God bless you, John Lewis, for who you are, for what you have done, and for what you have left to do. He will fight this as he has fought so many other battles, and our hearts and souls will be with him as they have been so often before.
5 days ago - Stanford political scientist John W. Lewis was a pioneer in establishing some of the first university programs in contemporary Asian politics in ...
John Lewis, Stanford political scientist and groundbreaking Asian politics expert, dies at 86
Stanford political scientist John W. Lewis was a pioneer in establishing some of the first university programs in contemporary Asian politics in the United States, while also advocating peaceful resolutions to international conflicts.
A Renaissance scholar
Lewis was the Renaissance scholar who bridged the gap between the academic and policy worlds. In the 1970s, he was a major player in the restoration of academic exchanges with China and established ties between U.S. and Chinese academic and governmental institutions that continue today.
In the 1980s, he built enduring ties with the Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Moscow that enhanced understanding and collaboration among Americans, Russians, and Chinese. He launched a project to gather medical expertise at Stanford to deal with North Korea’s severe drug-resistant tuberculosis problem, a project that took him twice to Mongolia to explore the possibility of a regional effort against TB.
Lewis was never satisfied with simply having a problem discussed, said Fingar. He ended every meeting with assembled experts on North Korean issues with a prodding, “A useful discussion. Now, what can we do?”
Lewis helped American business executives, academics, government officials and military officers establish contacts and networks in China. He also led two congressional delegations to Asia. In recognition of his impact, Lewis was invited to serve on the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences; the Joint Committee on Contemporary China of the Social Science Research Council; and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
The Stanford scholar also did consulting work for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress.
Born in King County, Washington, in 1930, Lewis gained his first exposure to international issues and institutions as a teenage page at the San Francisco meeting that established the United Nations. His interest in China was inspired by the stories and achievements of missionary relatives who built schools for Chinese girls. After graduating from Deep Springs College (California) in 1949, Lewis earned his bachelor’s degree (1953), master’s degree (1958) and doctorate (1962) at UCLA. His service as a gunnery officer in the U.S. Navy (1954-1957) kindled his interest in security issues and Korea.
Lewis wrote and co-authored numerous influential books on Asia and international security, including Leadership in Communist China (1963); and The United States in Vietnam (1967) (with George Kahin); and China Builds the Bomb (1988).
Formerly the Center for International Security and Arms Control, co-founded by physicist Sidney Drell and political scientist John Lewis, CISAC now stands for the Center for International Security and Cooperation. CISAC is a research center at Stanford University that studies a range of ...
I.M. Pei outside the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, which he designed
.M. Pei, 102. Dominant architect who designed the Louvre’s crystal pyramid and the angular East Building of Washington’s National Gallery of Art. Died May 16.
Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s creative director, in 1991 Photographer: Manuel Litran/Paris Match Archive Karl Lagerfeld, 85. Acclaimed fashion designer who was creative director at Chanel for 35 years and produced outfits for celebrities such as Princess Diana and Nicole Kidman. Died Feb. 19.
Henry Merritt "Hank" Paulson Jr. (born March 28, 1946) is an American banker who served as the 74th Secretary of the Treasury. Prior to his role in the Department of the Treasury, Paulson was the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of ...
Henry Merritt "Hank" Paulson Jr. (born March 28, 1946) is an American banker who served as the 74th Secretary of the Treasury. Prior to his role in the Department of the Treasury, Paulson was the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Goldman Sachs. He is now the chairman of the Paulson Institute, which he founded in 2011 to promote sustainable economic growth and a cleaner environment around the world, with an initial focus on the United States and China.
Henry M. Paulson, Jr., is a businessman, China expert, conservationist and author. He is the founder and chairman of the Paulson Institute. Paulson served as the 74th Secretary of the Treasury under President George W. Bush, from July 2006 ...
Hank Paulson Karl Lagerfeld, 85. Acclaimed fashion designer who was creative director at Chanel for 35 years and produced outfits for celebrities such as Princess Diana and Nicole Kidman. Died Feb. 19.
‘From ancient Greece to modern Silicon Valley, the only thing that gets in the way of continued success and relevance, and impact, is hubris’. The FT’s Person of the Year is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Read why here:
Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business,...
BLOOMBERG.COM
Since Marissa Mayer took over the helm at Yahoo in 2012, she has been skating on some rather thin ice. The latest in a long line of bosses to try and revive the web firm’s fortunes, she has seen Yahoo’s share price soar thanks largely to its stake in Alibaba, a giant Chinese e-commerce outfit. But its core businesses in areas such as online advertising are still stuck in the doldrums http://econ.st/1BEOahY
What is Satya Nadella really saying when he addressed MicrosoftMSFT-0.36%’s
employees in a memo this morning? The Wall Street Journal’s Business
Editor Dennis K. Berman decrypts his letter, offering commentary in
[brackets].
From: Satya Nadella
To: All Employees
Date: Feb. 4, 2014
Subject: RE: Satya Nadella – Microsoft’s New CEO [Why make your
welcome letter part of an e-mail chain? Is there anything more
representative of big, lumbering companies than interminable email
chains?]
Today is a very humbling day for me. It reminds me of my very first
day at Microsoft, 22 years ago. Like you, I had a choice about where to
come to work. I came here because I believed Microsoft was the best
company in the world. I saw then how clearly we empower people to do
magical things with our creations and ultimately make the world a better
place. [Magical things? Creations? This is the language of Walt Disney and Steve Jobs.
Somehow it doesn’t quite fit in the Microsoft context, but perhaps this
is part of being a leader. Trying to get people to believe in such a
vision.] I knew there was no better company to join if I wanted
to make a difference. This is the very same inspiration that continues
to drive me today. [Translated: We really value your tech
talent. Please don’t decamp to Facebook or Oracle. We will keep the
stock options coming, accordingly.]
It is an incredible honor for me to lead and serve this great company
of ours. Steve and Bill have taken it from an idea to one of the
greatest and most universally admired companies in the world. I’ve been
fortunate to work closely with both Bill and Steve in my different roles
at Microsoft, and as I step in as CEO, I’ve asked Bill to devote
additional time to the company, focused on technology and products.
[This is the most intriguing part of the letter. Just how much power
and influence is he still going to exert on the company? Who really is
in charge of Microsoft? Nominally, and perhaps in fact, it is Nadella.
But what happens when the two clash on the course going forward? How
will people in the trenches respond to something that “Bill wants”
versus something that “Satya wants.”] I’m also looking forward to working with John Thompson as our new Chairman of the Board. [This feels obligatory. It makes it sound like Gates is the Boss, while Thompson is simply the nominal chairman.]
While we have seen great success, we are hungry to do more. Our
industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation. This
is a critical time for the industry and for Microsoft. Make no mistake,
we are headed for greater places — as technology evolves and we evolve
with and ahead of it. Our job is to ensure that Microsoft thrives in a
mobile and cloud-first world. [This seems like an important
marker in the ground. He is right about this. And at least for the
cloud, Microsoft does have some strengths there. Mobile, however, is a
persistent and money-losing conundrum. What is Nadella going to do with
Nokia, for instance? No clues yet.]
As we start a new phase of our journey together, I wanted to share some background on myself and what inspires and motivates me.
Who am I?
I am 46. I’ve been married for 22 years and we have 3 kids. And like
anyone else, a lot of what I do and how I think has been shaped by my
family and my overall life experiences. Many who know me say I am also
defined by my curiosity and thirst for learning. I buy more books than I
can finish. I sign up for more online courses than I can complete. I
fundamentally believe that if you are not learning new things, you stop
doing great and useful things. So family, curiosity and hunger for
knowledge all define me. [Have to respect his self-description. It seems sincere and honest.]
Why am I here?
I am here for the same reason I think most people join Microsoft — to
change the world through technology that empowers people to do amazing
things. I know it can sound hyperbolic — and yet it’s true. We have done
it, we’re doing it today, and we are the team that will do it again. [Another
admirable way of looking at the world. But its insistence shows a kind
of self doubt. Can Microsoft really do it again? The answer is
uncertain.]
I believe over the next decade computing will become even more
ubiquitous and intelligence will become ambient. The coevolution of
software and new hardware form factors will intermediate and digitize —
many of the things we do and experience in business, life and our world.
[Translated: Microsoft is not getting out of the device
business, no matter its many failures there. It will probably be
doubling down.] This will be made possible by an ever-growing
network of connected devices, incredible computing capacity from the
cloud, insights from big data, and intelligence from machine learning.
This is a software-powered world. [Not a new insight, but
sounds about right. Still, the tone of Nadella’s note suggests this will
be a company with a significant consumer focus. In other words, this
does not seem like a big strategic shift is on the way.]
It will better connect us to our friends and families and help us
see, express, and share our world in ways never before possible. It will
enable businesses to engage customers in more meaningful ways. [Again, more consumer focus. Interesting that he puts end-consumers first and not businesses.]
I am here because we have unparalleled capability to make an impact.
Why are we here?
In our early history, our mission was about the PC on every desk and
home, a goal we have mostly achieved in the developed world. Today we’re
focused on a broader range of devices. While the deal is not yet
complete, we will welcome to our family Nokia devices and services and
the new mobile capabilities they bring us.
As we look forward, we must zero in on what Microsoft can uniquely
contribute to the world. The opportunity ahead will require us to
reimagine a lot of what we have done in the past for a mobile and
cloud-first world, and do new things.
We are the only ones who can harness the power of software and
deliver it through devices and services that truly empower every
individual and every organization. We are the only company with history
and continued focus in building platforms and ecosystems that create
broad opportunity. [A nice sound bite, but this does not seem
quite accurate, especially with the iOS and Android ecosystems so
ubiquitous and profitable. More open software standards at both the
consumer and enterprise level are deeply changing this equation. This
sounds like an aspiration at the moment, but not quite the reality.]
Qi Lu captured it well in a recent meeting when he said that
Microsoft uniquely empowers people to “do more.” This doesn’t mean that
we need to do more things, but that the work we do empowers the world to
do more of what they care about — get stuff done, have fun, communicate
and accomplish great things. This is the core of who we are, and
driving this core value in all that we do — be it the cloud or device
experiences — is why we are here. [This sounds like a nice
re-summation of the old “productivity” approach to computing. It does
not answer why Microsoft helps people do more, compared with the likes
of Apple, Oracle, Salesforce, Google, Splunk and hundreds of other
companies harnessing the wonders of computational improvement.]
What do we do next?
To paraphrase a quote from Oscar Wilde — we need to believe in the impossible and remove the improbable. [Sounds
like he’s getting impatient with Microsoft bureaucracy and structure.
Might it be time to re-organize the company again after the recent
Ballmer restructuring in August, 2013 that turned Microsoft into a
“devices and services” company?]
This starts with clarity of purpose and sense of mission that will
lead us to imagine the impossible and deliver it. We need to prioritize
innovation that is centered on our core value of empowering users and
organizations to “do more.” We have picked a set of high-value
activities as part of our One Microsoft strategy. [Sounds like the overall strategy is not going to change.] And with every service and device launch going forward we need to bring more innovation to bear around these scenarios.
Next, every one of us needs to do our best work, lead and help drive
cultural change. We sometimes underestimate what we each can do to make
things happen and overestimate what others need to do to move us
forward. We must change this. [Translated: “We have lost confidence in ourselves. We are bogged down in bureaucracy.”]
Finally, I truly believe that each of us must find meaning in our
work. The best work happens when you know that it’s not just work, but
something that will improve other people’s lives. This is the
opportunity that drives each of us at this company.
Many companies aspire to change the world. But very few have all the elements required: talent, resources, and perseverance. [Translated: Microsoft has a lot of money to play with. Give the new CEO time to experiment and get things right.] Microsoft has proven that it has all three in abundance. And as the new CEO, I can’t ask for a better foundation.
Let’s build on this foundation together.
Satya
Microsoft Names Satya Nadella as CEO
Bill Gates Leaves Chairman Post to Become Technology Adviser
Satya Nadella is seen in this undated Microsoft photograph released Feb. 4, 2014.
Reuters
Microsoft Corp.
MSFT +0.03%
named company veteran
Satya Nadella
as its next chief executive, a widely expected choice that also returns co-founder
Bill Gates
to a high-profile role in helping the company confront its challenges.
Mr.
Gates, who had been serving as chairman, will become a technology
adviser and devote more time to the company, supporting Mr. Nadella in
shaping technology and product direction, the company said.
John Thompson,
who was formerly the lead director, will become chairman.
Both Mr. Gates and
Steve Ballmer,
who is giving up the CEO role, will remain on the board of
directors. Mr. Gates, who for years has mainly focused on philanthropic
activities, said he was thrilled that Mr. Nadella asked him to become
more involved at Microsoft.
"I'll have
over a third of my time available to meet with product groups, and it
will be fun to define this next round of products working together," Mr.
Gates said in a video message posted Tuesday.
Microsoft has named company veteran Satya Nadella as its
next chief executive, and said founder Bill Gates will leave the
chairman post to become technology adviser. Rob Enderle of Enderle Group
joins MoneyBeat to discuss what the changes mean for the software
giant. Photo: AP.
In a series of exclusive interviews, Microsoft's CEO told The Wall Street Journal how he came to believe he wasn't the best person to remake the technology giant for its next act. More on Microsoft's Future
Mr. Nadella, who takes his new
position immediately, becomes the third CEO since the Redmond, Wash.,
company was founded in 1975. Mr. Ballmer, who announced plans to retire
in August was originally handed the reins in 2000 when Mr. Gates stepped
aside after 25 years.
The appointment
of Mr. Nadella, who is 46 years old and leads the Microsoft division
that makes technology to run corporate computer servers and other
back-end technology, is considered a safe choice. It comes after a
lengthy search during which the company considered a long list of
external and internal candidates.
Mr.
Nadella, who will also join the company's board, said his selection
marked a "humbling day" and vowed to reinvigorate Microsoft's role as a
leader despite stiff competition in markets such as mobile devices and
what the industry calls cloud services.
"Our
industry does not respect tradition—it only respects innovation," he
said in a letter to employees. "The opportunity ahead will require us to
reimagine a lot of what we have done in the past for a mobile and
cloud-first world, and do new things."
Little
in Mr. Nadella's public history at Microsoft, however, suggests he will
break from the company's pattern as a fast follower, rather than a
trend setter.
"As Microsoft continues
down the right lane of the highway at 55 mph with its new CEO in hand,
the fear among many investors is that other tech vendors from social,
enterprise, mobile, and the tablet segments continue to easily speed by
the company in the left lane of innovation and growth," wrote analysts
at FBR Capital Markets.
Matthew Hedberg,
an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, wrote that a bigger positive
for investors may be the renewed involvement of Mr. Gates in product
strategy. He also praised the decision to give the position of chairman
to Mr. Thompson, an industry veteran whospent more than 25 years at
International Business Machines Corp.
IBM +0.03%
andled the Microsoft CEO search.
Microsoft's
shares were largely unchanged after the announcement Tuesday, which
confirmed reports about the CEO change that emerged Thursday and Friday.
The stock was up two cents at $36.50 in midafternoon trading in New
York.
Mr. Nadella inherits a big,
profitable company that has missed some potential growth areas, as
people and businesses shift more computing chores to the Web, tablets
and smartphones.
Microsoft is heavily
dependent on a trio of products—Windows, Microsoft Office and related
software to run companies' back-end computing gear—that are deeply tied
to the sales of Windows-powered PCs. Other well-known products, like the
Bing search engine and the Xbox videogame system, don't contribute as
much to results.
The company kicked off
the current fiscal year by announcing first- and second-quarter results
that easily topped Wall Street's expectations. Analysts surveyed by
Thomson Reuters are projecting full-year revenue to rise 7% for the
period ended June 30, but the bottom line is expected to be roughly
flat.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has faced
pressure from activist investor ValueAct Capital Management LP to make
better use of its assets. The company and hedge fund reached a deal in
August to meet regularly to discuss the business and agreed to
potentially add a representative from ValueAct to the board at a later
date.
"As an active contributor to the
CEO search process, I have spent a lot of time with Satya and he is
clearly the best choice to lead the company," ValueAct President
G. Mason Morfit
said in a statement. "I look forward to working with Satya,
Chairman John Thompson and the rest of the board of directors to create
value for all shareholders."
People who
have worked with Mr. Nadella credit him with repairing technical
glitches at Microsoft's Web-search service and fostering collaboration
in a turf-conscious workplace.
Most of
Mr. Nadella's experience is in serving corporate customers—the source of
two-thirds of Microsoft profit—which suggests the company may want to
double down in that area. He has been an internal champion of
Microsoft's efforts to rent computing power to other companies, even
though that business competes with some of Microsoft's most-profitable
products.
Mr. Ballmer, in an email to
Microsoft employees, called Mr. Nadella a proven leader. "He has a
remarkable ability to see what's going on in the market, to sense
opportunity, and to really understand how we come together at Microsoft
to execute against those opportunities in a collaborative way," he said.
Some
of Microsoft's biggest corporate customers are eager for the new CEO to
make progress in mobile devices and cloud-related offerings.
Stuart Kippelman,
chief information officer of Covanta Energy, says he'd like
Microsoft to make its bedrock Office applications available on
non-Microsoft smartphones and tablets, such as
Apple's
AAPL -0.16%
iPad.
Mr. Kippelman, among a
group of chief information officers attending a Wall Street Journal's
conference near San Diego, also said he'd like Microsoft to make its
software cheaper and easier to manage. "It costs a fortune to own," he
said.
Microsoft had previously indicated it would look both inside and outside the company for a replacement for Mr. Ballmer.
A handful of well-known candidates were rumored to be in the running for the post.
Ford Motor Co.
F -0.55%
's CEO
Alan Mulally
in early January said he wasn't taking the job.
Others who at one time discussed the CEO job with Microsoft directors have included
Nokia Corp.
NOK1V.HE +0.40%
executive
Stephen Elop,
Oracle Corp.
ORCL +0.33%
President
Mark Hurd,
Pivotal Software Inc. CEO
Paul Maritz
and Microsoft executive
Tony Bates.
Ericsson CEO
Hans Vestberg
was also a rumored candidate.
ByVINDU GOEL and CLAIRE CAIN MILLERJanuary 17, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO — It looks as if the Google pixie dust isn’t so easy to spread around.
Marissa Mayer’s arrival at Yahoo as chief executive a year and a half ago was widely hailed as an opportunity to infuse the struggling Internet pioneer with the smarts and cachet that had helped her succeed as a top executive at Google. She was one of the earliest employees at Google, with a reputation for inventiveness and attention to detail. If anyone could fix Yahoo, it was believed, it was Ms. Mayer.
But the announcement on Wednesday that she had tossed out her top lieutenant, Henrique de Castro, was her first public acknowledgment that turning around Yahoo would be far more difficult than has sometimes been suggested by the media attention she has received.
“That was Marissa’s first big hire,” said Robert Peck, an analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. “You can imagine how difficult it would be to admit a mea culpa.”
Bringing on Mr. de Castro, who was also a longtime Google executive, was just one of many prominent moves Ms. Mayer has made, including buying the blog site Tumblr for $1.1 billion, hiring the television host Katie Couric to be the anchor to a new online news operation and starting an online food magazine.
While Ms. Mayer took the public spotlight — for example, she personally introduced Yahoo’s new consumer technology site at a trade show in Las Vegas this month — Mr. de Castro was charged with the less sexy but equally vital task of reviving Yahoo’s advertising business. While that would be a herculean task for anyone at a company whose fortunes have been declining for a decade, Mr. de Castro was particularly ill-suited for the job, according to ad-industry executives, analysts and people who worked with him at Google and Yahoo. When Ms. Mayer hired him, the choice mystified people both inside and outside the company. And tension quickly developed between the two leaders, according to the company insiders, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to not upset business relationships.
Mr. de Castro, a former consultant at McKinsey, was fond of using spreadsheets but was weak in his knowledge of Google’s products, said a person who worked with him at Google.
Additionally, he was not a charismatic salesman willing to schmooze with Madison Avenue marketers to persuade them to spend their ad dollars on Yahoo instead of on rivals like Facebook and Google.
“Henrique wasn’t as market-facing as his predecessors or competitors,” said Amanda Richman, president of investment and activation at Starcom USA, which buys billions of dollars of ads a year on behalf of big consumer brands like Kraft and Kellogg.
Mr. de Castro did not respond to phone and email messages on Thursday. Ms. Mayer declined a request for an interview.
Although colleagues universally described Mr. de Castro as very smart, they also said he was a poor communicator with an arrogant, abrasive manner. A native Portuguese speaker, his strongly accented English was sometimes hard to understand. At Google, Mr. de Castro had so many negative reviews from employees that the human resources department had been called in to review the situation, according to a person who worked with him there.
Google declined to comment on personnel matters.
In the end, the whole misadventure might not matter unless Ms. Mayer is able to redirect the company away from its failing core business of selling display ads.
“It certainly didn’t help that there may have been internal conflict, but it probably didn’t make a big difference, either,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst with the Pivotal Research Group. “You can’t overcome the structural issues.”
The splashy home-page banner ads that Yahoo rode to riches in the early days of the web are fading away in favor of Google’s search ads, Facebook’s targeted social ads and automated systems that reach consumers on smaller sites that charge a relative pittance. In mobile advertising, the hottest area of growth for the industry, Yahoo has virtually no presence.
In recent months, Yahoo has begun a series of initiatives to increase traffic to its sites, including new mobile apps, an overhaul of its Flickr photo service, expanded video news offerings and the consumer tech site, which is anchored by David Pogue, a former columnist for The New York Times.
“With content, there’s eyeballs, and with eyeballs, there’s advertising,” Mr. Peck said.
In addition, Yahoo has overhauled its ad-buying platform and added new formats like so-called native advertising, in which advertisers provide content that looks similar to other articles and videos on the site.
Ms. Richman said Yahoo has also been contacting more to advertisers, sharing more data about users and ad performance than its rivals, helping brands refine their marketing.
For now, investors are basically ignoring all of it.
“The funny thing is how little any of this matters to the stock,” Mr. Wieser said.
Wall Street values Yahoo, which closed on Thursday at $40.34, mostly for its partial ownership stakes in Alibaba, a successful Chinese e-commerce company that plans to sell stock to the public this year, and Yahoo Japan. The core business is not nearly as valuable.
In the third quarter, Yahoo reported revenue of $1.14 billion, down 5 percent from the previous year. Net income was $297 million, compared with $3.16 billion in the previous year, in which Yahoo had a gain of $2.8 billion from a sale of Alibaba shares.
It is not clear whether Ms. Mayer will choose another chief operating officer to succeed Mr. de Castro. She has divided his responsibilities among a number of other executives, with Ned Brody, a former AOL executive, overseeing the North American advertising business.
Mr. Peck said the attention on Alibaba’s expected initial public stock offering gives Ms. Mayer more time to fix Yahoo’s core business.
He also praised Ms. Mayer for having the courage to cut her losses on Mr. de Castro, even though his departure will cost the company tens of millions of dollars in severance and stock compensation that he was promised.
“It’s a testament to her,” he said. “She made a public acknowledgment of an expensive mistake.”
*****
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has said multiple times that advertisements, if done well, can actually improve the user experience
在美國，今年3月初的 Yahoo的一紙行政命令，更觸及企業員工/團隊的"創新vs 生產力"之吊詭。
紐約時報的大作家開始發雌威
Op-Ed Columnist
Get Off of Your Cloud
By MAUREEN DOWDMarch 02, 2013
WASHINGTON
When Marissa Mayer became queen of the Yahoos last summer, she was hailed as a role model for women.
The 37-year-old supergeek with the supermodel looks was the youngest
Fortune 500 chief executive. And she was in the third trimester of her
first pregnancy. Many women were thrilled at the thought that biases
against hiring women who were expecting, or planning to be, might be
melting.
A couple months later, it gave her female fans pause when the Yahoo
C.E.O. took a mere two-week maternity pause. She built a nursery next to
her office at her own expense, to make working almost straight through
easier.
The fear that this might set an impossible standard for other women —
especially women who had consigned “having it all” to unicorn status —
reverberated. Even the German family minister, Kristina Schröder, chimed
in: “I regard it with major concern when prominent women give the
public impression that maternity leave is something that is not
important.”
Almost two months after her son, Macallister, was born, Mayer
irritated some women again when she bubbled at a Fortune event that “the
baby’s been way easier than everyone made it out to be.”
“Putting ‘baby’ and ‘easy’ in the same sentence turns you into one of
those mothers we don’t like very much,” Lisa Belkin chided in The
Huffington Post.
Now Mayer has caused another fem-quake with a decision that has a
special significance to working mothers. She has banned Yahoos, as her
employees are known, from working at home (which some of us call
“working” at home).
It flies in the face of tech companies’ success in creating a cloud
office rather than a conventional one. Mayer’s friend Sheryl Sandberg of
Facebook wrote in her new feminist manifesto, “Lean In: Women, Work,
and the Will to Lead,” that technology could revolutionize women’s lives
by “changing the emphasis on strict office hours since so much work can
be conducted online.”
She added that “the traditional practice of judging employees by face
time rather than results unfortunately persists” when it would be more
efficient to focus on results.
Many women were appalled at the Yahoo news, noting that Mayer, with
her penthouse atop the San Francisco Four Seasons, her Oscar de la
Rentas and her $117 million five-year contract, seems oblivious to the
fact that for many of her less-privileged sisters with young children,
telecommuting is a lifeline to a manageable life.
The dictatorial decree to work “side by side” had some dubbing Mayer
not “the Steinem of Silicon Valley” but “the Stalin of Silicon Valley.”
Mayer and Sandberg are in an elite cocoon and in USA Today, Joanne
Bamberger fretted that they are “setting back the cause of working
mothers.” She wrote that Sandberg’s exhortation for “women to pull
themselves up by the Louboutin straps” is damaging, as is “Mayer’s
office-only work proclamation that sends us back to the pre-Internet era
of power suits with floppy bow ties.”
Men accustomed to telecommuting were miffed, too. Richard Branson
tweeted: “Give people the freedom of where to work & they will
excel.”
While it is true that women have looked to technology as a leveling
force in the marketplace, it is also true that tech innovators — even as
far back as Bell Labs scientists — have designed their campuses around
the management philosophy that intellectual ferment happens when you
force smart people to collaborate in person and constantly bounce
creative ideas off each other.
Mayer has shown that she is willing to do what it takes, with no
coddling. She has a huge challenge in turning around Yahoo — she was the
third of three C.E.O.’s at the company in 2012 alone. She had success
brainstorming face to face during her years at Google, where she was the
20th employee, the first female engineer and the shepherd of more than
100 products. The Times’s Laura Holson wrote that when meeting with
Google subordinates, Mayer came across like a “meticulous art teacher
correcting first-semester students.”
Mayer’s bold move looks retro and politically incorrect, but she may
feel the need to reboot the company culture, harness creativity, cut
deadwood and discipline slackers before resuming flexibility.
Coming into the office, Yahoo H.R. chief Jackie Reses wrote in a
memo, ensures that “some of the best decisions and insights come from
hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu
team meetings,” adding tartly that if “Yahoos” “have to stay home for
the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of
collaboration.”
Maybe as Mayer rejuvenates “the grandfather” of Internet companies,
as she calls Yahoo, she needs the energy and synergy of a start-up
mentality.
She seems to believe that enough employees are goofing off at home
that she should bring them off the cloud and into the cubicle. But she
should also be sympathetic to the very different situation of women —
and men — struggling without luxurious layers of help.
Mayer has a nursery next to the executive suite. But not everyone has it so sweet.
新聞快訊
