Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

Faced by the Google behemoth and by a growing identity crisis, Yahoo was foundering - and then they hired Marissa Mayer. "Yahoo's celebrity, superhero, savior CEO had arrived." Drawing from interviews with over a hundred sources, journalist Carlson tells the story of a woman "fascinating for her contradictions," who started her tenure at the company with a bang%E2%80%94only to be taken to task by her employees en masse at a company-wide meeting in November 2013. She had inherited a mess from former CEO Carol Bartz, which she handled deftly and to widespread applause - particularly for her decision to reverse a mass layoff. So how did her team lose so much faith? Beginning with Mayer's introverted, focused, highly ambitious nature and the start of her career as a Google intern in 1999, Carlson draws a compelling picture of an ambitious engineer uncomfortable in the spotlight, but determined to excel. The narrative has the pace and pop of an expos%C3%A9, and readers will find themselves both rooting for and against this complicated leader, whose confident, self-promoting behavior, Carlson points out, is not considered unusual for an executive%E2%80%94assuming that said executive is a man. Exciting and informative, and necessary reading for Silicon Valley junkies. (Jan.)