What does former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz think about the Yahoo board that summarily fired her? Going out in typical, feisty Bartz style, she minces no words: “The board was so spooked by being cast as the worst board in the country,” she tells Fortune’s Patricia Sellers. “Now they’re trying to show that they’re not the doofuses that they are.”
Her old pal, chairman Roy Bostock did the deed over the phone, reading from a prepared script. “Why don’t you have the balls to tell me yourself?” she asked him after he was done, meaning in person. “I thought you were classier,” she added.
It’s not a huge surprise why Bartz was fired. The company is muddling along without a clear sense of how it will grow. The deal with Microsoft helps Yahoo transfer the cost of running a search engine, but doesn’t really help with what Yahoo needs: revenue growth. Yahoo still does not know what it wants to be.
And while the company has many financial options, the biggest thing it needs is clear leadership and a sense of direction. It needs to reinvent itself like Apple did when Steve Jobs returned. Before that can happen, though, I am with Om in that the next people who need to be fired are the board. It sounds like Bartz might also agree on that one.
Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It has since evolved into a major internet brand with search, content verticals, and other web services. Yahoo! Inc. (Yahoo!), incorporated in 1995, is a global Internet brand. To users, the Company provides owned and operated online properties and services (Yahoo! Properties, Offerings, or Owned and Operated sites). Yahoo! also extends its marketing platform and access to Internet users beyond Yahoo! Properties through its distribution network...
On January 13th, 2009, Carol Bartz was named CEO of Yahoo, succeeding outgoing CEO & Founder Jerry Yang, and she held this position until September 6, 2011. Prior to joining Yahoo as CEO, Carol Bartz was executive chairman of the board of Autodesk, Inc. Bartz was chairman, president and CEO of Autodesk for 14 years and stepped down in April 2006. During her tenure, the company diversified its product line and grew revenues from $285 million to $1.523 billion in...
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