Featired Article: Marissa Mayer Is Wrong

Melissa Clouthier

I've followed Marissa Mayer’s career with interest. She’s smart, bright, and running a huge corporation — Yahoo, Inc. — into the ground. Verizon decided to pick up the pieces and buy the ailing company that’s suffered five CEO’s in four years.  Many wonder at the wisdom of the buyout. There are also doubts about Mayer’s future with the company, though she insists that she’s sticking around. Mayer’s failure disappoints. There’s lots to like about her. She’s ambitious and doesn’t seem to work as an expression of feminist duty to Change Everything, but to just be an effective CEO. She’s just the type of woman executive I’d like to see more of: emphasis on the executive with the femaleness being another descriptor but not a definer.......This is Marissa Mayer’s problem: She’s a hard worker and a plodder. She is not particularly visionary because she’s so busy being busy she’s not seeing. She may not be doing make-work and be genuinely busy, but how is she working? The values she extols become the values she models and the values her employees emulate......Our educational system rewards conformity and hard work. Obey, submit, produce copious amounts of busy work. Play your sport. Play your instrument. Take your lessons. Achieve! Achieve! Achieve! There is little time for play or thinking or reading or connecting. The kid is busy and falls face-first into bed, then does it all again.......To Read More.....

My Take - Working hard and working smart may not go hand in hand.  The corporate world has been taken over by the Harvard Whiz Kids type like Robert McNamara.  They could tell you the bottom line on anything - they just didn't understand anything.  McNamara gave Ford the Falcon, which was a perfectly good inexpensive car and they sold a ton of them.  American's hated it.  Iococa gave Ford the Mustang.  Nuf Ced?  That's the difference between bean counters and visionaries.