Marissa Mayer - My Own Personal Inspiration

Yes, I know. She failed. Under her leadership, Yahoo dove down and ended up being bought by Verizon.

Yet, to me Marissa Mayer is a true role model and inspiration. Here is why.

She is Successful

How many woman CEOs of public companies do you know? Can you count them on one hand? Sadly, there are more men CEOs named John than women CEOs today. There are also more CEOs named David btw.

Mayer  joined Google in 1999 as employee number 20 and was the company's first female engineer. In 2005 she became Vice President of Search Products and User Experience. Quite a big role I would say.

In the 5 years prior to Mayer's appointment as Yahoo's CEO, Yahoo changed 5 different CEOs (4 males, 1 woman). That's 1 per year. Yet Mayer held this role for straight 4 years. Had she been such a bad leader, why wasn't she just replaced like the others?

And yes, she crashed the stock price, but overall the stock price actually went up 150% since she stepped in as CEO. And that is much more than you can say about most of her predecessors.

Source

Yes, She failed. But She Keeps On Going

Have you ever failed before? I know I have. I had to close my startup company in 2013 which was one of the hardest things I had to do. Yet, I learned so much from the experience of running my own company and from leading the marketing in that company, that there is not a single day I regret the experience.

After closing the company, I took that experience and brought it with me to the positions I held since, both as the Head of Marketing for Roojoom and the Head of Content Marketing at Teradata Marketing Applications, a position I currently hold. I also took the network and the passion that I still have for the fashion-tech world, and started a community which is currently the biggest one in Israel for fashion-tech and fashion innovation, and 3 years later I am still leading this group and using it to make an impact on the industry that I'm so passionate about.

At the end of the day, Mayer could not hold Yahoo together. She did broker a pretty good deal, as you can learn from the many articles discussing why Verizon spent so big on this deal. Yet Mayer does not intend to quit. She will stay in the company to see the deal through, and make sure that her life's work in the past 4 years would not go to waste. After that, she plans to stay in the business world and continue making an impact.

So yes, she failed. We all fail. The question is how do we cope with failures and how we leverage that failure to continue doing good in this world.

She Is Transparent and Open

This whole situation is probably tough on Mayer. If it was me I would probably crawl under a rock for at least a few weeks. Remember what happened to E Corp's SVP of Technology?

Source

But Mayer is out there, talking openly about the sale, about her feelings and her plans for the future. I just love that.

Work-Life Balance

I was having a hard time deciding whether I should add this part. If Mayer was a men, would I even be thinking about her personal life? Do you know how many kids does Erik Schmidt have? Or Bill Gates? I don't. Yet we all know that Marissa Mayer recently gave birth to twin girls. In fact, the media was obsessed about it. From a lengthy article around the girls' names to criticism about her absence during maternity leave - and on the other side criticism for her coming back too early. My friend Moran Bar wrote a great post here on LinkedIn analyzing the differences between Mayer's maternity leave and Zuckerberg's. One of Moran's points is that not everyone can afford to be like Mayer and return to work so quickly. She also compared it with her own decision to take on a full maternity leave, knowing and trusting that her team will successfully navigate the seas at Geektime while she is gone. For Bar, as a first-time mother, it was important to play a meaningful part in her son’s life for the first few months.

After two kids (and another on his way) I can certainly relate to that. Each parent is different, and each baby is different two. Some would keep you up at nights, get you frustrated trying to feed them or just need more attention. Others, like my second one, will sleep through the night from almost day one and require less attention during the day. This is why I went back to work very shortly after having her. The fact that my husband was working from home at the time made it of course much easier.

Why am I getting into all this? Because it IS important. Wheather you are a man or a woman, you deserve to spend enough time with your kids. Woth your spouse. Your dog even. We should all balance our work and personal life, but for each one of us work-life balance means something else.

Mayer's 3.5 year old made her parents laugh when he told them that he is going to "make an important call". They found it strange that such a young boy already knows the meaning of that... well - mine know it as well.

For me, though some days I'm working 10 or more hours, and sometimes I find myself working during weekends, the fact that I own my time and I can also go home early a couple of times a week and be with my kids in the afternoon, that to me is work-life balance. Like Mayer, I enjoy the work. I love making an impact where I can. So I don't mind the long hours and the occasional weekend work. I do it because I want to, not because I have to. 

Final Thoughts

As a woman in the business world, I am happy that I have people like Mayer to look up to. I wish that we had more female role models, and I am honored to know a few remarkable people, such as Hilla Ovil Brenner, who are constantly working to make that happen one day.

What is your take on this? Would love to get more perspectives. Feel free to add yours in the comments below.

Featured image source