[gloverkcn]

I wouldn't say capsized ship as much as "capsizing". Yahoo had a revolving door of CEOs. She was the 4th CEO in a decade. The one before her lasted 4 months (and made $6 million for his trouble). And in that time the stock price had gone from $40 to $16. Just because Yahoo was sinking doesn't mean it was sunk. Yahoo still had revenue, people, and products, but it had been declining for a long time.

It wasn't a death march, it was hail mary to see if Yahoo could be saved. The majority of her compensation was tied to stock price.

The snark doesn't bother me, but people want to hang the failure of Yahoo on Mayer. She did not take a vibrant, innovative, and successful company and drive it into the ground.

The stake in alibaba helped Mayer give her a windfall of cash she wouldn't have had otherwise. Her incentives were tied to stock price NOT performance. Start bashing the board for tying her compensation to the wrong metric.

[shostack]

This is a fair point that the board is really the one who set her objectives, and it seems she met them.

Many people don't realize that you can increase share price by "killing" a company if you can either let shareholders come out ahead as a result, or even just minimize their downside from what could have been a much larger loss.

For every CEO out there who makes hugely unpopular decisions that don't appear to be doing what the masses consider to be "the right thing" to get the company back on track...ask yourself if the board might have given direction that led down this path. Ultimately they are the ones the CEO reports to.