Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

December 1, 2014
Faced by the Google behemoth and by a growing identity crisis, Yahoo was foundering - and then they hired Marissa Mayer. "Yahoo's celebrity, superhero, savior CEO had arrived." Drawing from interviews with over a hundred sources, journalist Carlson tells the story of a woman "fascinating for her contradictions," who started her tenure at the company with a bangâonly to be taken to task by her employees en masse at a company-wide meeting in November 2013. She had inherited a mess from former CEO Carol Bartz, which she handled deftly and to widespread applause - particularly for her decision to reverse a mass layoff. So how did her team lose so much faith? Beginning with Mayer's introverted, focused, highly ambitious nature and the start of her career as a Google intern in 1999, Carlson draws a compelling picture of an ambitious engineer uncomfortable in the spotlight, but determined to excel. The narrative has the pace and pop of an exposé, and readers will find themselves both rooting for and against this complicated leader, whose confident, self-promoting behavior, Carlson points out, is not considered unusual for an executiveâassuming that said executive is a man. Exciting and informative, and necessary reading for Silicon Valley junkies.