Too Much Authenticity From ex-Yahoo!´s Carol Bartz

Everybody appreciates true authentici­ty, especially when displayed by CEOs. However the boarder line between being courageous and being immoderate is really thin. Especially for Carol Bartz (63). Her actions when splitting up with Yahoo! have shown that she generated more publicity about HOW she has left her CEO job there, rather than for what she has done over the last two and a half years in her role.

Breast cancer survivor Carol Bartz was always known for her blunt leadership style. She has always been a no nonsense. When she has learn that she is being fired by the Yahoo! board this September, she has dealt with this unexpected news in her own way. Even before completing her departure deal with the board, she was quick to announce to all Yahoo's 14,000 employees via an iPad email:  "I am very sad to tell you that I've just been fired over the phone by Yahoo's Chairman of the Board (Roy Bostock). It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward. "

The firing of Bartz was messier than it needed to be. Several sources admitted that she was caught by surprise. In her first interview with Fortune since her dismissal, she was very direct to describe her situation: "These people f---ed me over." … On Tuesday, Bartz was in New York, to speak at Citigroup's (C) technology conference the next day, when she was supposed to call Roy Bostock at 6 p.m. "I called him at 6:06," she recalls. When he got on the line, she says, he started reading a lawyer's prepared statement to dismiss her."I said, 'Roy, I think that's a script,'" adding, "'Why don't you have the balls to tell me yourself?'"When Bostock finished reading, Bartz didn't argue—"I got it. I got it," she told the Yahoo chairman. "I thought you were classier," she added. Such kind of statements burn a lot of bridges and divide people into her fans or rather strict opponents.

Bartz is a seasoned executive, proud for what she has achieved, not wiling to be in any way manipulated. She often uses „salty“ language to express her blunt assessments. Reporters love her unforgettable bon mots – e.g. when she refered to Yahoo!'s board as a "bunch of doofuses“  or back in May 2010, when she became famous for her sharp response to aggressive interview attack of Michael Arrington, the internet tech blogger, when she used the „fuck off“ /you tube link/ words to calm him down.

Once Bartz said: "I have a belief that life isn't about balance, because balance is perfection ... Rather, it's about catching the ball before it hits the floor ." Now she entered a period of life to decide which ball she wants to catch up next. The couriosity stands around the question if she is going to learn to build bridges and gather fans.

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Note:  According to Mashable: „Yahoo, the No. 1 search engine early last decade and a product of the late 1990s dot-com boom, has in recent years lost ground to Google Inc. and been hurt by social-network firm Facebook Inc. Both are taking away market share in selling online graphical and video ads, a market in which Yahoo previously shone. The number of minutes that U.S. website visitors spend on Yahoo sites per month has dropped 33% since Ms. Bartz's arrival 2 ½ years ago, according to comScore Inc.  

Bartz, 63, never was able to articulate a strategy to win over investors. Despite being one of the pioneers in the online search business, Yahoo has seen its market share dwindle in recent times. Not only have the users turned to its rivals, advertisers have also been ditching the company. Research firm eMarketer has projected that Facebook will overtake Yahoo in online display advertising in the US this year. Analysts said a lack of focus and direction have hurt the company's image.

 A mother of three and a breast-cancer survivor, Ms. Bartz grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, where she was a high-school homecoming queen. She became a top executive at Sun Microsystems before becoming CEO of Autodesk Inc., which develops software for designers. In 14 years at Autodesk, she increased revenue and the share price. She stepped down in 2006 before being lured to Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., three years later. "

Bartz Timeline according to Mercury News:

 

 

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When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going*

The rules of the game are changing. When else would be this *Robin Sharma´s quote more true than today when further economical development is uncertain and effects of crisis become even more visible. Managers at all levels lose jobs and those who keep them are playing it safe, being afraid of joining their ex-colleagues. Will they all be able to regain back their self-confidence and happiness?

New conditions require new skills and approaches. Turbulent times create new stars or send defeated individuals into apathy. Stormy days either elevate leadership skills of each individual and show hidden talents, or they may reveal weaknesses of those who are not strong enough to fight their fears of unknown or of those who are not able to adapt and find fresh opportunities offered by the new changed situation.

As Robin Sharma in his book The Leader Who Had No Title well said: “Things need to fall apart before they can be rebuilt. …You can´t reach a place of breakthrough without going through a period of breakdown. Being out in the wilderness of the unknown brings up our limiting beliefs and our greatest fears. You bump up against your insecurities. You meet face-to-face with your self-doubt. Anytime you are moving nearer to growth and embracing deep change, your fears will surface. Your old foundations and traditional structures need to fall apart so better ones can be constructed. Out of confusion always comes clarity. From chaos always flows order. 

“It´s amazing how far you can get when you decide that you simply will not give up – that failure is not an option….Obstacles just show up to measure how badly you want something. Setbacks are nothing more than tests to see if you are ready for the rewards that are available to you. Most people give up as soon as they see a wall.” 

Positive thinking, creating a new vision for own fulfilling life, accepting stepping up a new learning journey as well as persistency and patience are a must on the way forward.  

Uncomfortable conditions wake many leaders up to unleash the greatness within self. When they defeat their fear to go through the tough times, they become stronger. When they go to their limits, their limits expand. When they get ready to thrive in discomfort, they set themselves on the path of being ready to step up.
  
"Leadership really is about closing your ears to the noisy voices of others so you can more clearly hear the mission and call within yourself. It´s about feeling really safe in your own skin and learning to trust yourself so that you work under your values, express your original voice and be the best you can be. It´s about knowing who you are, what you stand for and then having the courage to be yourself – in every situation rather than only when it´s convenient.“ Robin Sharma

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” Neale Donald Walsch 

“We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.” Helen Keller

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Where Are The Next Power Women?

Everybody agrees to the logic of broadly pronounced claim that “Only Companies who have the best talent win”. However, in reality only very rarely a woman is upweighted alongside with her promoted male boss. Only very rarely a woman succeeds another woman into the board rooms of the corporate world. Does that imply scarcity of talent among women? Definitely not.

In the present knowledge economy that struggles with waves of economical crisis open discussion about women in leadership is relevant more than ever before. As the job market shrinks - we see downwards trend in Central Europe in No. of executive women in the top positions - women are perceived as highly risky to hire.

A woman is by nature different – being more creative, more people involving, more interested in results rather than in hierarchies. Women in high positions are – thanks to their small No. – still much more visible and exposed in media. An unintentional shining media star may put the other folks in the shadow and change the senior management team “club rules” that is seldom desired.

The male bosses would have to enter new waters and put their own reputation at stake in front of their male pals that is rather rare. It has a lot to do with corporate cultures that have as a norm masculine leadership styles and non-inclusive informal networks of men who support each other especially during the crisis times.

And women themselves too often do not help to solve the issue. Women are mistakenly assuming that they can make it through the hard work alone and not through networking and the social side of the corporate ladder. They do not realize that their more direct leadership style limits their putting up with the corporate agenda. Or they give up the battle too soon, accepting the “glass ceiling” status quo that can be as well a result of not having enough confidence while not seeing enough role models around. Or finally they do not see the value in combining forces, mentoring and helping each other up.

There are already few women role models who have made it to the top themselves and since then they are trying to push also other women up– like Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook or Arianna Huffington from The Huffington Post. Their initiatives (e.g. building women circles or opening new channel for Women in Tech) give courage to other women to make it happen as well.

It certainly does not mean that every woman leader has the desire to jump at the top or has the skills and capabilities to succeed there, however once we accept as a society, that women have a tougher time as they move through the higher ranks than they do at the more junior levels, there will have to be a discussion about what we ALL are ready to do about it. How can each of us make a difference - having in mind that natural evolution of the mankind toward greatness and balance is far better than emposed quotes from the EU Commission.

Should the initial question be rather rephrased into: „Where are the male leaders with guts to hire the next power female executives?

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The unique value women bring to leadership positions,  bullet point list from Magus Consulting

• “…. Companies with three or more women in senior management functions score more highly on average (on nine dimensions of company excellence). It is notable that performance increases significantly once a certain critical mass is attained, namely, at least three women on management committees for an average membership of 10 people. “  (Women Matter, McKinsey 2007)
• “Fortune 500 companies with the highest representation of women board directors attained significantly higher financial performance, on average, than those with the lowest representation of women board directors.” (Catalyst, October 2007)
• “A selected group of companies with a high representation of diverse board seats (especially gender diversity) exceeded the average returns of the Dow Jones and NASDAQ Indices over a 5 year period.” (Virtcom Consulting)
• “An extensive 19-year study of 215 Fortune 500 firms shows a strong correlation between a strong record of promoting women into the executive suite and high profitability. Three measures of profitability were used to demonstrate that the 25 Fortune 500 firms with the best record of promoting women to high positions are between 18 and 69 percent more profitable than the median Fortune 500 firms in their industries.” (European Project on Equal Pay and summarized by researcher Dr. Roy Adler  in Miller McCune).

Note:  The EU commission has ambitious objective to increase women's presence on corporate boards to 30% by 2015 and to 40% by 2020, up from 12%. The EU Employment and Social Policy Council urged national-level action by 2020 to  "promote the equal participation of women and men in decision-making at all levels and in all fields ."  From the eyes of the year 2011 the goal seems unrealistic to achieve….

2011 World´s Most Powerful Women According To Forbes 

More On How Sheryl Sandberg Helps Other Women Up 

Why Women Have Barriers To Help Each Other Up? 

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Social Media Flops Of Respected Companies

Many people claim to be the real experts on social media. Many people struggle to understand there is more than just “cool” conversation with fans and followers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites, especially when shared on behalf of a company.

Although each social media site has its own culture, language and communication style, all have one thing in common. There are ethics to be preserved. Otherwise negative coverage explodes like a time bomb.

Take the recent case of Microsoft, building up on Amy Winehouse sudden death, trying to exploit mourning of twitter community for its own commercial benefit:@tweetbox360 Microsoft UK PR : Remember Amy Winehouse by downloading the ground-breaking ‘Back to Black’ over at Zune: social.zune.net/album/Amy-Wine… 25 Jul via web. A lot of people found this initiative insensitive and Microsoft had to change the tone: "Apologies to everyone if our earlier Amy Winehouse 'download' tweet seemed purely commercially motivated. Far from the case, we assure you." Following later with a compassionate tweet: "With Amy W's passing, the world has lost a huge talent. Our thoughts are with Amy's family and friends at this very sad time." 

Microsoft is not the only Company facing a debacle within its on-line (mainly Twitter) community, in that case due to underestimating community distaste for commercial usage of a celebrity’s misfortune. Some flops are built up incidentally, other time fiasco is a result of purposely issued tweet aiming to test the communication boundaries while getting the media coverage at any costs.

A blunder was most probably a reason for crisis communication of Chrysler Autos this March, after an employee from the hired New Media Strategies agency has mistaken her account for the one she was managing on behalf of @ChryslerAutos and issued following tweet: “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f#king drive.” Chrysler immediately after apologized for having their brand compromised and took steps to resolve the issue.

Another case was the one of Kenneth Cole, an American fashion designer, who tried early this year to use the upheaval in Egypt (#Cairo) to promote his own spring collection on Twitter. Luckily for him, the whole event faded while the huge initial negative feedback was replaced not just by instant apology of Kenneth Cole himself, but mainly because Twitter geeks started to joke under #KennethColeTweets about this brand: „People from New Orleans are flooding into Kenneth Cole stores!“ or „People of Australia: Water up to your ankles? We´ve got your Kenneth Cole Capri right here!“. Community sentiment changed from asking people to #unfollow the brand towards growing No. of Kenneth Cole followers laughing about the whole thing. 

Humor have already saved attractiveness of many brands, but one cannot count on it in crisis management. Much more appropriate is to stay authentic and real, truly tuned in the community mood. With system for effective monitoring of social media discussions 24/7 as well as with ready strategies and plans for immediate response to unintentional flops each Company can hope that the issue will fade away as the on-line community will move on to the next big thing.

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 Progressive CEO Changes Crisis Into Opportunity

When CEO Himself Tweets For His Company, Issue Turns Into Opportunity

When the news about tweeting CEO Pieter Uys on behalf of Vodacom - the South Africa´s largest cellphone Company - spread out on Twitter early July, I was happy there is the first CEO herald, who takes social media opportunities seriously.

Pieter has not just installed internal effective monitoring systems to track the Company´s reputation on 24/7 scale. When he got alert about connectivity issues being discussed on Twitter and Facebook, he immediately took the time to personally respond to subscribers of Vodacom, who experienced the service downtime. To an angry customer tweet:  "@Vodacom are you ignoring my last tweet. If we don't pay you chop us. If you don't provide service we don't pay! @uyspj",  Pieter Uys himself wrote back: "@marknel1. Hi Mark. I am not ignoring you. Working on making you smile again :-)". And later that night, Pieter continued to keep his customers aware, he is there for them to solve the issues: “Words can’t express how sorry I am about today’s problem. Flat out working at making sure all is 100%. Pieter.” He shared updates until the problems were solved.

Instead of probable consequent negative press coverage and a stream of customers leaving to competition, Uys not just attracted positive international attention, he won the respect of the hard to persuade tweeting community: “The fact that you are still working at 11pm speaks volumes Pieter -- as does your apology. Bravo,” Chris Moerdyk.

Customers were astonished, that a CEO himself took the time to speak with them. They got reassurance that the problems are temporary and being solved with high priority, as the CEO himself puts his credit into the game. And because Pieter Uys listened and cared enough, because his tweets were authentic and with clear intentions, he was able to switch opinions.

As Vodacom case shows, nowadays there is a huge benefit when a CEO acts as the public face of the company to both the customer community as well as the marketplace as a whole, when he shifts the emphasis from a broadcast and self-centered mentality to one of listening and serving the community.

Vodacom´s CEO clearly understood, that social conversations nowadays have turned the tables. Customers are more and more empowered to publish their thoughts, there is no way to stop or control them. Brands and companies are no longer expected to be perfect, quite the opposite. And the ones that continue to repeat the good old message of "You - customer- are lucky we exist. We are perfect. It is you that is not" are definitely heading to face a big surprise.

Reputation is not just something to "protect".  Reputation is something to be built - every day, each moment, every single step. Social media offer a great opportunity to enhance it for brands and companies, especially if they are led by brave and progressive CEOs.


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Google Made Her Rich, Facebook Made Her A Legend

Some people become famous for what they say. The outstanding ones make their quotes reality. Like Sheryl Sandberg. Woman, who has made it last year to #16 place of 50 Most Powerful Women in Business in the world selected by Fortune magazine and this year jumped to #5 place of 100 Most Powerful Women in the World by Forbes (#2 in Business).

In 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, felt a desperate need to turn Facebook from a “cool” social network to a real profitable business. Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s thirty-eight-year-old vice-president for global on-line sales and operations, was recommended to him as a potential partner. They started to talk at a Christmas party, they continued their discussions at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January. The deal was done and Sheryl Sandberg became the first COO of Facebook in March 2008. She started to write a history of a legend for herself.

Influenced By Her Mentor´s Career

Sandberg has benefited from sponsor Lawrence Summers, who was very powerful. First he was her thesis adviser at Harvard Business School. Later when Summers became the chief economist at the World Bank he recruited her as a research assistant. Finally when Lawrence advanced to Treasury Secretary, in 1999, Sandberg became, at twenty-nine, his chief of staff. After the Democrats lost the 2000 election, she decided to move to Silicon Valley to join the technology boom. Sandberg is still very grateful for his support, for encouraging her and helping her to develop: “Nobody can succeed on their own,” she believes.
                                                                                                

Risk Taking Business Builder

Sandberg has joined Google even when she knew that they didn’t have a business plan. It was a private company, barely three years old, with no steady revenue stream. Her title was business-unit general manager, even though there was no business unit. At the time, Google had four people working on AdWords, a program for selling the small text ads that appear next to related search results. Sandberg volunteered to oversee sales and operations for the project. Before long, AdWords was making money. Soon, Sandberg was working on AdSense, which placed advertisements on external Web sites, with Google taking a slice of the revenues.And finally she got the AOL deal running. She was tough and fearless.

Profit Driven
Her biggest worry was financial. “There was this open question: Could we make money, ever?” The engineers in Facebook were primarily interested in building a really cool site; profits, they assumed, would follow. Thanks to Sheryl, by 2010, a company that was bleeding cash, when she arrived, had become profitable. Within three years, Facebook grew from a hundred and thirty employees to twenty-five hundred, and from seventy million worldwide users to nearly seven hundred million.

Hands-on, Attention To Detail

 “Sheryl always believed that if there were thirty things on her to-do list at the beginning of the day, there would be thirty check marks at the end of the day,” Summers says. Zuckerberg says he’s grateful that Sandberg “handles things I don’t want to.”

Listening, Approachable And Collaborative

Sandberg began to work at Facebook asking questions and listening. “She walked up to hundreds of people’s desks and interrupted them and said, ‘Hi, I’m Sheryl Sandberg,’ ” recalls Chris Cox, the vice-president of product. She goes around the room and asks people, ‘What do you think?’ ” She welcomes debate.
                                                                                      

Being Close To Employees
The people who are her friends at work are her friends outside work. With Sheryl, everything is personal. There isn’t a separation with this thing she does at work and everything else. Sandberg says: “I believe in bringing your whole self to work. We are who we are. When you try to have this division between your personal self and your professional self, what you really are is stiff. . . . That doesn’t mean people have to tell me everything about their personal lives. But I’m pretty sharing of mine.” Being open with your employees, she believes, means that nothing is a surprise to them—even if you fire them.


Helping People Advance

 “A key part of what Sheryl does in her life is helping people advance, to be seen and to be heard,” David Fischer, who was her deputy at Treasury, and has worked for her at Google and now at Facebook, says.

Supporting Other Women In Their Career

Early this spring, Sandberg gathered twelve female Facebook executives for the company’s Women’s Leadership Day. Each of them was expected to lead sessions encouraging all the female executives there to step up “into leadership” roles. Sandberg believes that women need the equivalent of “the old-boys network.” That is why Sheryl is putting together a new-girls network inside Silicon Valley. She invites to her home each month rotating cast of two hundred women for a buffet dinner and to listen to and question guests, who have included e.g. Microsoft C.E.O. Steve Ballmer, the educator Geoffrey Canada, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Being Always Honest

“She builds trust because she’s honest,” Cox says. “People can be intimidated by Mark. Sheryl just cuts right through that.” Summers sees it similarly and appreciates her boldness: “If I was making a mistake, she told me. She was totally loyal, but totally in my face.”

Powerful, Still True To Herself

“Sandberg could go be the C.E.O. of any company that she wanted to,” Mark Zuckerberg says. “But I think the fact that she really wants to get her hands dirty and work, and doesn’t need to be the front person all the time, is the amazing thing about her. It’s that low-ego element, where you can help the people around you and not need to be the face of all the stuff.”  Howard Schultz, the C.E.O. of Starbucks, says, “Most people you meet who are highly qualified and accomplished tend to want to tell you all the things they’ve done and how smart they are. Or they want to impress you. Sheryl is not like that at all.”

With An Unplanned Future

Surely Sandberg is on track to one day become a C.E.O., if that’s what she wants. Or she may decide to return back to a potential career in politics. When she was asked, what she can imagine doing next, she responded simply, “I’m actually quite happy with Mark and the company. I always tell people if you try to connect the dots of your career, if you mess it up you’re going to wind up on a very limited path. If I decided what I was going to do in college - when there was no Internet, no Google, no Facebook . . . - I don’t want to make that mistake. The reason I don’t have a plan is because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s options.”

During her Barnard´s Speech Sandberg said to fresh women graduates, “Don’t let your fears overwhelm your desire. Let the barriers you face—and there will be barriers—be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold. I promise that you will never know what you’re capable of unless you try. You’re going to walk off this stage today and you’re going to start your adult life. Start out by aiming high. . . . Go home tonight and ask yourselves, What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And then go do it!”

Written based on inspiration from following sources: The New Yorker Magazine:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_auletta?currentPage=all, the interviews in various newspapers, TED Talk and Barnard´s Speech.

Going Into Own Business For The Right Reasons

I have recently observed many managers quitting the corporate job for their vision of starting their own Company. Right or wrong, the future will tell. They have to be sure they do not join the entrepreneurship world just because of their need to achieve bigger personal freedom, money or fame. Or because they think they have no other choice and look for an easy escape. These internal, personally driven reasons for launching a start-up are wrong. They are predetermined for failure.

For creating the next big thing an entrepreneur must have dreams that are externally driven, focused around improving customers´ well-being. Only those succeed in the longer term, who look at the outside opportunities thinking about how to best seize them in a unique way. Only those succeed who are making meaningful products and services, who bring the future closer towards the present time. Only those succeed, who are passionate about changing the status quo, about improving the quality of lives of people on this planet.

Formalized Companies purposes bring the visions down to the Earth – for customers, potential employees, business partners or investors. Leaders, who are able to make the purpose clear, inspiring and unique for the benefit of others, eventually surf on the wave of success. Freedom, money and fame come to them only as a bonus, afterwards.

The Company purpose formulation needs to be made prior launching of a new venture. It gives the direction. It guides the investments decision path. It helps customers to understand what the Company stands for, how does it fit in this world.

Starbucks rewards everyday moments. “Starbucks´mission is to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” “Expect More than Coffee – we are a neighborhood gathering place, a part of daily routine.” (Source: Starbucks.com)

Coca-cola refreshes the world, inspires the moments of optimism and happiness, creates value and makes a difference. (Source: The Coca Cola Company 2020 Vision)

Apple was never about selling boxes to people to get their jobs done. As per Steve Jobs: “Apple at the core, it´s core value is, that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.” … “The goal was never to beat the competitor, or to make a lot of money, it was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.” (Source: You Tube)

Having the objective of giving a meaning to your Company still does not guarantee lifetime success, but it definitely gives a fulfillment coming from aiming for something more than ordinary, not for self, but for the others.

“In real life being an “entrepreneur” is not a job title. It is a state of mind of people, who want to change the future.“ - Guy Kawasaki

“You should carefully observe, where you heart leads you, then to choose this path and devote your maximum energy to it.” Hasidic proverb

Hot News: Twitter & The Pope

The Pope Benedict XVI.  is on Twitter (@news_va_en). These top news were hot enough this week for a wide twitter community discussion, even though Vatican is already tweeting for some time (until today with 1300 tweets, and ca 65 thousand followers). The spread of the news started only when the Pope Benedict XVI. has sent his first - by his team pre-prepared - tweet from his iPad (great choice by the way…). Becoming the first Pope to tweet in history. Learning “THE” thing:

@news_va_en Vatican - news

Dear Friends, I just launched http://t.co/fVHpS9y  Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI

28 Jun via Twitter for iPad

The Pope received positive and negatives WOWs in the twitter discussion. But what is more important, there is a clear signal, that to be a leader in this world one must participate on Twitter (or Facebook) . To influence the masses while being accessible. To start to understand the youngsters, to come closer to their world.

The Pope became by this tweeting act another role model within the social media world, mainly for the mid age plus generation, that - especially in Europe - still consider Twitter not being their cup of tea. As they do not understand why they should use it. Now they can come closer to the Pope every day. Not only to the Pope, but towards many other gurus and leaders, they can get real time news, from the spot, before anybody else has it.

If an 84-old man of many obligations gets easily excited about twitter (and Facebook and YouTube, where his messages will be from now on posted), when will you?

CNN commentary and video about the Pope tweeting

P.S. By the way -  a great free PR for twitter and iPad!
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