By: Jing Wang
Marissa Mayer took office on July 16th 2012 and began her tenure in Yahoo! as the company’s new CEO. She had worked for Google since 1999 as the company’s No. 20 employee also holds the title of their first female engineer. Before Marissa joined Yahoo! she was in charge of local products and services. ReasonsYahoo! board directors appointed the former Google Vice President to be their new CEO are mostly because of her ability to work with products in addition user experience. She would take Yahoo! back to its original goals regarding products and customer tactics. Second, Marissa is great at mentoring employees and fulfilling the role as a leader; she had trained several talents who now work for Uber, Dropbox, and Polyvore during her time at Google.
Her outstanding focus on basic construction is exactly what Yahoo! needed and she fills the hole. Marissa is the fifth CEO of Yahoo! in just 5 years; Carol Bartz was fired by the board due to his terrible achievement, then Tim Morse was just a temporary CEO, next was ex-CEO Scott Thompson from PayPal, but he embarrassed Yahoo! by his fake education history. The chaos happened interior has affected employees’ ambitions, it is a priority issue that Marissa need to solve as soon as possible. Another challenge is Marissa was pregnant when she got into Yahoo! and she needs to overturn the company’s image as well as took care of the baby. Yahoo! has lost in the past years, it used to be the pioneer of early internet, now Yahoo! is confusing if it need to reinforce media content or improve internet products and the lack of technique experts also become a problem.
Throughout Marissa Mayer’s reform, the best PR theory is system theory. System theory is organization and their environments are interdependent, so Marissa herself is a new revelation to Yahoo! and social responding will be considered when decide every change. Scott Thompson, the ex-CEO of Yahoo!, had the goal of establishing a long-term plan to utilize all resources into innovation. His top goals surrounded innovative new services, but he was silent on journalism and advertisem*nts publicity, which didn’t help Yahoo! increase its market. Marissa, on the contrary, imitated other well-known CEO’s tactics in order to increase hope for employees. She implemented a free lunch system that is similar to what Google has, and she joins other colleagues during lunchtime, which motivates and improves the standing of Yahoo! in its field. And Marissa may hire a COO to be in charge of the enterprise’s operations so that she can focus on products and innovation, it is a move learned from Mark Zuckerberg. Comparing Scott Thompson and Marissa Mayer on the way they mange the company, Scott was company-only while Marissa put emphasis on the employees. As long as Marissa was able to set up a talented group of leaders she could have more time to adjust plans for a brand new Yahoo!
References
Bercovici, J. (January 4th, 2012). New yahoo CEO Scott Thompson: “We’ll be back to inonvation”. Forbes. Retrieved from forbes.com.
Carlson, N. (July 16th, 2012). Why yahoo picked Marissa Mayer, according to a close source to the board. Business insider. Retrieved from businessinsider.com.
Lublin, S.J and Kwoh, L. (July 17th, 2012). For yahoo CEO, two new roles. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from online.wsj.com
