Carol Bartz was the CEO of an international public company. But that didn't stop her from cursing a blue streak when she was fired last week. Here's why she should have kept her mouth shut.
I'm not really offended by profanity, and at first I thought it was funny that Bartz let F-bombs slip on her first earnings call as Yahoo's CEO. But it got old pretty fast. It seemed like she went out of her way to establish herself as foul-mouthed, and that's not really something executives should want to be known for. However, that is the primary thing people will remember about Bartz, and that's disappointing.
I'm in the Boomer crowd with Carol Bartz. At one time -- a long, long time ago -- women who acted like "one of the boys" were popular in some areas of the business world. It didn't last; That act really just brought women a kind of wry, skeptically amused attention; it didn't really encourage credibility or respect for women any more than it did for men.
Yes I don't think Bartz has done women any favors here. Of course, if she were some incredible executive who managed to turn Yahoo around and into a successful and amazing business, then I think we could care less about what words came out of her mouth. But that was not the case, hence her firing!
You're right. Much is forgiven execs who can lead and succeed. But anyone at the top of the heap draws lots of attention, positive and negative. If there's something to be pointed at or mocked, it'll take center stage pretty quickly. When things aren't going well, expect center stage to turn vaudeville.
For better or worse, executives have long been profane behind closed doors. It's badmouthing to the press that's the problem here, especially badmouthing your former colleagues.
Yes, cursing out one's former colleagues to the press is in really bad form. I don't think anyone can take Bartz seriously anymore. Who would want to work with her again after that?
Part of me feels like she ran her mouth as a distraction from the fact that she didn't have any real answers or ideas when it came to Yahoo. Perhaps she felt it was better to come off as abrasive as a cover-up.
There's a trend underway to make employee performance reviews everyone's business – letting peers, customers, and direct reports in on rating people's daily doings. Mary gives this a thumbs down.
Famous musicians claim the Internet's ruining their royalties. But given time, signs indicate that the Internet will make peace with the music industry.
When it comes to Internet-related research, the gap between the real world and academia is widening. Indeed, a few boffins may be up so high in their ivory towers that Earth is invisible. Sadly, some of this research is probably costing the US government – and US citizens – real money.
No one likes to be left out of the loop when it comes to the latest news about family and friends. But Facebook makes it possible for us to feel just that way when we encounter postings that make us feel disregarded or dismissed.
Over 20 percent of Verizon's workforce is on strike, thanks to the company's efforts to make up for reduced wireline revenues by reducing the value of wireline union jobs. Given Verizon's current profitability, it's time for management to find a better solution.
The founder of 4chan, Christopher Poole, has become a VC darling now that he's started his own beta site, Canvas – proving that the troll's path can lead to entrepreneurial success in these strange days.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
Cisco's rumored sale of Linksys suggests we may have problem with innovation and profit at the edge of our Internet, and that could be critical to the evolution of many Internet-delivered services.
Marissa Mayer at Yahoo has come out with her strategy on turning the company around: culture, company, calibration, and compensation. But Yahoo needs to have a technical approach to the mobile cloud opportunity, not a management theory lesson.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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