Often boards will appoint CEOs to dismantle or sell off hopeless companies (disappearing market, obstreperous union, product is turning into a commodity) in a last ditch effort to recover some shareholder value. We can't call those CEOs failures if they manage to get shareholders something as opposed to the nearly nothing they would get if the company went bust.
I think a lot of the criticism of Marissa Mayer misses the point that she was appointed CEO of Yahoo, home-page website for people who don't know how to change their home page. The fact that she managed to arrange an exit for Yahoo that wasn't a complete bankruptcy or shutdown is just epsilon-short-of-miraculous.
Another way to look at it is that she had an entire large tech company at her disposal and managed to do pretty much nothing with it, then pawned it off and jumped out with a golden parachute.
Not an equally legitimate way of looking at it in my opinion.
This was Yahoo we're talking about. A buyout was the best possible scenario for shareholders. She's been rewarded for rescuing some shareholder value from a burning car wreck.
Here's a question you can ask yourself: do you think Verizon got a good deal? I'd be upset if I held Verizon stock because I believe based on everything I know about Yahoo that Verizon shouldn't have purchased them and that it was a bad deal for them.
Often boards will appoint CEOs to dismantle or sell off hopeless companies (disappearing market, obstreperous union, product is turning into a commodity) in a last ditch effort to recover some shareholder value. We can't call those CEOs failures if they manage to get shareholders something as opposed to the nearly nothing they would get if the company went bust.
I think a lot of the criticism of Marissa Mayer misses the point that she was appointed CEO of Yahoo, home-page website for people who don't know how to change their home page. The fact that she managed to arrange an exit for Yahoo that wasn't a complete bankruptcy or shutdown is just epsilon-short-of-miraculous.