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So she arguably had all this going on and still couldn't save Yahoo. This must speak of the dire nature Yahoo was in or her incompetence(both maybe?). Though it

• grandalf 10y ago
  I think it says a lot about the early environment at Google. Mayer herself began to plateau at Google after a while, which is why she ended up going to Yahoo instead of running Google. Major successes take a great team and a fair bit of luck and good timing. This is (I think) why very few highly successful people manage to do it again when starting from scratch (even with the advantages of lessons learned the first time). I think one problem with human society is that we want so badly to respect success and put individual people on a pedestal, which creates an unfair expectation of genius, when in fact it was likely partly luck and partly timing. In leadership roles, where the development of a cult of personality is helpful (Mayer, Trump, Clinton, etc.) the name brand of the leader is part of the value proposition, but it reinforces the idea of genius which is usually not remotely true. But it can work because of the desire of humans to align behind chieftain and themselves avoid risk of failure. I personally think the "leader as servant" model would have been most useful for Mayer, but instead she immediately ended some perks and reined in remote workers. This suggests that she fell into the trap of feeling like she was entitled to authority she (as a leader) hadn't yet earned.