personal belief is that she is not at fault in any real sense. Yahoo was a company on life support for several years before she got there. Nothing was going to turn that around. If anything, the point of bringing her in was to prop up the company long enough to cash in on Alibaba, and in that she certainly succeeded. The latter question goes to a debate we should definitely be having regarding executive compensation, and one in which I probably agree with both you and other (somewhat self-righteous) respondents to my comment. She was paid far too much. However, in that she cannot be faulted any more than any other well-compensated CEO in the world, regardless of success. To say that she was paid far too much /to fail/ implies that had she succeeded the pay would have been appropriate. The notion that there's some outcome that warrants executive compensation on that level is not one I subscribe to.
chasing 10y ago
The metaphor doesn't hold: Yahoo! didn't have a fatal disease, it had failing businesses. This oncologist literally cannot cure certain terminal ailments. A better metaphor might be: Yahoo! was like an old rusted out car. You hire someone who tells you how they can fix this car, you pay them a lot of money, and then they leave the car in worse shape than when you hired them. How much blame do they deserve? Which is to say: A new CEO absolutely can turn a failing business around -- that's what she was being paid tons and tons of money to do. If Meyer did feel like Yahoo! was a completely lost cause or that she would be incapable of fixing its problems, then she should not have taken their money. As an extremely wealthy person to begin with, she had that luxury. In short: She absolutely has culpability in the failure of Yahoo!.
- LogicFailsMe 10y ago
  I don't blame her for making $80M+ just by being herself. I blame the people who hired her for their magical thinking approach to technology.
  - chasing 10y ago
    She wasn't Yahoo!'s mascot -- she was their CEO. If you're CEO, part of your job is accepting blame when things go badly for your company.
  - geodel 10y ago
    Nobody is blaming her for making $80M. She is blamed for not doing things that would have made it better business.
- dasil003 10y ago
  A CEO absolutely can turn a failing business around? Are you sure of that? I don't feel any cognitive dissonance in my belief that, yes, Mayer is responsible for Yahoo's ongoing failure, but also it's quite likely impossible to turn Yahoo around.
  - chasing 10y ago
linuxkerneldev 10y ago
> Do you fault the oncologist that doesn't cure advanced metastatic cancer? Yeah, especially if the "oncologist" told the patient to change their t-shirt to purple to cure the cancer. Eg: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-whe... " For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand. ccording to one senior executive, Sharma’s body language changed the moment Mayer issued her request. He looked deflated. Altering the color of such an intricate product would require that members of his team spend all night adjusting colors in thousands of places. He slumped off and prepared to tell his staff the bad news. "
- untog 10y ago
  That feels like the most anecdotal data point possible. It's also possible that Meyer was right.
  - ricksplat 10y ago
    But why was she right after all the work was done? If the brand colours were so important surely the design team should have been aware of that beforehand.
    - sopooneo 10y ago
      Steve Jobs was reportedly only "right" about the choice to use glass screens for the first iPhone after the entire production chain had already been set up to build them with plastic.
      - ricksplat 10y ago
        Steve Jobs had a proven track record and was spending his own money. Marissa for all her great qualities ain't no Steve.
lisper 10y ago
Not an apt analogy at all. Biological systems are fundamentally different from companies. The components of biological systems are neither engineered nor intelligent. The components of companies are either engineered (servers, business processes) or intelligent (employees). That makes it a completely different kind of problem.
tyingq 10y ago
>Do you fault the oncologist that doesn't cure advanced metastatic cancer? If said oncologist has the hubris to claim they can...while accepting $100M+ to do it then, yes...yes I do.
jazzyk 10y ago
Do you pay the oncologist $80-120M for a botched job? https://www.themuse.com/advice/negotiating-success-what-to-learn-from-marissa-mayers-compensation-package https://www.themuse.com/advice/negotiating-success-what-to-l...

jfoster 10y ago

Depends on what was promised, doesn't it?

existencebox 10y ago

As someone who normally attributes large amounts of fault to CEOs, that's a fascinating rebuttal, (both in that of the many arguments I hear, it's not often among them, despite making me have to think hard about my stance) so let me try to counter it: Do I fault the oncologist? Depends. Is there any reasonable expectation of success? Was the failure mode that ended up panning out one that could have been avoided with known courses of action? Was there any "user error"? Similar questions could be asked of Yahoo, and while I realize that I + most people not in a yahoo boardroom probably don't have sufficient visibility or background to answer decisively, never felt the external signals (her management decisions) I've seen demonstrated a course of action I would have been confident in. Now, that could in and of itself be debated, but I think it's only a peripheral argument to the core point: Is compensation commensurate to the work done? (Which frankly I often think is the subtext in these CEO discussions) This is where a large amount of my personal issue lies, since regardless of which direction I think Yahoo could move, the course of action taken was "iffy" and the compensation extreme. Winding down a lost cause? Could have been done without nearly as much expenditure, and likely with greater shareholder value. Reviving a faltering company? Clearly has not happened. Nevertheless, she is pocketing hundreds of millions for what is by all standards a failed job. So again, do I fault the oncologist (CEO) for failing to treat the terminal cancer (business failure), if all other options are undesirable? Probably not more than as the parent said, they "share a hand" in it, but to me that does not necessarily entail a declaration of aggressive "fault". Do I pay them exponential multiples of a typical salary to do so? Probably not. I realize that from this 10000 foot view it's a very subjective argument, but to go into line items requires a good deal more time than this post before work allows, and I hope this conveys the idea sufficiently even so.

karmajunkie 10y ago
Thanks for a well-reasoned reply. I think there are two issues here, which I don't often see cleanly separated: * She took the helm of a failing company; is it reasonable to think that she was going to be able to turn it around, from any rational perspective? * She was paid a lot of money to turn it around; is a CEO essentially paid to "take the blame" when a company fails /for whatever reason?/ The former is a question of business physics, if you will, and my personal belief is that she is not at fault in any real sense. Yahoo was a company on life support for several years before she got there. Nothing was going to turn that around. If anything, the point of bringing her in was to prop up the company long enough to cash in on Alibaba, and in that she certainly succeeded. The latter question goes to a debate we should definitely be having regarding executive compensation, and one in which I probably agree with both you and other (somewhat self-righteous) respondents to my comment. She was paid far too much. However, in that she cannot be faulted any more than any other well-compensated CEO in the world, regardless of success. To say that she was paid far too much /to fail/ implies that had she succeeded the pay would have been appropriate. The notion that there's some outcome that warrants executive compensation on that level is not one I subscribe to.

chasing 10y ago

The metaphor doesn't hold: Yahoo! didn't have a fatal disease, it had failing businesses. This oncologist literally cannot cure certain terminal ailments. A better metaphor might be: Yahoo! was like an old rusted out car. You hire someone who tells you how they can fix this car, you pay them a lot of money, and then they leave the car in worse shape than when you hired them. How much blame do they deserve? Which is to say: A new CEO absolutely can turn a failing business around -- that's what she was being paid tons and tons of money to do. If Meyer did feel like Yahoo! was a completely lost cause or that she would be incapable of fixing its problems, then she should not have taken their money. As an extremely wealthy person to begin with, she had that luxury. In short: She absolutely has culpability in the failure of Yahoo!.

LogicFailsMe 10y ago
I don't blame her for making $80M+ just by being herself. I blame the people who hired her for their magical thinking approach to technology.
- chasing 10y ago
  She wasn't Yahoo!'s mascot -- she was their CEO. If you're CEO, part of your job is accepting blame when things go badly for your company.
- geodel 10y ago
  Nobody is blaming her for making $80M. She is blamed for not doing things that would have made it better business.
dasil003 10y ago
A CEO absolutely can turn a failing business around? Are you sure of that? I don't feel any cognitive dissonance in my belief that, yes, Mayer is responsible for Yahoo's ongoing failure, but also it's quite likely impossible to turn Yahoo around.
- chasing 10y ago

linuxkerneldev 10y ago

> Do you fault the oncologist that doesn't cure advanced metastatic cancer? Yeah, especially if the "oncologist" told the patient to change their t-shirt to purple to cure the cancer. Eg: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-whe... " For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand. ccording to one senior executive, Sharma’s body language changed the moment Mayer issued her request. He looked deflated. Altering the color of such an intricate product would require that members of his team spend all night adjusting colors in thousands of places. He slumped off and prepared to tell his staff the bad news. "

untog 10y ago
That feels like the most anecdotal data point possible. It's also possible that Meyer was right.
- ricksplat 10y ago
  But why was she right after all the work was done? If the brand colours were so important surely the design team should have been aware of that beforehand.
  - sopooneo 10y ago
    Steve Jobs was reportedly only "right" about the choice to use glass screens for the first iPhone after the entire production chain had already been set up to build them with plastic.
    - ricksplat 10y ago
      Steve Jobs had a proven track record and was spending his own money. Marissa for all her great qualities ain't no Steve.

lisper 10y ago

Not an apt analogy at all. Biological systems are fundamentally different from companies. The components of biological systems are neither engineered nor intelligent. The components of companies are either engineered (servers, business processes) or intelligent (employees). That makes it a completely different kind of problem.

tyingq 10y ago

>Do you fault the oncologist that doesn't cure advanced metastatic cancer? If said oncologist has the hubris to claim they can...while accepting $100M+ to do it then, yes...yes I do.

jazzyk 10y ago

Do you pay the oncologist $80-120M for a botched job? https://www.themuse.com/advice/negotiating-success-what-to-learn-from-marissa-mayers-compensation-package https://www.themuse.com/advice/negotiating-success-what-to-l...