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" Every Monday at 3 p.m. Pacific, she asked her direct reports to gather for a three-hour meeting. Mayer demanded all of her staff across the world join the cal

" Every Monday at 3 p.m. Pacific, she asked her direct reports to gather for a three-hour meeting. Mayer demanded all of her staff across the world join the call, so executives from New York, where it was 6 p.m., and Europe, where it was 11 p.m. or later, would dial in, too. Invariably, Mayer herself would be at least 45 minutes late; some calls were so delayed that Yahoo executives in Europe couldn’t hang up till after 3 a.m." This is completely unacceptable behavior from anyone aspiring to be an actual leader.

echoless 12y ago
Depends on the reasons why she was late and if they were legitimate or not.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  "Depends on the reasons why she was late and if they were legitimate or not." It really depends on how "invariably" she was late. If she was late almost all the time, and by 45 minutes or more each time, then it's patently irresponsible. She should have set a different time for the meeting every week. Or she should have blocked out her schedule to make the time. On the other hand, if she was late maybe 25% of the time, that's a different story. The CEO of a huge corporation is going to be late to a lot of meetings. It's the nature of the job. There isn't enough time in the working day for all the people, situations, and projects she needs to handle. Having worked every now and then with C-level executives at huge companies, some much bigger than Yahoo, I can tell you that they're often late to meetings. Staff meetings especially, because staff meetings are standing, and standing meetings usually lose in an ad-hoc triage battle against spur-of-the-moment meetings. Almost axiomatically, anyone or anything important enough to hijack a CEO's time is going to be important enough to win the priority battle against a standing staff meeting. All of that said, "invariably" needs to be defined here. Especially given the circumstances, i.e., requiring all direct reports in various timezones to be there every Monday on Mayer's clock. If it was, indeed, "invariable" -- as in, she was always at least 45 minutes late -- then she should have found a new time for the meeting. That's completely unacceptable.
  - RBerenguel 12y ago
    Having meetings at a time that suits you with people that may be considering going to bed, and actually are outside any kind of office hours whatsoever should be unacceptable behaviour of any leader.
    - jonnathanson 12y ago
      I agree completely, but to me, this speaks to an organizational design issue as much as a scheduling issue. If you have direct reports in N different timezones, and there's almost no functional overlap between some of those timezones and your own, then why are they your direct reports? You are fundamentally incapable of directly managing them, and they are incapable of directly reporting to you. Put a better org structure in place, and shed whatever reasons you have for insisting on those people's directness -- be they playing to people's vanity, an overreaching desire to be "flat," or something else entirely. (Obviously, this is easier said than done. At that level, the politics of moving around direct-reporting lines is going to be a nightmare.) But I do agree. The complexity of scheduling increases dramatically as the number of timezones N increases. You try the best you can to schedule a standing meeting that accommodates everyone. Someone's going to have to make a sacrifice in convenience. As the leader, you should try to find a time that makes a sacrifice on your end, provided it's not too ridiculous.
      - alexqgb 12y ago
        At the very least, start the standing meeting at 7-8 am California time. That's the decent way to run a global organization from the West Coast.
  - echoless 12y ago
    Yeah, it would have been better if the article went into detail about its use of the term "invariably". I don't know if the author was just loosely using the term or if he actually meant that she was habitually late. Still, I don't see that as "unacceptable" behaviour. It's something to be frowned upon for sure and it would be great if she could be punctual all the time, but being the CEO of an incredibly large and diverse organisation, she could be forgiven if she was late due to some other meeting or work-related issues. Also, remember she's getting only about 4 hours of sleep everyday and practically lives at her workplace, so I doubt she's being late on purpose.
- dickbasedregex 12y ago
  No job is worth that. Also consider the performance and morale damage from being forced to deal with that at the start of every week. Thanks but no thanks.
- phaus 12y ago
  Everyone is late once in a while. Some executives are late pretty often. But every single one of them that is worth anything at all will at least send a text or a phone call letting you know they aren't going to make it. Unless someone is on their way to the hospital, there really isn't a reason to leave someone hanging.
throwawaymsft 12y ago
It seems there's a pattern in how she sees other people. * Trying to design the Yahoo logo herself in a weekend (how hard can it be?) * Reading a children's book to a room full of employees, to stunned silence * Disallowing remote employees but building a nursery for her child + nanny. (Do other people get Yahoo! daycare too?) * Requiring extensive credentials for other people [Gwyneth Paltrow better have a degree!] but not bothering with background reference checks for people she wanted (Henrique de Castro, who cost Yahoo over $100M for a year's worth of shoddy work). Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here.
- phaus 12y ago
  >Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here. It seems that Marissa's feeling was that if her users don't already like the exact same things that she likes(as a millionaire living in a fantasy world), then they should learn to start liking them.
  - Domenic_S 12y ago
    Yes, which stems from vanity/narcissism: "I have exquisite taste, and people want to be me (a millionaire I-can-have-it-all mom/career woman), so everything must reflect my personal aesthetic." Contrast with her hero Jobs.
    - LLWM 12y ago
      It works for plenty of people. That's why professional celebrities like Kim Kardashian can become successful "fashion designers" based on their fame alone. The only caveat is that you do actually have to have good taste to be successful.
      - talmand 12y ago
        I would disagree with your conclusion there.
phaus 12y ago
Its unacceptable behavior from anyone even expecting to continue being an employee. Those meetings, when couple by her habitual tendency to miss meetings with people that weren't even a part of her company are ridiculous. It boggles my mind how someone so irresponsible, self-centered, and inconsiderate has managed to get where she's at.
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago
  > It boggles my mind how someone so irresponsible, self-centered, and inconsiderate has managed to get where she's at. Despite her other failings, she is obviously very smart. People talking about the early life at Google all agree on that.
  - innguest 12y ago
    Good thing the smart are incorruptible by power. Oh, wait.
    - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
      You just made Ayn Rand roll in her grave. Which was an action she freely chose to do, of course.
      - nerfhammer 12y ago
        Don't forget Plato
        Florin_Andrei 12y ago
        That a titan of human thought could in any way, shape or form be associated with that poor PTSD victim from Russia - is just proof that we indeed live in an imperfect sublunar realm, deprived of all genuine existence, mere shadows on the wall of the real, ideal forms up there. In a manner of speaking. :)
mathattack 12y ago
This is completely unacceptable behavior from anyone aspiring to be an actual leader. Seems more appropriate for crisis mode than ongoing management. In general there seems to be a modus operandi of "My time is more valuable than yours, so you wait." While this may be true, it's a poor way to manage creatives.
- GVIrish 12y ago
  It's a poor way to manage anyone, period, and an even poorer way to deal with people outside of the company. An anti-pattern if I ever saw one.
bsg75 12y ago
> This is completely unacceptable behavior from anyone aspiring to be an actual leader. Someone at her level should not be aspiring to be a leader, but should be a leader from the start.

echoless 12y ago

Depends on the reasons why she was late and if they were legitimate or not.

jonnathanson 12y ago
"Depends on the reasons why she was late and if they were legitimate or not." It really depends on how "invariably" she was late. If she was late almost all the time, and by 45 minutes or more each time, then it's patently irresponsible. She should have set a different time for the meeting every week. Or she should have blocked out her schedule to make the time. On the other hand, if she was late maybe 25% of the time, that's a different story. The CEO of a huge corporation is going to be late to a lot of meetings. It's the nature of the job. There isn't enough time in the working day for all the people, situations, and projects she needs to handle. Having worked every now and then with C-level executives at huge companies, some much bigger than Yahoo, I can tell you that they're often late to meetings. Staff meetings especially, because staff meetings are standing, and standing meetings usually lose in an ad-hoc triage battle against spur-of-the-moment meetings. Almost axiomatically, anyone or anything important enough to hijack a CEO's time is going to be important enough to win the priority battle against a standing staff meeting. All of that said, "invariably" needs to be defined here. Especially given the circumstances, i.e., requiring all direct reports in various timezones to be there every Monday on Mayer's clock. If it was, indeed, "invariable" -- as in, she was always at least 45 minutes late -- then she should have found a new time for the meeting. That's completely unacceptable.
- RBerenguel 12y ago
  Having meetings at a time that suits you with people that may be considering going to bed, and actually are outside any kind of office hours whatsoever should be unacceptable behaviour of any leader.
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    I agree completely, but to me, this speaks to an organizational design issue as much as a scheduling issue. If you have direct reports in N different timezones, and there's almost no functional overlap between some of those timezones and your own, then why are they your direct reports? You are fundamentally incapable of directly managing them, and they are incapable of directly reporting to you. Put a better org structure in place, and shed whatever reasons you have for insisting on those people's directness -- be they playing to people's vanity, an overreaching desire to be "flat," or something else entirely. (Obviously, this is easier said than done. At that level, the politics of moving around direct-reporting lines is going to be a nightmare.) But I do agree. The complexity of scheduling increases dramatically as the number of timezones N increases. You try the best you can to schedule a standing meeting that accommodates everyone. Someone's going to have to make a sacrifice in convenience. As the leader, you should try to find a time that makes a sacrifice on your end, provided it's not too ridiculous.
    - alexqgb 12y ago
      At the very least, start the standing meeting at 7-8 am California time. That's the decent way to run a global organization from the West Coast.
- echoless 12y ago
  Yeah, it would have been better if the article went into detail about its use of the term "invariably". I don't know if the author was just loosely using the term or if he actually meant that she was habitually late. Still, I don't see that as "unacceptable" behaviour. It's something to be frowned upon for sure and it would be great if she could be punctual all the time, but being the CEO of an incredibly large and diverse organisation, she could be forgiven if she was late due to some other meeting or work-related issues. Also, remember she's getting only about 4 hours of sleep everyday and practically lives at her workplace, so I doubt she's being late on purpose.
dickbasedregex 12y ago
No job is worth that. Also consider the performance and morale damage from being forced to deal with that at the start of every week. Thanks but no thanks.
phaus 12y ago
Everyone is late once in a while. Some executives are late pretty often. But every single one of them that is worth anything at all will at least send a text or a phone call letting you know they aren't going to make it. Unless someone is on their way to the hospital, there really isn't a reason to leave someone hanging.

throwawaymsft 12y ago

It seems there's a pattern in how she sees other people. * Trying to design the Yahoo logo herself in a weekend (how hard can it be?) * Reading a children's book to a room full of employees, to stunned silence * Disallowing remote employees but building a nursery for her child + nanny. (Do other people get Yahoo! daycare too?) * Requiring extensive credentials for other people [Gwyneth Paltrow better have a degree!] but not bothering with background reference checks for people she wanted (Henrique de Castro, who cost Yahoo over $100M for a year's worth of shoddy work). Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here.

phaus 12y ago
>Believe it or not, Jobs had empathy for what the user truly needed, which gave him a killer sense of taste. I feel that's lacking here. It seems that Marissa's feeling was that if her users don't already like the exact same things that she likes(as a millionaire living in a fantasy world), then they should learn to start liking them.
- Domenic_S 12y ago
  Yes, which stems from vanity/narcissism: "I have exquisite taste, and people want to be me (a millionaire I-can-have-it-all mom/career woman), so everything must reflect my personal aesthetic." Contrast with her hero Jobs.
  - LLWM 12y ago
    It works for plenty of people. That's why professional celebrities like Kim Kardashian can become successful "fashion designers" based on their fame alone. The only caveat is that you do actually have to have good taste to be successful.
    - talmand 12y ago
      I would disagree with your conclusion there.

phaus 12y ago

Its unacceptable behavior from anyone even expecting to continue being an employee. Those meetings, when couple by her habitual tendency to miss meetings with people that weren't even a part of her company are ridiculous. It boggles my mind how someone so irresponsible, self-centered, and inconsiderate has managed to get where she's at.

Florin_Andrei 12y ago
> It boggles my mind how someone so irresponsible, self-centered, and inconsiderate has managed to get where she's at. Despite her other failings, she is obviously very smart. People talking about the early life at Google all agree on that.
- innguest 12y ago
  Good thing the smart are incorruptible by power. Oh, wait.
  - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
    You just made Ayn Rand roll in her grave. Which was an action she freely chose to do, of course.
    - nerfhammer 12y ago
      Don't forget Plato
      - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
        That a titan of human thought could in any way, shape or form be associated with that poor PTSD victim from Russia - is just proof that we indeed live in an imperfect sublunar realm, deprived of all genuine existence, mere shadows on the wall of the real, ideal forms up there. In a manner of speaking. :)

mathattack 12y ago

This is completely unacceptable behavior from anyone aspiring to be an actual leader. Seems more appropriate for crisis mode than ongoing management. In general there seems to be a modus operandi of "My time is more valuable than yours, so you wait." While this may be true, it's a poor way to manage creatives.

GVIrish 12y ago
It's a poor way to manage anyone, period, and an even poorer way to deal with people outside of the company. An anti-pattern if I ever saw one.

bsg75 12y ago

> This is completely unacceptable behavior from anyone aspiring to be an actual leader. Someone at her level should not be aspiring to be a leader, but should be a leader from the start.