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Yahoo CEO: No more working remote -- get to the office or quit

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by LongTimeListener, Feb 25, 2013.

  1. DanielSimpsonDay

    DanielSimpsonDay Well-Known Member

    I thought it was a combination of Alibaba and AltaVista. Either way, meh.
     
  2. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

  3. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

  4. Neutral Corner

    Neutral Corner Well-Known Member

    More like another overpaid CEO who runs things into the ground, and gets handsomely paid to go away.

    If you and I screw up our jobs, we get sacked. If a CEO runs a company into bankruptcy, he gets a metric shit ton of cash as he slinks out.
     
    Baron Scicluna likes this.
  5. DanielSimpsonDay

    DanielSimpsonDay Well-Known Member

  6. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    I guess I'm just not cut out to sit on a board of directors. In no universe of mine is an exit sum negotiated in advance to a CEO for when he/she does not accomplish the stuff he/she was hired and handsomely compensated to do.

    Does that really mean my company will be forced to hire even shittier CEOs?
     
    Neutral Corner likes this.
  7. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    See? Working from home can be profitable. For the CEO, that is.
     
  8. dixiehack

    dixiehack Well-Known Member

    If you change "company" to college and "CEO" to head coach, then yes.
     
  9. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    Marissa Mayer was hired to engineer a higher stock price via stock buybacks and return the horde of cash the company had to shareholders. In that regard, the large shareholders (namely Dan Loeb) who hired her for that purpose, were VERY happy with her performance. They made a crazy amount of money while she was running the company.

    If anything, her failure (as far as the actual owners of the company are concerned) wasn't that she wasn't able to save an unsavable company, the way some of you think. The people who hired here never even considered that -- they didn't see Yahoo! as a growth company. They saw it as an undervalued asset, and saw the key to unlocking that value being a CEO who would return the ridiculous amount of money the company was sitting on to its owners (i.e. shareholders). She actually made a few halting moves to invest, and THOSE were her actual failures -- she made a couple of really bad acquisitions (Tumblr was the big one) that wasted cash that could have been returned to shareholders too. But even with that, she returned a lot of money to the owners of the company -- and that was all people who had loaded up with large stakes in the company (and controlled the board of directors) cared about. It's specifically why to them, Scott Thompson was a failure and Marissa Mayer wasn't.

    Dan Loeb (very specifically) was who hired Marissa Mayer. He made more than a billion dollars in two years (that is not a typo) -- he loaded up on Yahoo! stock, took control of the board, fired Thompson, hired Mayer (yes, with that compensation package) with the expectation that she would return cash to shareholders (i.e. -- make him richer very quickly). ... and when she did exactly what she had been hired to do, he got out two years later with an obscene amount of money. The actual owners of the company (at least the very large ones who didn't invest in Yahoo! with expectations that it was a turnaround story), don't share the opinion that she was a failure or that her compensation package wasn't earned. They made a lot of money because she did precisely what they wanted her to do.
     
    Last edited: Mar 13, 2017
    YankeeFan likes this.
  10. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    You need to hire a CEO to engineer stock buybacks?

    Sounds like the most phony way to "make money" among a ton of phony ways to make money.
     
  11. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    It is more than just buybacks. For example, she sold a portion of the stake in Alibaba and returned the cash to shareholders. She engineered the deal with Verizon @ a premium, and managed to keep the stake in Yahoo! Japan separate (which still has ridiculous value).

    To me, phony are the plethora of companies that have been borrowing and leveraging themselves to the hilt because interest rates have been artificially suppressed for the last decade, and rather than using that gift on capital expenditures, they have used that money to engineer higher stock prices via buybacks and dividend raises. That is completely phony. Those companies have nothing real.

    In this case, we are talking real assets, not phony leverage. There is nothing phony about realizing the value of the assets you accumulated when your company was flying high. It's perfectly legit for the owners of a company to say, "We aren't growing anymore, we can't compete with the new kids on the block, so how about we unlock some of our value and enjoy the fruits of this thing?"

    That was essentially what she was hired to do. In that regard, I doubt the actual owners of the company thought she was a complete failure. They have made a lot of money.

    I point all of that out in an agnostic way. It's not like I am wedded to Marissa Mayer or really care about Yahoo! -- I am not an owner of the company. From an operational and a PR standpoint, I am sure the owners of the company would give her poorer grades. For example, they would have been ecstatic over the Verizon deal. They would have been pulling their hair out over the user data hacks that endangered the deal and brought the sale price down a little.

    I am just responding to the posts on here that said things like, "She ran the company into the ground and then gets paid to go away." It shows a lack of understanding of who hired her, why she was hired and how successful she actually was to their interests (i.e. -- the owners of the company!). Dan Loeb owned 6 or 7 percent of the company. He's essentially the one who hired her. I am certain that isn't what he saw.
     
    YankeeFan likes this.
  12. dixiehack

    dixiehack Well-Known Member

    Let's do the time warp again.

    IBM demands employees stop working from home

    Doesn't apply to all of their work-at-home employees (who at one point made up over 40% of the headcount) but it hits a lot of them.

    And this closing paragraph is a doozy.

     
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