Carol Bartz Is Paid $47 Million By Yahoo, But Does Not Know What Yahoo Is!

Carol Bartz You're Fucked!

From New York Times:

No Expletives, Please

Carol Bartz’s foul language may play well in the purple bleacher seats at Yahoo, the demoralized Internet business she runs. But investors should be wary of executives spouting obscenities at critics — even the pesky blogger whom Ms. Bartz cursed out on Monday. As Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling can attest, there’s a fine line between robust discourse and shooting the messenger.

Salty language can sometimes be a mark of earthy candor or pugnacious leadership. And frequently such responses are provoked. That was perhaps the case with Ms. Bartz, who responded to a provocation from the Techcrunch founder, and Silicon Valley gadfly, Michael Arrington with an expletive. Still, that’s odd behavior to exhibit at a voluntary event sponsored by Techcrunch.

There are two problems with Ms. Bartz’s response. First, any savvy Internet executive must surely know how an unbuttoned-down response is prone to spread like wildfire on the Web. Indeed, having just announced a big tie-up with Nokia on the same morning as her intemperate retort, Ms. Bartz should have expected someone in the audience would have a cellphone set to video.

But quite apart from the fear of getting caught is the more vexing question of Yahoo’s poor performance, which absolutely lends itself to saucy questions from shareholders and their quasi-journalistic proxies. Investors have little to show for the $47 million pay package that Yahoo dangled to bring Ms. Bartz in from the obscurity of her previous employer, Autodesk.

Just do the stock market math. Since she was named to Yahoo’s top job in January 2009, Yahoo shares have rallied around 16 percent. Google has risen just over 50 percent. Even the Nasdaq has outpaced Yahoo by more than two and a half times.

If Yahoo weren’t such a dog, Ms. Bartz’s response might be defensible. In light of the firm’s laggardly performance, however, it smacks of the same kind of desperation that led Mr. Skilling to dress down a hedge fund executive with a vulgarity in April 2001 for questioning the soon-to-go-bust firm’s financials on a conference call.

Shooting the messenger is never a sign of strength. More often it is a sign of an executive trying to change the subject.