There are two ways to look at Mayer's payday: 1. She is getting rewarded even though her performance as CEO of Yahoo! was way less than expectations. Expectati

There are two ways to look at Mayer's payday: 1. She is getting rewarded even though her performance as CEO of Yahoo! was way less than expectations. Expectations being the salvation of Yahoo! as an independent company. 2. She is being rewarded for selling Yahoo! People are focusing on #1, but that is really past performance and past stock grants. She has plenty of previously granted stock based on previous performance, but she did not achieve everything she could have: This past year, Mayer had to forfeit just over 400,000 of those performance shares. Once the "for sale" sign went up, her incentive became "sell Yahoo!", not "save Yahoo!" because that is what her incentive (severance package) aligned with the moment the "for sale" sign went up. I expect that the Board understood this very well when they created her severance package.