Transparency

Marissa Mayer Was Right to Ask Executives to Commit to Staying at Yahoo

You can’t start a big effort unless your team is all in.

by

Reid Hoffman,
Ben Casnocha,

and

Chris Yeh

by

Reid Hoffman,
Ben Casnocha,

and

Chris Yeh

November 11, 2015

Kara Swisher reported in Re/code this week that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer asked her top executives to make explicit commitments to stay at Yahoo – that they take a “pledge.” Swisher writes: “That move seems to have backfired a bit, resulting in several major departures recently, including European boss Dawn Airey, marketing and media head Kathy Savitt, development chief Jackie Reses and many others to other jobs.” (Mayer herself had earlier claimed on Yahoo’s third quarter earnings call that the departures were carefully planned.)

Reid Hoffman is a cofounder of LinkedIn and a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. He is a coauthor of Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies (Currency, 2018). (Disclosure: His podcast, Masters of Scale, is produced by WaitWhat, which is currently developing projects with HBR’s parent company, Harvard Business Publishing.)
Ben Casnocha is a founder and partner at Village Global, a venture capital fund. He is also an award-winning entrepreneur and bestselling coauthor, with Reid Hoffman, of The Start-up of You (Currency, 2012). He is a frequent speaker on talent management, and is a coauthor of The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age.
Chris Yeh is an entrepreneur, a writer, and a speaker. He is a coauthor of Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies (Currency, 2018) and The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age.

Marissa Mayer Was Right to Ask Executives to Commit to Staying at Yahoo

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