梅耶尔解决雅虎1000个难题的秘诀

    15个月前，当玛丽莎•梅耶尔空降雅虎(Yahoo)走马上任CEO时，有些员工告诉她，“你有1,000个问题要解决。”

    “听到人们这么说，压力真的很大。你打算怎么解决1,000个问题呢？”上周四她在《财富》全球最具影响力女性峰会的舞台上这样表示。

    梅耶尔能成功解决1,000个问题，得益于她从过去的老板、谷歌(Google)的埃里克•施密特得到的建议。“埃里克说，优秀的管理人士也会常常混淆一点，深信自己的职责是做事。你的工作是防卫（而非）攻击。清理道路。排除障碍”——然后让员工们“尽可能快地”向前跑。

    自称科技迷的梅耶尔还将施密特的建议转化成了她自己的科学领导力理论。她在最具影响力女性峰会上告诉包括沃伦•巴菲特、施乐(Xerox)首席执行长乌尔苏拉•伯恩斯在内的听众，她将文化视为DNA。“我对遗传学了解不多，但我知道一点，”梅耶尔说。“我们需要的是那些正表达基因或高表达基因。”

    为了激励雅虎全球12,000名雇员，梅耶尔表示，她尝试“剔除一些成为阻碍的负表达基因。这不是注入新的突变DNA，不是改变文化，文化还是原来那个文化，但去芜存菁，变成了最好。”

    为此，梅耶尔启动了PB&J计划，希望能去除繁杂的流程和官僚文牍主义，消除局部拥塞。作为PB&J的一部分，梅耶尔和她的新管理团队打造了一个在线工具，用于征集员工的投诉，以及就这些问题是否值得尝试解决进行投票。任何至少获得50票的投诉，比如，低电量的笔记本电脑或公司健身馆繁多的条例，都会引起管理层的关注，并由普通员工负责解决这个问题。雅虎会对员工的做法进行评估。

    上任一年多后，梅耶尔在此次峰会上表示，“我们解决了1000个问题，有大问题，也有小问题。”

    企业文化重塑显然正在让雅虎变成一个更有吸引力的工作场所。梅耶尔表示，上个季度，雅虎收到了17,000份求职者简历。大大高于上年同期的2,000份。（财富中文网）   

    When Marissa Mayer landed at Yahoo (YHOO) as its new CEO 15 months ago, some employees told her, "There are 1,000 things you need to fix."

    "It's really overwhelming when people come up and say that to you because, how are you going to fix 1,000 things?" she said on stage last Thursday at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit.

    What enabled Mayer to fix 1,000 things was a piece of advice she got from Eric Schmidt, her former boss at Google (GOOG). "Eric says that good executives confuse themselves when they convince themselves that they actually do things. It's your job to be defense [rather than] offense. Clear the path. Get obstacles out of the way"—and then let employees run "as far and fast as they can."

    A self-proclaimed geek, Mayer translated Schmidt's advice into her own science-based theory of leadership. She told the MPW audience—including Warren Buffett (BRKA) and Xerox (XRX) chief Ursula Burns—that she thinks of culture as DNA. "I don't know a lot about genetics, but I know a bit," Mayer said. "You want the genes that are positive to hyper-express themselves."

    To motivate Yahoo's 12,000 employees around the world, Mayer says she's tried to "take some of the negative genes that are getting in the way and shut them off. It's not about injecting new mutant DNA. It's not about changing the culture. It's about making the culture the best version of itself."

    Her tactic has been a program she launched called PB&J, which is designed to rid Yahoo of poisonous processes, useless bureaucracy and jams. As part of PB&J, Mayer and her new management team created an online tool to collect employee complaints and employee votes on whether the problems are worth trying to fix. Any complaint—such as underpowered laptops or onerous rules at the company gym—that generates at least 50 votes gets management attention--and the onus on the rank and file to fix the problem. Employees get evaluated on how they do that.

    One year in, Mayer reported at the Summit, "We fixed 1000 things, some big, some small."

    The cultural overhaul clearly is making Yahoo a more attractive place to work. Last quarter, Mayer says, the company received resumes from 17,000 job applicants. That's up from 2,000 last year.