7 ms·

Marissa Mayer breaks her silence on Yahoo's telecommuting policy

75 points by kjhughes 14y ago

thrush 14y ago
"My goal is not to change the culture, but to amplify its greatness"
EliAndrewC 14y ago
Perhaps the most common and controversial aspect of Mayer's decision was the claim of hypocrisy regarding child care. Staying home with children to avoid the cost of a full-time nanny is a common reason for telecommuting. Some claimed hypocrisy for her installing a persona nursery next to her office for her own newborn while making Yahoo significantly less family friendly for its employees. Although I never agreed with these criticisms, I'm annoyed that she apparently said, "I need to talk about the elephant in the room" and then avoided addressing this complaint at all. Unless she did and this was simply bad reporting which omitted any reference to it - I'd appreciate a link to the fill keynote transcript if one exists; I can't seem to find it.
- shardling 14y ago
  >Perhaps the most common and controversial aspect of Mayer's decision was the claim of hypocrisy regarding child care. That seems more like a rhetorical tactic than a genuine issue? (The hypocrisy, not child care in and of itself.)
  - EliAndrewC 14y ago
    >That seems more like a rhetorical tactic than a genuine issue? I ascribe it to something else; Mayer is a female CEO, which I think causes many people to assign to her responsibility for championing women in the workplace. When she fails to live up to this standard which has been imposed on her, people cry foul. Another relevant example is her interview awhile back where she mentioned she didn't really consider herself a feminist. This was met with far harsher criticism than I think any man would have received for making the same statement - "Oh really... which of your equal rights do you want to give back?!" This is why I don't think the claims of hypocrisy are just a rhetorical tactic. People are genuinely disappointed in her failure to live up to the standards they've imposed on her, which they imagine that as a female CEO she has also set for herself and is implicitly broadcasting to the world.
- ultimoo 14y ago
  Not to disagree with the point you are making, but just to add to it -- I'm sure the personal nursery bit was a part of the employment terms that Mayer must have negotiated before joining Yahoo!.
  - Sambdala 14y ago
    and working from home wasn't part of the terms any Yahoo employee negotiated before joining the company? Edit: Not that I really have an opinion on the policy as it applies to Yahoo specifically.
    - snowwrestler 14y ago
      There is a very big difference between working from home, an working from home while caring for a child. Most WFH policies only allow the former.
    - dragonwriter 14y ago
      > and working from home wasn't part of the terms any Yahoo employee negotiated before joining the company? If it was a contractual employment condition negotiated before joining the company, then there wouldn't be complaints, there'd be breach-of-contract lawsuits. "Our policy is X", "Okay, cool, I'd like to work somewhere with that policy" isn't a negotiation for a benefit that the employer is obligated to continue to provide.
- chollida1 14y ago
  > Staying home with children to avoid the cost of a full-time nanny is a common reason for telecommuting. I'm not sure I understand your point. Could you please elaborate? How does working from home avoid the cost of a full-time nanny? If I work when I'm at home then I can't, by definition, take care of my children at the same time. Assuming a minimal commute, working from home doesn't save hardly any time at all.
  - signed0 14y ago
    I would imagine that taking care of one's children does not require constant interaction. If that is the case then one could WFH for 8 hours a day but space out their time so that they can attend to their children's needs as they arise.
    - bjelkeman-again 14y ago
      Depends very much on the age of the children. A friend has three, 6-10 years. It is not so easy to work from home when they are five or less. Try with someone else's kids and you will see.
  - leecGoimik7 14y ago
    It's quite simple: school ends at 3pm. Somebody needs to pick up the kid. After that my 6 yo is perfectly capable of entertaining herself for few hours while I continue my work. And why would you assume minimal commute? For me that's 2.5 h a day, and that's not a lot by NYC metro area standards.
  - drcube 14y ago
    We're not talking about babies here. My six year old can take care of himself just fine if he's fed and has an adult around in case of emergencies. I have worked in my home office for hours while he played in the rest of the house, watched videos, etc. Daycare can be $500/week, for the privilege of simply having an adult be near my kid. If telecommuting helps me avoid that cost, it's a significant incentive.
    - 14y ago
- doktrin 14y ago
  My familiarity with this issue extends only so far as the coverage it has received on HN, and this is the first time this "most controversial" aspect of the decision has been brought up. The whole nursery thing also strikes me as a bit of a red herring. Yes, CEOs of multi billion dollar companies taking home million dollar paychecks receive perks that rank and file employees don't get to enjoy. Maybe I'm just complacent, but that doesn't even begin to enter "controversial scandal" territory IMO.
  - EliAndrewC 14y ago
    My familiarity comes more from Slate Magazine, and especially it's sister publication DoubleX, where the child-care aspect was heavily emphasized both in articles and in their bi-weekly DoubleX podcast. However, I strongly agree with your analysis of her nursery as a CEO perk, which might like her high salary is simply much better than what normal employees have access to. This is why I disagree with the claims of hypocrisy, as I alluded to in my original comment.
  - vor_ 14y ago
    I consider it controversial if the reasoning behind a policy is one the CEO isn't required to endure because of perks.
    - svachalek 14y ago
      I take it you don't live in the US? CEOs aren't required to endure any policies. Nor Congress, or anyone else at that level. Some of us don't like it but it's the norm.
      - vor_ 14y ago
        I was speaking morally, not legally.
drorweiss 14y ago
Yahoo needs to reinvent itself. Working from home is so unimportant in the big scheme.
- drawkbox 14y ago
  I think WFH is key to making good products, for focus and an external view. If Yahoo is still making peanut butter, getting internalized viewpoints isn't going to help improve external product development and perception. Groupthink is heavy in the office which is bad for external views of product. Also this concentrates employees to one locale, again lending to internalized viewpoints of how things are.
  - homosaur 14y ago
    You're right that entropy moves that way, but you can solve this culture problem in the office with the right maintenance. Implementing a strategy that lets people feel comfortable throwing disruptive ideas up the ladder helps a lot. I tend to find the groupthink comes from certain personalities imposing their will on offices. At times its necessary but you also risk putting your staff in lockstep.
  - drorweiss 14y ago
    Agree - "design by committee" is a disaster and you many times get something mediocre, full of compromises. On the other hand, interaction, corridor-talks and chance encounters are key to idea-exchange which is also important.
aviswanathan 14y ago
I think turnaround CEOs have the some of the toughest and most public jobs in the industry. The particularly difficult roles are for those individuals that already have a successful past (Mayer with Google) that are then implicitly 'expected' to bring new energy and vitality to companies simply because of those past successes. Look at Ron Johnson, for example. His genius did wonders for Apple but the same concepts failed with a different industry in his tenure with JCPenney. There's no silver bullet, and what Mayer's doing with Yahoo may have some similarities with what was done early on with Google, but in order to cement Yahoo's independent identity, she's going to have to pursue some goals that aren't identical to things she's done before. Ending WFH is perhaps a start. The externalities (noisy lashback from media, etc.) don't help, but she's going to have to face a lot more of that in order to institute long-lasting change.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- general_failure 14y ago
  You know how this works right? Everyone will call crap until the CEO is not doing well. Once the company shows signs of improving, they will immediately talk about the radical things they did and how they told you so.
marknutter 14y ago
It's interesting that both Yahoo and Best Buy both cancelled their work from home programs during a time when they are struggling to save their businesses. It would be far more relevant to me if a company that was posting record profits decided to kill its work from home program. Sounds like they were looking for a scapegoat.
wubbfindel 14y ago
It's nice to see she does actually still have her head screwed on correctly. I think she could have avoided a lot of criticism if she had only spoken on the subject earlier. It is fair to say that what works for one company will not work for another. Therefore it cannot represent an opinion on the industry as a whole.
parfe 14y ago
>The shift in policy affects roughly 200 of Yahoo's 12,000 employees. I see this statistic and I'm reminded at how much of a disingenuous uproar the policy change caused. Every time I read comments regarding this issue I'm more convinced the real issue is who issued the policy, and not the change itself. A new mother canceling work at home while simultaneously raising her own child in the office is not hypocritical. It supports her position. And yes, a private nursery is a perk she receives as CEO. A CEO gets a nursery: Outrage! CEO gets a private bathroom, private airplane, private car, meetings on the golf course, etc: normal operating procedure. I wonder why the nursery gets singled out for ridicule?
- mitchellhislop 14y ago
  Not to mention that she paid for it herself.
- tenpoundhammer 14y ago
  The internet has basically become a place for disingenuous uproar. There should just be a site called disingenuousuproar.com
  - mathgorges 14y ago
    On it!
- vor_ 14y ago
  It seems a bad thing to me to expect that employees give up telecommunication even for family reasons when the CEO doesn't have to endure such a tough choice because they get a special CEO nursery.
  - bradshaw1965 14y ago
    Male CEO's can act like alpha animals, take what they want and flaunt blingy perks, but let a woman build a nursery... Employees never get the same perks as CEO's.
mabhatter 14y ago
It's not terrible to cancel that program for a while. Her previous counterparts spent too much time on politics and people at home weren't WORKING on what the company needed. When the company is out of control, somebody has to take reigns..and it usually sucks for everybody. Just remember, MOST employers in the country DON'T OFFER work from home at all. Or of the do offer it, it is primarily for sales people.. That are never actually "at home". This whole thing is a top 10% problem.. Only the top richest companies offer top employees these type of options. Now child care and commuting is a DIFFERENT problem. Perhaps Yahoo doesn't need all its staff in crazy expensive trendy cities. They could relocate some offices out to other places property values and commute times are more reasonable... But that is for another time.
potatolicious 14y ago
There's a second elephant in the room, though a slightly more subtle one: Was the elimination of WFH at Yahoo housecleaning? There have been many reports from former Yahoo insiders that the WFH policy was abused to no end by a small number of people. I remember there was a large Microsoft layoff a while back during the fallout from the '08 crisis, which insiders also reported to be housecleaning. After all, what better opportunity to cut loose a lot of dead weight the company has accumulated, without incurring the requisite "is the sky falling at Microsoft?" reporting? Personally I'd rather have people able to work remotely, but flexibility in staid, slow, crufty large corporations is more often a source of abuse rather than actual flexibility. I'm willing to believe that Yahoo's move was justified.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- hkmurakami 14y ago
  Unfortunately that second elephant in the room isn't purple but is the invisible pink elephant that will never get addressed :(
- homosaur 14y ago
  It seems Yahoo was fostering a dysfunctional office culture in general and WFH abuse was a symptom of that. I totally agree with you about housecleaning scenario.
- velodrome 14y ago
  They lost a lot of good people during that period. They may have rid themselves of "dead weight" but scared the best employees off in the process (by severely hurting employee morale).
kisielk 14y ago
The new Yahoo Weather app mentioned in the article is really nice. However, one thing I'm surprised it doesn't let you do is take a photo.
just2n 14y ago
> The shift in policy affects roughly 200 of Yahoo's 12,000 employees. So what you're telling me is that only 1.6% of the company's employees WFH at all? Or is this 1.6% who work remotely in the usual case? I highly doubt only 200 employees take regular WFH days. I'd expect to get one or two if needed a week, so I'd suspect this impacts a LOT more people than she admits. > ..but they're more collaborative and innovative when they're together. So e-mail, chat, hangouts/skype, voip, etc. don't exist, as far as Yahoo is concerned? Collaboration does not require physical proximity. And if it's only 200 people who are working remotely, why is a mere 1.6% of the company making a DRAMATIC difference to collaboration and innovation within the company? I'm seeing a contradiction here. I still maintain my stance on this move: it's a horribly shortsighted and poorly/hastily made decision which will negatively impact Yahoo significantly more than anyone expects. If someone is abusing a lenient policy, you ban that individual from working remotely, not the entirety of your company. What a massive overreaction.
- dragonwriter 14y ago
  > So e-mail, chat, hangouts/skype, voip, etc. don't exist, as far as Yahoo is concerned? "Do not exist" isn't required for the claim to be valid; "are not as effective as face-to-face, in the room communication at facilitating collaboration" is sufficient. And, a fairly widely recognized fact.
  - just2n 14y ago
    You need to quantify "are not as effective." Is it 1000000000000x as effective? 5% more effective? If it's not boolean (such that "do not exist" is the effect), then the problem is probably significantly less severe than it would appear. For the record, I completely disagree. For instance, personality would likely dictate what the most effective method would be on an individual basis, so that no general claim can be accurate. I've personally been involved in collaboration over e-mail that was more productive than most meetings I've ever taken part in. I've never thought "this sucks, we should be doing this meeting in person," but I have thought the opposite many times.
    - 14y ago
michaelochurch 14y ago
I'm glad she did that. One of the things that was a mess at Google was an intensional/extensional conflict. Throughout the 2000s, Google was viewed as "the cultural leader" and that exposed it to a lot of executive bikeshedding. Not everyone feels entitled to an opinion about how Google should run, but everyone has an opinion about how the cultural leader should be run. If I ever build a company that's a cultural leader, I'm going to try to have the reputation of a #4 player for that reason. I admire Mayer a lot for having the cojones to say, "This isn't necessarily right for everyone, but it was right for us."
aswanson 14y ago
Why not just fire people who don't produce? If they are on the clock bullshitting, remote or at the office, ax em and leave perks in place for good employees. If you have logs of them charging the company and not doing anything, fire them.

75 points by kjhughes 14y ago

"My goal is not to change the culture, but to amplify its greatness"

Perhaps the most common and controversial aspect of Mayer's decision was the claim of hypocrisy regarding child care. Staying home with children to avoid the cost of a full-time nanny is a common reason for telecommuting. Some claimed hypocrisy for her installing a persona nursery next to her office for her own newborn while making Yahoo significantly less family friendly for its employees. Although I never agreed with these criticisms, I'm annoyed that she apparently said, "I need to talk about the elephant in the room" and then avoided addressing this complaint at all. Unless she did and this was simply bad reporting which omitted any reference to it - I'd appreciate a link to the fill keynote transcript if one exists; I can't seem to find it.

shardling 14y ago
>Perhaps the most common and controversial aspect of Mayer's decision was the claim of hypocrisy regarding child care. That seems more like a rhetorical tactic than a genuine issue? (The hypocrisy, not child care in and of itself.)
- EliAndrewC 14y ago
  >That seems more like a rhetorical tactic than a genuine issue? I ascribe it to something else; Mayer is a female CEO, which I think causes many people to assign to her responsibility for championing women in the workplace. When she fails to live up to this standard which has been imposed on her, people cry foul. Another relevant example is her interview awhile back where she mentioned she didn't really consider herself a feminist. This was met with far harsher criticism than I think any man would have received for making the same statement - "Oh really... which of your equal rights do you want to give back?!" This is why I don't think the claims of hypocrisy are just a rhetorical tactic. People are genuinely disappointed in her failure to live up to the standards they've imposed on her, which they imagine that as a female CEO she has also set for herself and is implicitly broadcasting to the world.
ultimoo 14y ago
Not to disagree with the point you are making, but just to add to it -- I'm sure the personal nursery bit was a part of the employment terms that Mayer must have negotiated before joining Yahoo!.
- Sambdala 14y ago
  and working from home wasn't part of the terms any Yahoo employee negotiated before joining the company? Edit: Not that I really have an opinion on the policy as it applies to Yahoo specifically.
  - snowwrestler 14y ago
    There is a very big difference between working from home, an working from home while caring for a child. Most WFH policies only allow the former.
  - dragonwriter 14y ago
    > and working from home wasn't part of the terms any Yahoo employee negotiated before joining the company? If it was a contractual employment condition negotiated before joining the company, then there wouldn't be complaints, there'd be breach-of-contract lawsuits. "Our policy is X", "Okay, cool, I'd like to work somewhere with that policy" isn't a negotiation for a benefit that the employer is obligated to continue to provide.
chollida1 14y ago
> Staying home with children to avoid the cost of a full-time nanny is a common reason for telecommuting. I'm not sure I understand your point. Could you please elaborate? How does working from home avoid the cost of a full-time nanny? If I work when I'm at home then I can't, by definition, take care of my children at the same time. Assuming a minimal commute, working from home doesn't save hardly any time at all.
- signed0 14y ago
  I would imagine that taking care of one's children does not require constant interaction. If that is the case then one could WFH for 8 hours a day but space out their time so that they can attend to their children's needs as they arise.
  - bjelkeman-again 14y ago
    Depends very much on the age of the children. A friend has three, 6-10 years. It is not so easy to work from home when they are five or less. Try with someone else's kids and you will see.
- leecGoimik7 14y ago
  It's quite simple: school ends at 3pm. Somebody needs to pick up the kid. After that my 6 yo is perfectly capable of entertaining herself for few hours while I continue my work. And why would you assume minimal commute? For me that's 2.5 h a day, and that's not a lot by NYC metro area standards.
- drcube 14y ago
  We're not talking about babies here. My six year old can take care of himself just fine if he's fed and has an adult around in case of emergencies. I have worked in my home office for hours while he played in the rest of the house, watched videos, etc. Daycare can be $500/week, for the privilege of simply having an adult be near my kid. If telecommuting helps me avoid that cost, it's a significant incentive.
  - 14y ago
doktrin 14y ago
My familiarity with this issue extends only so far as the coverage it has received on HN, and this is the first time this "most controversial" aspect of the decision has been brought up. The whole nursery thing also strikes me as a bit of a red herring. Yes, CEOs of multi billion dollar companies taking home million dollar paychecks receive perks that rank and file employees don't get to enjoy. Maybe I'm just complacent, but that doesn't even begin to enter "controversial scandal" territory IMO.
- EliAndrewC 14y ago
  My familiarity comes more from Slate Magazine, and especially it's sister publication DoubleX, where the child-care aspect was heavily emphasized both in articles and in their bi-weekly DoubleX podcast. However, I strongly agree with your analysis of her nursery as a CEO perk, which might like her high salary is simply much better than what normal employees have access to. This is why I disagree with the claims of hypocrisy, as I alluded to in my original comment.
- vor_ 14y ago
  I consider it controversial if the reasoning behind a policy is one the CEO isn't required to endure because of perks.
  - svachalek 14y ago
    I take it you don't live in the US? CEOs aren't required to endure any policies. Nor Congress, or anyone else at that level. Some of us don't like it but it's the norm.
    - vor_ 14y ago
      I was speaking morally, not legally.

drorweiss 14y ago

Yahoo needs to reinvent itself. Working from home is so unimportant in the big scheme.

drawkbox 14y ago
I think WFH is key to making good products, for focus and an external view. If Yahoo is still making peanut butter, getting internalized viewpoints isn't going to help improve external product development and perception. Groupthink is heavy in the office which is bad for external views of product. Also this concentrates employees to one locale, again lending to internalized viewpoints of how things are.
- homosaur 14y ago
  You're right that entropy moves that way, but you can solve this culture problem in the office with the right maintenance. Implementing a strategy that lets people feel comfortable throwing disruptive ideas up the ladder helps a lot. I tend to find the groupthink comes from certain personalities imposing their will on offices. At times its necessary but you also risk putting your staff in lockstep.
- drorweiss 14y ago
  Agree - "design by committee" is a disaster and you many times get something mediocre, full of compromises. On the other hand, interaction, corridor-talks and chance encounters are key to idea-exchange which is also important.

aviswanathan 14y ago

I think turnaround CEOs have the some of the toughest and most public jobs in the industry. The particularly difficult roles are for those individuals that already have a successful past (Mayer with Google) that are then implicitly 'expected' to bring new energy and vitality to companies simply because of those past successes. Look at Ron Johnson, for example. His genius did wonders for Apple but the same concepts failed with a different industry in his tenure with JCPenney. There's no silver bullet, and what Mayer's doing with Yahoo may have some similarities with what was done early on with Google, but in order to cement Yahoo's independent identity, she's going to have to pursue some goals that aren't identical to things she's done before. Ending WFH is perhaps a start. The externalities (noisy lashback from media, etc.) don't help, but she's going to have to face a lot more of that in order to institute long-lasting change.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
general_failure 14y ago
You know how this works right? Everyone will call crap until the CEO is not doing well. Once the company shows signs of improving, they will immediately talk about the radical things they did and how they told you so.

marknutter 14y ago

It's interesting that both Yahoo and Best Buy both cancelled their work from home programs during a time when they are struggling to save their businesses. It would be far more relevant to me if a company that was posting record profits decided to kill its work from home program. Sounds like they were looking for a scapegoat.

wubbfindel 14y ago

It's nice to see she does actually still have her head screwed on correctly. I think she could have avoided a lot of criticism if she had only spoken on the subject earlier. It is fair to say that what works for one company will not work for another. Therefore it cannot represent an opinion on the industry as a whole.

parfe 14y ago

>The shift in policy affects roughly 200 of Yahoo's 12,000 employees. I see this statistic and I'm reminded at how much of a disingenuous uproar the policy change caused. Every time I read comments regarding this issue I'm more convinced the real issue is who issued the policy, and not the change itself. A new mother canceling work at home while simultaneously raising her own child in the office is not hypocritical. It supports her position. And yes, a private nursery is a perk she receives as CEO. A CEO gets a nursery: Outrage! CEO gets a private bathroom, private airplane, private car, meetings on the golf course, etc: normal operating procedure. I wonder why the nursery gets singled out for ridicule?

mitchellhislop 14y ago
Not to mention that she paid for it herself.
tenpoundhammer 14y ago
The internet has basically become a place for disingenuous uproar. There should just be a site called disingenuousuproar.com
- mathgorges 14y ago
  On it!
vor_ 14y ago
It seems a bad thing to me to expect that employees give up telecommunication even for family reasons when the CEO doesn't have to endure such a tough choice because they get a special CEO nursery.
- bradshaw1965 14y ago
  Male CEO's can act like alpha animals, take what they want and flaunt blingy perks, but let a woman build a nursery... Employees never get the same perks as CEO's.

mabhatter 14y ago

It's not terrible to cancel that program for a while. Her previous counterparts spent too much time on politics and people at home weren't WORKING on what the company needed. When the company is out of control, somebody has to take reigns..and it usually sucks for everybody. Just remember, MOST employers in the country DON'T OFFER work from home at all. Or of the do offer it, it is primarily for sales people.. That are never actually "at home". This whole thing is a top 10% problem.. Only the top richest companies offer top employees these type of options. Now child care and commuting is a DIFFERENT problem. Perhaps Yahoo doesn't need all its staff in crazy expensive trendy cities. They could relocate some offices out to other places property values and commute times are more reasonable... But that is for another time.

potatolicious 14y ago

There's a second elephant in the room, though a slightly more subtle one: Was the elimination of WFH at Yahoo housecleaning? There have been many reports from former Yahoo insiders that the WFH policy was abused to no end by a small number of people. I remember there was a large Microsoft layoff a while back during the fallout from the '08 crisis, which insiders also reported to be housecleaning. After all, what better opportunity to cut loose a lot of dead weight the company has accumulated, without incurring the requisite "is the sky falling at Microsoft?" reporting? Personally I'd rather have people able to work remotely, but flexibility in staid, slow, crufty large corporations is more often a source of abuse rather than actual flexibility. I'm willing to believe that Yahoo's move was justified.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
hkmurakami 14y ago
Unfortunately that second elephant in the room isn't purple but is the invisible pink elephant that will never get addressed :(
homosaur 14y ago
It seems Yahoo was fostering a dysfunctional office culture in general and WFH abuse was a symptom of that. I totally agree with you about housecleaning scenario.
velodrome 14y ago
They lost a lot of good people during that period. They may have rid themselves of "dead weight" but scared the best employees off in the process (by severely hurting employee morale).

kisielk 14y ago

The new Yahoo Weather app mentioned in the article is really nice. However, one thing I'm surprised it doesn't let you do is take a photo.

just2n 14y ago

> The shift in policy affects roughly 200 of Yahoo's 12,000 employees. So what you're telling me is that only 1.6% of the company's employees WFH at all? Or is this 1.6% who work remotely in the usual case? I highly doubt only 200 employees take regular WFH days. I'd expect to get one or two if needed a week, so I'd suspect this impacts a LOT more people than she admits. > ..but they're more collaborative and innovative when they're together. So e-mail, chat, hangouts/skype, voip, etc. don't exist, as far as Yahoo is concerned? Collaboration does not require physical proximity. And if it's only 200 people who are working remotely, why is a mere 1.6% of the company making a DRAMATIC difference to collaboration and innovation within the company? I'm seeing a contradiction here. I still maintain my stance on this move: it's a horribly shortsighted and poorly/hastily made decision which will negatively impact Yahoo significantly more than anyone expects. If someone is abusing a lenient policy, you ban that individual from working remotely, not the entirety of your company. What a massive overreaction.

dragonwriter 14y ago
> So e-mail, chat, hangouts/skype, voip, etc. don't exist, as far as Yahoo is concerned? "Do not exist" isn't required for the claim to be valid; "are not as effective as face-to-face, in the room communication at facilitating collaboration" is sufficient. And, a fairly widely recognized fact.
- just2n 14y ago
  You need to quantify "are not as effective." Is it 1000000000000x as effective? 5% more effective? If it's not boolean (such that "do not exist" is the effect), then the problem is probably significantly less severe than it would appear. For the record, I completely disagree. For instance, personality would likely dictate what the most effective method would be on an individual basis, so that no general claim can be accurate. I've personally been involved in collaboration over e-mail that was more productive than most meetings I've ever taken part in. I've never thought "this sucks, we should be doing this meeting in person," but I have thought the opposite many times.
  - 14y ago

michaelochurch 14y ago

I'm glad she did that. One of the things that was a mess at Google was an intensional/extensional conflict. Throughout the 2000s, Google was viewed as "the cultural leader" and that exposed it to a lot of executive bikeshedding. Not everyone feels entitled to an opinion about how Google should run, but everyone has an opinion about how the cultural leader should be run. If I ever build a company that's a cultural leader, I'm going to try to have the reputation of a #4 player for that reason. I admire Mayer a lot for having the cojones to say, "This isn't necessarily right for everyone, but it was right for us."

aswanson 14y ago

Why not just fire people who don't produce? If they are on the clock bullshitting, remote or at the office, ax em and leave perks in place for good employees. If you have logs of them charging the company and not doing anything, fire them.