Less time feeling cool, looking hip, posing for Vogue, "hanging with the kids" - and more time in the boardroom - doth a CEO make!

        

It's only been less than four years since Google employee #20, otherwise known as Marissa Mayer, was appointed President and CEO of the struggling brand known as "Yahoo!", which effectively maintained business-as-usual (and little positive change); if it feels longer than that to me, well it must feel like a decade or more to Ms. Mayer herself!

Unquestionably, the recruitment and hitching of  Marissa Mayer's star to the aging, aching, ailing Yahoo brand and logo could only have been viewed as a positive move for a company that had completely lost touch with the times it lived in, and had thus left many with few reasons to believe. Anymore. But Marissa was the bright, blonde, shiny future, and Yahoo certainly bought into that dream, with a reputed reward of some $36M for her first six months alone! 

Yahoo somehow had let it all slip away; formerly glittering bejewelled crystals of sand flowed out through the widening pores of a veritable pillar of salt of their very own making, converted into a cold, hard new composite that was interlaced with the reality that the dream was almost over. Today in 2016 it is over, with bedfellows Google (along with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple) having changed the world we live in, and their conglomerate, Alphabet, now listed as the biggest company on the planet. 

Marissa initially went on a shopping spree like almost no other, and threw some twenty-plus start-ups into her shopping cart (presumably using a much more mobile-friendly and up-to-date provider for the online transactions!) since taking the reins at Yahoo. Kudos to her for realising that the linchpins of the company's online image and business (Yahoo News, Yahoo.com and various online communication tools) all needed a serious high kick in their low-tech rears. 

Things did change on the 17th floor of their Manhattan offices, with a clear and purposeful switch to start-up atmosphere, with teams of engineers running amok riding the new wave. Someone smart (I wonder who?!) made the conclusion that mobile media (make that mobile life!) was the way forward - yet there won't be any Nobel prizes for coming up with that pearl of wisdom. At other companies, it is neither the way forward nor the future. Why? Because that "future" is already here - it is now. Today. No, make that yesterday!

The fact that Yahoo is so far behind is a total indictment of how long and how deeply they have been asleep at the wheel. Somehow, as a shareholder, pictures like the one above, with Ms. Mayer arm-in-arm with a bunch of kids and tech geeks, would not exactly make me go all warm and fuzzy nor all "oh-ah" as I check the share prices, which are far from romantic. Profits did rise under her tenure, but revenue has slipped, again. 

"I'm pleased with Yahoo!'s performance in the first quarter," Mayer said back in April, 2013.  "I'm confident that the improvements we're making to our products will set up the company for long-term growth."

While I am glad that our Marissa had confidence, that is hardly a surprise for such an over-achiever, yet it is not enough to keep most of us warm at night. They can create a tech locker room nerdy boys club type of office all they want, and engineer the bejesus out of their creaky old rusty ship but there is one critical aspect that I think that Ms. Mayer let get buried in her clear desire to be hot and hip.

To what do I refer? Well, we will have to go back to web presence 101 for that one. It was called "web content" for a very good reason. I continue to be appalled at the lacklustre (often that's at best, sadly) and much too occasionally woeful excuse (at worst) for content that appears on many news items and blog posts directly associated with the Yahoo brand. 

It's all very well recreating the great-free-snacks-and-pinball-machines-and-basketball-hoops playroom office already hash(tagg)ed to death by the likes of Microsoft, Google and Facebook - but engineering can only do so much. You can build the most accurate and pristinely perfected car out of some magnificent engineering, all you want, but what if someone fills the tank with diesel and not fine grade unleaded? It's not going to be long before the inevitable stall.

It's all about end-user(s) and that user's experience, hands-on, when it comes down to it. Mobile versions of the major Yahoo online offerings will only carry the car so far - unless the gas fueling it is of the highest quality possible. In this case, the analogy is that the content is the gas. You can go ahead and spend millions developing the new tools, but unless you attend to issues to do with the content accessed by those tools - you can forget it. Content is king, with a capital K, and there is still much work to be done. And there's a huge difference when you're a Facebook or a Yahoo between being "cool" as opposed to being "cold" - as in left out in the cold - on your own. 

Now it's not shocking that Ms. Mayer is heavily focused on engineering and product development - that's her core expertise. But as CEO, she needed to dive into the deeper end of uncharted waters, and address (among other) the content posted with the Yahoo brand tagged to it, especially the Canadian franchise. There are still way too many posts (blogs in particular) with titles and a blank space beneath, or a sloppily written excuse for content with typos, grammatical errors and words that mean nothing at all - collectively implying that the people she called back to head offices for "phoning-it-in" continue to do so - only they do it now from head office! Need an example? Here is an opening sentence on a top news piece from October 10, 2013, on the announcement of the first Canadian writer to win the Nobel prize for literature:

"Celebrated Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro, who announced her retirement earlier this year, has won the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Canadian-based to earn the honour."

Did you spot it? This is a less egregious version of what I am referring to, but it's a major piece of news that was just cranked out, hurriedly, with clearly zero proofreading. If this is how big news is handled, imagine reports on basically anything else? These people ripped Yahoo off, and I sincerely hope she knows it. There were one or two names in particular who regularly posted titles with zero content, and I have a funny feeling that these people billed Yahoo for producing "x"such pieces per month, and no one bothered to check the content. Or the blank space beneath the title in many cases. It was, is, and should always be a total professional embarrassment to all senior management at Yahoo, and that means Ms. Mayer too. 

Or how about this one, hot off the presses in March, 2016, and it remains on the website's homepage right now. 

"She no computer, washing machine, television or car – instead cycling to work on an 80-year-old pedal bike."

Brilliant, huh? Shameful, duh! Yes, I know she bought Tumblr, thereby accessing some real content (making a nice change), but it cost her over a billion dollars to do so; in the end just to look cool. But it's hard to call your company "The biggest start-up in the world" when you can afford to buy other real start-ups for over one billion dollars to boost your own brand! To date she has acquired over twenty of those real start-ups. 

Just this past month in 2016, Yahoo finally acknowledged that Tumblr has fallen in value by $230 million since it was acquired. Although there has been some Yahoo growth since she was acquired, much of that growth was attributable to the company's stake in e-commerce giant Alibaba, but that entity was acquired before Mayer's tenure so there is only so much credit she can take for that. But the actual loss in value of a previously red-hot start-up just emphasises Yahoo's complete incapacity to innovate, even in the presence of real, raw talent! 

In terms of her presence and leadership as a boss, she was heavily criticised for her fashion of evaluating employee performance, with her famous bell curve quite literally dictating one's very survival at the company, if you were at the wrong end of that curve. A "toxic environment" is how it has been described by some. But worry not, people being ushered out the door were not classic "layoffs" which was a dirty word to her, she preferred the term "remixes". One of those "remixed" human beings just filed a lawsuit in California against Yahoo claiming that their firing procedures violate state law. That is going to be interesting to see playing out. 

Both The New York Times and The New Yorker have walloped Yahoo! as stocks continued to freefall by more than 30% throughout 2015, along with the departure of a dozen top executives. Both SpringOwl and Starboard Value have been scathing about Mayer's performance, which was underscored by estimates that Yahoo's core business was worth less than zero dollars for most of 2015! Now it is becoming an auction, with Mayer stating that they may well in fact sell their core business, which is, in my opinion, an outright admission of failure on what she was brought in to achieve, i.e. to bolster the core business! 

In terms of content, calling Yahoo a "big start-up" is disingenuous. It's only like a start-up in terms of where it's not today, in relation to where it should be, already being a household name and part of the zeitgeist. Yahoo the "start-up" is a true oxymoron. One that Ms. Mayer is not going to get away with much longer. Yahoo was officially a 20-year-old in 2014, which makes it no longer an adolescent in 2016, and in fact it should be all grown up today and on a clear(er) path forward - not selling its core business! 

On the upside, it probably is a little cooler to be a yahoo today. But the baby is all grown up, or should be. And we had a Mayer honeymoon, which is sadly now officially over too. Either Mayer and Yahoo deliver on the promise of transporting the brand into this decade (or beyond) or I fear that Ms. Mayer will be visiting that beyond in the form of the circumference outside Yahooworld - maybe even before all her young engineers hit their big 3-0!

An angelic blonde star at the helm needs to be more than eye candy, which is what activist investors have been getting at recently. Engineering is just the mechanics. Acquiring cool start-ups is great for photo opps. But you need the gas and you need the best drivers - and that can only come with a renewed and reinvigorated overhaul of that dirty word - content - and a re-established commitment to end-user experience and not just living for advertising. 

The clearest problem at Yahoo's helm stems from having hired a stellar product developer and manager, and assuming they had both the personal bandwidth and managerial depth to transform themselves into the CEO of a giant behemoth like Yahoo. Today I cannot help but feel that the penny has finally dropped and change now once again has to come to the company; whether that change will involve just Mayer or the entire C-suite remains to be seen. Either way, currently there's no "Woohoo!" in being a Yahoo!