Bartz Blasts Yahoo Board With F-Bomb After Firing
Colorful language may be an understatement to describe Carol Bartz's reaction to being fired as Yahoo's CEO. But then again Bartz is known as a cussing CEO.
"These people f***ed me over," she told Fortune magazine a day after Yahoo announced it fired her. Bartz said she received the news from Yahoo's chairman, who read from a prepared statement drafted by an attorney.
"Why don't you have the balls to tell me yourself? I thought you were classier," she said she told Chairman Roy Bostock. "The board was so spooked by being cast as the worst board in the country. Now they're trying to show that they're not the doofuses that they are."
Is It the Board's Fault?
But some analysts agree with Bartz. Rob Enderle, principal analyst at The Enderle Group, said Bartz was right in her assessment of how the board handled her departure. Indeed, he said, Yahoo's problem started with the board.
"Bartz was the wrong person for the job. She didn't have the right skill set," Enderle said. He compared Yahoo's turnaround needs to catastrophic accidents in which people suffer massive damage and need a skilled team to rebuild them.
"Yahoo had been badly managed for a long period of time and was under massive hostile acquisition pressure. Yahoo required an A-plus turnaround team," Enderle said. "Bartz was kind of a unique specialist -- like a pediatrician -- but Yahoo needed a team of people specializing in massive trauma. From Day One she wasn't qualified, and she didn't bring on a team that could supplement her shortcomings, either."
Bartz's Successes
Bartz, who was 60 when Yahoo hired her in January 2009, was a smashing success in her career prior to replacing Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. She is a veteran technology executive who had most recently served as executive chairman of Autodesk and also CEO of Autodesk for 14 years, leading the company to become a powerhouse in computer-aided design software.
During Bartz's tenure at Autodesk, the company's revenues climbed from less than $300 million to more than $1.5 billion, and its share price increased nearly 10-fold. Bartz's executive experience also includes hands-on responsibility for leading global operations, engineering, sales and marketing organizations for large technology and engineering companies, including Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment and 3M.
But Yahoo needed -- and still needs -- a turnaround specialist, Enderle said. In fact, he argued, Yahoo needs a team of turnaround experts that understand the market and are skilled at rebuilding a company. As he sees it, this team needs to take Yahoo down to its foundation and rebuild.
The Trauma of Change
"Right now, Yahoo has too many properties, too many things still left over from prior administrations as the company went in every different direction," Enderle said. "There's a process you go through to turn around a firm. Steve Jobs at Apple is a great example of how you turn around a company."
Apple was in far worse shape than Yahoo is today, yet Jobs turned it into one of the most powerful companies in the technology world, Enderle said, and he did it by cutting the company down to its roots and rebuilding it differently. But the problem once again may lie with the board.
"This board not too dissimilar from the one that hired Bartz. And this board was being awfully supportive of her just a few weeks ago," Enderle said. "The board needs to have the right skill set, otherwise it will hire the wrong people again and we'll be right back to square one.
Things could get worse. If the board selects one more wrong team, at some point the company might not survive the trauma of change."
