玛丽莎•梅耶尔如何驯服雅虎（节选）

    8月末一个周五的早晨，出任雅虎（Yahoo）CEO已有六周的玛丽莎•梅耶尔正在主持一场头脑风暴会议，讨论如何让公司重新富有创造力。谈到如何激励员工、打破企业内部僵局时，梅耶尔变得特别神采奕奕，帕特里夏•摩尔•克里斯回忆道。几位前谷歌（Google）同僚追随梅耶尔一起加入了雅虎这家举步维艰的网络巨头，克里斯是其中之一。“我们要谈的是精简流程、减少官僚习气和排除困境，”梅耶尔面带会心的微笑告诉克里斯。这时，这位喜欢用缩略语的CEO想出了一项全公司范围内的新计划命名。“流程、官僚习气和困境，”她说。“就叫它PB&J吧!”

    那天下午，梅耶尔主持了一场FYI会议。她7月份离开谷歌、加盟雅虎后不久，就开始在每周五召开这个全体员工会议。梅耶尔当然知道，PB&J肯定会让人们想到花生酱宣言（Peanut Butter Manifesto），这是2006年时雅虎一位经理针对雅虎摊子铺得太大提出的批评。梅耶尔这样解释她的PB&J——一些小小的改变就能提高工作的效率，同时要求员工提出更多的建议，寻求改变：员工们可以登陆公司内部网站，对其他人的提议进行投票。网站按受欢迎程度对这些提议进行排名；管理层将实施其中最佳的提议。PB&J很有谷歌特色，也是梅耶尔的行事典范——基于数据、民主而且有趣。当天傍晚，在写给12,500名雅虎员工的一封电子邮件中，梅耶尔宣布，她的计划是将雅虎打造为“绝对最佳的工作场所”。

    这是一个相当雄心勃勃的目标，对于她尤其如此。这是她首次担任CEO，进入的公司销售平平、员工人数持续缩减，高层走马灯似地更换：雅虎五年内已经送走了4任CEO。尽管拥有多达7亿消费者的庞大用户群，已成立18年的雅虎公司在搜索、社交和移动等需要与谷歌、Facebook齐头并进的领域中根本连一个必备产品都还没有打造出来。这家公司一度拥有1,250亿美元的市值（诚然，这是它在互联网泡沫时期创下的峰值），如今仅价值约200亿美元，而且这只股票的股价在过去的4年内几乎毫无起色。投资者以及雇员凭什么相信雅虎最终找到了一位能够修复企业文化、吸引人才、提升创新力的CEO？“我真的希望她好好的，”去年被董事会解雇的前CEO卡罗尔•巴茨表示。“改变文化不是短距离冲刺，”她补充说。“这是一场马拉松。要影响文化很难很难。”

    根据常理，同时还有雅虎长时间的困境来判断，可能所有人都觉得下一任CEO也将失败。但梅耶尔不一样——的的确确不一样。显然，她很年轻。年仅37岁的她已经是财富500强公司中最年轻的CEO了（不论男女），此项殊荣让她摘得《财富》杂志40位40岁以下商界精英榜单探花。她出人意料地获聘掌管雅虎。在雅虎任命她担任CEO后仅仅几小时，她又透露自己已经怀孕，让企业界大感到意外。(《财富》杂志曾获得这条独家新闻。)梅耶尔在9月30日产下一名男婴，打算几周后重返工作。

    On a Friday morning in late August, six weeks into her new job as CEO of Yahoo (YHOO), Marissa Mayer was brainstorming about how to make the company innovative again. She became particularly animated when she talked about empowering employees and ending corporate gridlock, recalls Patricia Moll Kriese, one of several former Google colleagues who followed Mayer to the struggling web giant. "We're talking about streamlining process, reducing bureaucracy and removing jams," Mayer told Kriese with a sly smile. At that moment the acronym-loving CEO stumbled upon the name for a new companywide initiative. "Process, bureaucracy, jams," she said. "We'll call it PB&J!"

    That afternoon Mayer hosted one of her FYI meetings, the Friday town halls that she started holding for employees soon after she arrived from Google(GOOG) in July. It wasn't lost on Mayer that PB&J was sure to remind people of the Peanut Butter Manifesto, a 2006 rant by a Yahoo manager about how the company had spread itself too thin. Mayer explained her PB&J -- a bunch of small changes to make work more productive -- and urged employees to suggest more changes: Employees log in to an internal website and vote on one another's ideas. The site ranks the ideas by popularity; management implements the best ones. PB&J is Google-like and quintessentially Mayer -- data driven, democratic, and fun. That evening, in an e-mail to 12,500 Yahoo employees, Mayer declared her plan to make Yahoo "the absolute best place to work."

    That's a pretty ambitious goal for a first-time CEO walking into a company with flat sales, an ever-shrinking workforce, and a revolving door at the top: Yahoo has had four CEOs in five years. Though it has a vast user base of 700 million consumers, 18-year-old Yahoo has utterly failedto produce the must-use products in search, social, and mobile that it needs to keep pace with Google and Facebook (FB). The company that once boasted a market value of $125 billion (to be sure, it peaked during the dotcom bubble) is now valued at about $20 billion, and the stock has scarcely budged in the past four years. Why should investors -- or employees, for that matter -- believe that finally Yahoo has a boss who can fix the culture and attract the talent to upgrade innovation? "I really wish her well," says former CEO Carol Bartz, whom the board fired last year. "Changing culture is not a sprint," she adds. "It's a marathon. It's very, very hard to affect culture."

    Logic and Yahoo's longtime troubles could lead anyone to believe that yet another CEO will fail. But Mayer is different -- really different. Obviously there's her youth. At 37, she is the youngest CEO -- male or female -- of a Fortune 500 company, a distinction that lands her at No. 3 onFortune's annual 40 Under 40 ranking. She was an unexpected pick to run Yahoo, then surprised the business world when she revealed, a few hours after Yahoo named her CEO, that she was pregnant. (Fortune got the scoop.) Mayer delivered a baby boy on Sept. 30, fully intending to return to work in a couple of weeks.