The Marissa Mayer Debacle
There's been so much outrage recently about Marissa Mayer and her decision to force Yahoo employees to work from home. I haven't heard anybody say that she made the right call. However, I think the decision really has to be viewed in the context of the company and its competitors.
I'm in the technology business too, and you don't need to be tech-savvy to realize that it's a super fast-changing landscape. No taking it slow here, companies have to out-innovate each other or be forever relegated to the sidelines. Yahoo's main competitor, Google, is constantly creating new products and has expanded its offering exponentially in the last few years, from Android to Google Maps.
In this landscape, you really need collaboration to innovate. This is not an opinion, it's a fact. Every company that has made leaps in innovation has relied on intense collaboration. Apple instantly comes to mind - Steve Jobs used to roam the halls of Apple just to get a chance to talk to somebody and come up with a new idea.
The second aspect is that it's very hard to collaborate when you're working remotely. Skype just doesn't replace walking by somebody's cube and hashing out an idea on a whiteboard. Remote offices face this problem all the time, and no amount of video conferencing is a viable replacement.
Therefore, if Yahoo really wants to be considered a serious competitor to Google, it needs to be on its game 100%. It needs to innovate, and for innovation, you need collaboration, and for collaboration, people have to be in the same place at the same time. That's the only way the sum of their efforts will far exceed their individual efforts. You can't be super-comfortable and super-creative at the same time.
So, to cut to the chase, I think Marissa Mayer made exactly the right call. And I also think that people who don't see this don't really understand how cut-throat the tech world is.
I'm in the technology business too, and you don't need to be tech-savvy to realize that it's a super fast-changing landscape. No taking it slow here, companies have to out-innovate each other or be forever relegated to the sidelines. Yahoo's main competitor, Google, is constantly creating new products and has expanded its offering exponentially in the last few years, from Android to Google Maps.
In this landscape, you really need collaboration to innovate. This is not an opinion, it's a fact. Every company that has made leaps in innovation has relied on intense collaboration. Apple instantly comes to mind - Steve Jobs used to roam the halls of Apple just to get a chance to talk to somebody and come up with a new idea.
The second aspect is that it's very hard to collaborate when you're working remotely. Skype just doesn't replace walking by somebody's cube and hashing out an idea on a whiteboard. Remote offices face this problem all the time, and no amount of video conferencing is a viable replacement.
Therefore, if Yahoo really wants to be considered a serious competitor to Google, it needs to be on its game 100%. It needs to innovate, and for innovation, you need collaboration, and for collaboration, people have to be in the same place at the same time. That's the only way the sum of their efforts will far exceed their individual efforts. You can't be super-comfortable and super-creative at the same time.
So, to cut to the chase, I think Marissa Mayer made exactly the right call. And I also think that people who don't see this don't really understand how cut-throat the tech world is.
posted by Hasnain at 11:57 AM
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