After reading Amy Wu and Nancy Lu’s blog posts on Abercrombie and Fitch’s CEO Mike Jefferies and the negative impact that he has had on the company, I began to think about how vital it is for a company to have the right CEO. I immediately thought back to when Amielle Lake, founder of Tagga, made us repeat that “our greed [should be] greater than our pride” and how she knew it would be best for the company to step down and let another CEO take over. The right CEO can make or break a company, and as we’ve been discussing in class a major part of a CEO’s job is to establish and define the company’s corporate culture.
I did more research on some of the world’s most successful CEO’s, and I found a blog post that mentioned Marissa Mayer and what she’s been doing for the past two years to try and redefine the Yahoo workforce, and there were many aspects that I thought were very intelligent. One point that I found particularly interesting was her stance on failure – because in most workplaces there is little to no room for failure, but it is often one of the only ways for a company to advance and grow. Mayer believes that “It’s totally OK to fail. If what you’ve tried is working, throw more fuel on the fire. If not, pull back”. The corporate culture that Mayer is trying to establish at Yahoo is an environment where people are motivated to innovate and be actively engaged in the company, which I think will lead to great things for the company.
PS. On a side note, I think all first year students could learn something from Mayer’s views on failure. We are all going through a period of massive change and we have had to adapt and reflect on what is and isn’t working. It is important that we remember that what matters most is we people react to failure and what we can learn from it.