Dive summary:
- Last week, Marissa Mayer was chosen as CEO of Yahoo, and already she is inspiring optimism. In fact, one employee created a "Hope" poster in the spirit of Barak Obama's from the 2008 election.
- Steven Levy from Wired wrote a piece on Marissa Mayer's "secret weapon" -- her relationships with some of tech's best and brightest due to a leadership program within Google called "Associate Product Manager". Mayer invented the program and has been the head of it until her departure last week.
- APM is extremely sought after, and is an "incubation system for tech rock stars". Mayer has had over 300 of these rock stars as APM's and always made time to help mentor those in the program.
- Many see talent acquisition as Mayer's key challenge, and these deep relationships may help her lure people away, or recruit via their networks.
From the article:
Everyone agrees that one of Marissa Mayer’s most urgent tasks at Yahoo will be hiring great managers and product people. Yahoo’s talent pool has been reduced to puddles, as the best techies have gone elsewhere and promising newcomers have come down with colorblindness when it comes to purple. Some people wonder whether even Mayer can lure back the brains.
It turns out, though, that the new CEO has a unique advantage in fulfilling this quest. For the past decade, she has been the doyen of a collection of some of the most talented young engineers and product managers in all of technology.
