Fortune had a profile story on yahoo ceo, carol bartz.
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Fortune Magazine) — Carol Bartz wasn’t interested when Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang first approached her about rescuing the company he’d created at Stanford University 15 years ago. As she drove to his home in Los Altos Hills one day last December, she was prepared to be polite and maybe offer some advice. Bartz, who had retired in 2006 from design-software maker Autodesk, didn’t need a new gig, and she certainly wasn’t looking to play savior to a company she figured needed a CEO with media-industry chops - not her specialty.
Out of respect for Yang, though, she found herself in his living room, asking him to draw her an organizational chart. “It was like a Catholic school kid diagramming a sentence,” she later told business partners. Lines crisscrossed everywhere, with no clear system of accountability. By the time he finished, the hooks were in. “I got it,” she told Yang. “What you need is a manager.”
That’s exactly what Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) got when it hired Bartz, 60, as CEO in January. She is likable yet hard-charging, given to salty language, and always brutally candid. (In March she told a questioner at a Morgan Stanley conference that she uses Google’s online maps because they’re better than Yahoo’s.) Bartz is also a known quantity in Silicon Valley circles: a seasoned executive who understands technology, is skeptical of the kinds of juvenile-sounding job titles that proliferate at Yahoo (Yang remains Chief Yahoo, for example), and thrives under pressure.
It will be interesting to see if she can turnaround yahoo considering she has no internet business experience.