Marissa Mayer. What is she fighting for?

When I push through, amazing things happen. ~ Marissa Mayer

If there's an award for CEO Pi?ata of the Year, Yahoo's Marissa Mayer would certainly win it.

The media pile on began in earnest last month with a Forbes article ominously entitled Last Days of Marissa Mayer? that chronicled assorted employee dysfunctions at Yahoo's October offsite meeting. A flurry of reports followed, detailing Marissa Mayer's failures, foibles and misfortunes, pausing briefly to note the birth of identical-twin girls that will probably not be named Ali and Baba.

In 2012 Marissa Mayer was pregnant with her first child when she was welcomed to Yahoo like Dorothy to Oz, with a purple carpet, Shepard Fairey-like HOPE posters and hundreds of cupcakes.

Employees would stop her in the hall to take pictures. Now the weight of Yahoo's unmet expectations threatens to crush her. What happened? Searching for clues, I turned to Nicholas Carson's Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo. 

When Elon Musk's biographer spoke to the people who knew him as a child, they all said he was the last person they'd pick to be successful. When Nicholas Carson spoke to the people who knew Marissa Mayer as a child, they all described her as professional and organized. In grade five.

Nicholas Carson refers to Marissa Mayer a woman of contradictions. She repeatedly calls herself a geek who prefers Kraft Catalina French dressing on her salad yet...

she posed for a Vogue magazine cover looking like Nicole Kidman's twin sister in a Michael Kors dress and matching Yves St Laurent foot shackles. Her pose reminds me of the painful things I used to do to my Business Barbie, bending her arms at awkward angles and hurling her head first down the Hot Wheels track that travelled down the basement stairs. 

One of the first things Mayer did as CEO was dive head first into potential conflict, defying Yahoo's board of directors by refusing to layoff 5,000 employees. Instead, she did something far worse. She instituted Quarterly Performance Reviews (QPRs), also known as "rank-and-yank" in which employees are evaluated and placed in buckets along a bell curve--10% went into the coveted "greatly exceeds" bucket, 25% into "exceeds", 50% in "achieves", 10% in "occasionally misses", and 5% into "will miss their job soon" buckets. Bucket placements determined who got promotions, bonuses and raises and who got fired.

QPR resulted in the kind of dysfunctional behaviour that almost destroyed Microsoft and has made it a discredited relic in the Welchasaurus exhibit at the HR Museum of Horrors. Talented Yahoos would refuse to work with other talented Yahoos for fear of landing in the wrong bucket (or worse, would actively undermine each other), managers would trade rankings like baseball cards to meet bucket quotas, and employees would be arbitrarily placed inside bad buckets for hallway remarks or executives who said, "He just annoys me".

Mayer's strategy to address employees' frustration at QPR was to call a special all-Yahoo meeting and read from a children's book entitled Bobby Has a Nickel.

As the mood in the room darkened with each page she read, Mayer became agitated. They just didn't get how she was Bobby and how much she was enjoying her time at Yahoo where everywhere she turned there was another wonderful opportunity to spend a nickel.

Mayer gave 2.2 billion nickels to Henrique de Castro, The Most Interesting Man in the World, who was given $109 million for 15 months of ideas without execution and awkward comments about business and life delivered in broken English...

To incentivize the sales force we need to hit them with a big carrot.

Katie Couric got hit with a big carrot from Yahoo, $5 million annually for generating content that nobody watched. Mayer paid $1.1 billion carrots for Tumblr and has been widely criticized herself for being the "most overpaid CEO in history".

For all the oversized carrots and multitudinous miscues (detailed at length in this 99-slide deck), the biggest problem with Marissa Mayer's tenure as Yahoo's CEO isn't her obsession with divisible numbers and her hatred of prime numbers. Nor is it her tendency to make strategic decisions that waste other people's money. The main problem is…let Marissa tell you...

Digital daily habits? I know there are a lot of lonely people out there with digital daily habits, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it's not a cause to rally a company around.

Whereas Jack Dorsey talks about levelling the playing field for communication and commerce, and Elon Musk talks about sustainable energy and making humanity a multi-planetary species, Marissa Mayer talks about digital daily habits, search, mail, and digital magazines. Yahoo is a search without a query.

As a woman, it's painful for me to view Marissa Mayer as a cautionary tale, but here are three things can teach us about what not to do:

1. Never talk like this:

We have the company calibrated in terms of "what does success look like?" and "what is it to have a big stretch goal and hit it?"

2. Try a little empathy. The smartest, most attractive person in the room can also be the person who reads a children's book that's all about her to a room full of people who are hurting. Marissa Mayer is pathologically late, enters the lives of her staff like an Arctic air mass and always puts being right over being nice.

 3. What are you fighting for? It's the problem that all mercenary CEOs face: how do you find passion in borrowed intensities, the old wars and faded dreams that once enlivened the days of the company's founders but are several CEOs removed from you? If it's only ambition that makes you push through, you will manage from fear rather than love and will appear inconsistent, robotic and lacking in imagination because there's nothing bigger driving you than you.

What are you fighting for, Marissa Mayer? Beyond a certain point that you passed a long time ago the money is just Catalina dressing. I hope that in your next job you find something worth fighting for.

About the author: Lynne Everatt is a Faithfull fan.

What do you think Marissa Mayer has done wrong or right at Yahoo? Is she your CEO of the Year? Cast your vote in the comment section for Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Marissa Mayer, Steve Easterbrook (post coming December 18) and Mark Zuckerberg(December 21). When you cast your vote in the comment section along with your rationale, you'll be entered in a draw to win the best CEO book of 2015, Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk: Tesla, Space-X and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.