Case Study 1:
Carol Bartz, the Well-Known Former CEO of Yahoo Inc. Carol Ann Bartz is a high-tech executive well known for the successes she has enjoyed, her optimism, and her frankness and colorful expressions. Shortly after being appointed as the CEO of Yahoo Inc., she pulled off one of the biggest deals of her career. She relinquished control of the Yahoo search business in exchange for a decade of revenue-sharing with Microsoft. (The Bing engine powers Yahoo searches.) The deal was criticized by stockholders and business writers, but Bartz believed that over the long run the Microsoft deal will pay off for Yahoo because so much advertising has shifted to search engines.
Bartz began her career in information technology with a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin. During her early career, she held sales positions at 3M and Digital Equipment Corp. Her executive experience before Yahoo included positions as vice president of Worldwide Field Operations at Sun Microsystems, and as chief executive at Autodesk.
Bartz contends that Yahoo’s most important asset is its ability to reach over 600 million people in 30 countries and place ads on their computer or smart-phone screens. She is heavily sales-oriented. An executive who has known Bartz for many years said, “She is good at figuring out what people will buy, why they buy it and what you can do to make them pay more.”
One of the reasons that Bartz accepted the CEO position at Yahoo is that after retiring from Autodesk in 2006, she missed the day-by-day thrills, and even the stress, of executive life. She particularly enjoys working through crises.
Bartz has had to overcome personal adversity during her business career. The second day on the job as Autodesk CEO she discovered she had breast cancer.
She had a mastectomy, leaving her hospitalized for four weeks. She worked on company problems from her hospital bed. Shortly after joining Yahoo, she had a left-knee replacement.
Bartz has a reputation for unvarnished language.At Yahoo, she told employees she would “drop-kick to f——g Mars” anyone who leaked company information.
In reference to giving feedback, she once comment that she believed in the puppy theory: “If a puppy pees on the rug, you don’t wait six months for a performance evaluation to tell the dog what he or she did wrong.”
In paying a compliment to Steve Jobs for his effort to maintain high-quality ads on Apple devices, Barz said: “The last thing you need on that beautiful iPad is to see an ad for Russian brides or teeth whitener.” Her words about Jobs were less charitable with respect to Apple’s restrictions on what information can be placed on its devices. She said that Apple has “obnoxious control” over what kind of ads and content are permitted to appear on some of its devices, but that the control will not endure.
Bartz writes the occasional e-mail of encouragement to Yahoo employees. A paragraph from one of these messages is as follows:“There sure are a lot of folks writing about us. There are some pretty incredible stories out there. I’m not letting it distract me, and you shouldn’t either. Because the really incredible story to me is how far we’ve come to build a better Yahoo!—something you’re all making a reality.Your fearless leader,Carol.”
As Bartz worked to improve the business results of Yahoo, she told a reporter, “You don’t come in and do fairy dust. You upgrade technology, you see what drives engagement.” Her approach appeared to be working but too slowly for the Yahoo board who fired Bartz in September 2011.
Q1. What evidence is presented in this story that Bartz has good congnitive skills?
Q2. Which personality traits does Bartz apprear to possess?