Another Fortune Most Powerful Woman — a longtime member of our annual Power 50 list — is leaving the corporate world. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, who was Genentech’s (DNA) president of product development, is heading to the University of California San Francisco as chancellor.

Desmond-Hellmann’s departure from business’s upper echelons (She ranked No. 13 on Fortune’s 2008 Power 50 list) adds to the trend of top women execs leaving corporations and deciding not to jump back in. Among the departed: former Procter & Gamble (PG) president Susan Arnold, former Pepsi-Cola North America (PEP) CEO Dawn Hudson, former Yahoo (YHOO) president Sue Decker, and the trio who once were the most renowned women on Wall Street: Sallie Krawcheck of Citigroup (C), Zoe Cruz of Morgan Stanley (MS), and Erin Callan of Lehman Brothers, whose recent leave from her new employer, Credit Suisse Group, is looking like it may be permanent.

All these onetime stars are on the sidelines except Hudson, who recently joined Parthenon Group, a Boston-based strategic advisory, as vice chairman — a three-day-a-week commitment to rachet down her stress level, Hudson says.

This decision by Desmond-Hellmann, 51, isn’t so surprising given Genentech’s fate: in March, Swiss drug giant Roche won a year-long battle to acquire the 44% of the biotech company that it didn’t already own for a whopping $46.8 billion. Chief executive Art Levinson, a Desmond-Hellmann fan who promoted her from clinical scientist to chief medical officer to EVP to president, lost the CEO title and remains chairman. Questions abound regarding whether Roche will be able to retain Genentech’s entrepreneurial culture. That culture has helped Genentech become not only the best company in biotech but also one of Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For.

A onetime practicing oncologist who never imagined she’d climb the corporate ladder, Desmond-Hellmann is returning to her roots. She started her career at UCSF and, she says, “my heart has never left it.” She can’t talk at length about her move until the California Board of Regents approves her appointment. Stay tuned to Postcards next week to hear more from Desmond-Hellmann.

Meantime, have a great weekend!

Another week of big power shifts. Steve Jobs is the biggest, of course. Hope he recovers and makes it back to Apple (AAPL) in June. As Andy Serwer, Fortune’s managing editor and my boss, says, Steve Jobs is the Thomas Edison of our times. He transformed four industries: computers, music, telecom and film. Will any innovator in our lifetimes do better than that?

Jobs also gave the best commencement speech I know of. At Stanford in 2005. You’ve probably read it or watched it on YouTube. But in case you haven’t, here it is. I talk about this commencement speech in my own talks that I give to students about managing careers and finding your calling in life. Jobs’ inspiring address happens to be one of the rare times he has talked about his illness – one of “three stories from my life,” as he calls it.

The other big news in Silicon Valley: Yahoo (YHOO) named former Autodesk (ADSK) CEO Carol Bartz as its new chief. Click here to read what I wrote on Tuesday about this tough, tell-it-like-it-is boss. My take on Sue Decker, Yahoo’s president who wanted the top job and has decided to leave, stirred up a debate with my colleague Adam Lashinsky. Adam thinks that three outside corporate boards is too many for any top-tier exec – especially for one at a company as troubled as Yahoo.

For what it’s worth, I just learned that Decker said at the last Yahoo shareholders meeting that she has a “pre-nuptial agreement” with the three companies whose boards she’s on: Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), Intel (INTC) and Costco (COST). The agreement is that she won’t be required to serve on their audit committees. That’s key because audit committees typically demand at least twice as much time as other committees do. Given Decker’s finance background (she was CFO of Yahoo before she became president), I bet those boards will call on her soon to step up to the audit job. If they haven’t already.

You likely won’t see Decker land a new job soon. I hear that she’s planning to take it easy for at least a few months. To get her head together and catch up on life. Couldn’t we all use time to do that?

Enjoy your weekend!

How many public-company boards should a top exec at a Fortune 500 company join?

That’s debatable, particularly in these tumultuous times. But I hardly expected a harsh retort from my colleague Adam Lashinsky after I touched on this topic in Postcards yesterday. I said that Sue Decker, Yahoo’s (YHOO) outgoing president,  has a “breadth of experience” and an “impressive resume” because she’s on the boards of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), Intel (INTC) and Costco (COST). Adam took issue on his blog, Go West: “How the hell did someone in a grueling and overwhelming job and who happens to have a punishing commute to work maintain memberships on the boards of three such significant companies? Here’s another question: Why did the board tolerate Decker’s willingness to be even the slightest bit distracted for so long?”

Whoa, Adam! Three outside boards, I admit, may be pushing it, even for workaholic execs like Decker. But there’s no evidence that her extracurricular activities in the governance sphere constrained her performance as Yahoo’s president. She didn’t get the CEO job, which she very much wanted, largely because she was too loyal to CEO Jerry Yang and lacked the general management experience that distinguishes Carol Bartz, whom the board picked.

How do you think Bartz collected the experience she needs to be Yahoo’s CEO? She was chief of Autodesk (ADSK) for 14 years, until 2006, and did a great job there. As Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker points out, she increased the software company’s revenues from $285 million to $1.5 billion and its stock-market value from $827 million to $9.7 billion. But Bartz’s chops also came from serving on the boards of Intel, Cisco (CSCO), data-storage company NetApp, and BEA Systems before it was acquired by Oracle last year. If she hadn’t served on three major boards while also serving as CEO of Autodesk (proving her multi-tasking abilities!), she wouldn’t be Yahoo’s CEO today, I bet.

And she would argue that too. Here’s what Bartz told the Wall Street Journal in 2006: “Some companies don’t want their executives to serve on boards – because of time reasons, liability reasons, all kinds of reasons…If your company says it prefers you not to be on a board, you need to fight that rule. Because women can’t reach into the top executive management levels if they aren’t allowed on boards.”

As I said yesterday, Bartz is always candid. She went on: “Men are still in control and they hire men. The people running boards, which hire the CEOs, are men. At the end of the day, that still is the disease. So we just have to get in there and keep pushing.”

Now that she’s got the top job at Yahoo, she’s backing down a bit. I hear from a good source that Bartz is likely to leave the boards of NetApp and Intel, though not immediately. She’ll probably remain on the board of Cisco, where she’s the lead independent director. Given that a typical corporate director’s time commitment is around 200 hours annually, one outside board makes sense for Bartz, don’t you think? After all, turning around Yahoo is no ordinary CEO challenge.

I predicted last year that Yahoo would get bought by Microsoft in 2009 which I think is still going to happen.  Yahoo is such a great franchise but whose leadership well. . strange. . Jerry Yang’s public persona was questionable. . I mean he just seemed to say things that made him seem “out of touch.”

I said it before. .  him and the board in retrospect were absolutely insane for not taking the Microsoft offer at 33 a share. .

Carol Bartz is going to be named CEO of Yahoo. . nice safe pick . . and exactly what Yahoo does not need.  Here are some of my comments http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=466&doc_id=170366&.

The funny thing is Yahoo is still an extremely valuable franchise. In my opinion the search results at Yahoo are as good at this point to Google’s; and Microsoft probably needs Yahoo more then Yahoo needs Microsoft.  Microsoft’s search efforts have been futile. (What is Microsoft doing with all the money they spend on their search efforts?)

Here is my dream scenario. . Apple buys Yahoo. . I would love to see this. . .doubtful yes. . but I can dream can’t I. .

Sue Decker is leaving Yahoo (YHOO). The news broke Tuesday afternoon just as Yahoo announced that its board has chosen former Autodesk (ADSK) chief Carol Bartz as the company’s new CEO. As Yahoo’s president, Decker was the lone Yahoo insider who was a strong candidate in the CEO search. And she wanted the job. But Yahoo’s poor performance and her loyalty to outgoing chief Jerry Yang damaged her reputation too badly.

That doesn’t mean that Decker, 46, won’t land a good gig elsewhere. She has unusual breadth of experience given her seats on the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), Costco (COST) and Intel (INTC) boards. (She’s on the Intel board with Bartz.) Decker was also a director at Pixar until Disney’s (DIS) 2006 acquisition of Steve Jobs’ film company. That impressive resume, in fact, landed Decker a spot on the 2008 Fortune Most Powerful Women list, though Yahoo’s foibles pulled her ranking to No. 39 from No. 20 in 2007.

Once a Wall Street analyst who covered advertising stocks, she’s a finance ace and could get a job as a CFO at another Fortune 500 company. But she’s already done the CFO job at Yahoo. I know from talking with Decker that she prefers running a business, and probably a big one. No question she’ll tap one of her fans, Warren Buffett, to help her get her career back on track. Especially in this job market, that’s a fine fan to have.

P.S. Click here to read the post I wrote about Decker last November.

Yahoo named Carol Bartz its new chief. With an appointment of Bartz, the former CEO and current executive chairman of Autodesk (ADSK), the Yahoo (YHOO) board is signaling that experience in general management and tech trumps a media and advertising background. Just as important, this is a bet on a boss known for guts and decisiveness – the latter a critical trait that Jerry Yang, the boss she is replacing, has lacked.

I’ve never written a major story about Bartz, but I’ve tracked her career for more than a decade in the course of overseeing Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list. And I’ve spent enough time with her at Fortune conferences to know that she’s one of the most blunt and candid bosses around. At one Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, Bartz spoke fiercely about earnings guidance. The Summit is off the record, but I can tell you that she’s adamant that if you’re a CEO who doesn’t provide guidance, analysts will jump to insane estimates that you can’t live with. Bartz disagrees with my colleague Carol Loomis, who contends that analysts jumping to insane estimates will cure itself if you just let them stew in their own juice.

Bartz is no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is, and fearless. No wonder, given her background. She was born in Winona, Minnesota, lost her mother when she was eight years old, and was raised by a grandmother who also protected Carol from her abusive father. She worked her way through the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a BA in computer science. Then, moving from 3M to Digital Equipment to Sun Microsystems (JAVA), she landed at Autodesk, where at 43, she became CEO and was diagnosed with breast cancer. The same week. She worked through months of chemotherapy.

So you see, Bartz is not easily intimidated. I recall riding a bus in Aspen with her a few years ago, at a Fortune Brainstorm conference, and chatting with her about extroversion and introversion. Though she comes across so confident, she admitted, she’s a closet introvert. (I am too.) “Learn to be an actor,” Bartz told the Wall Street Journal in 2006. “You have to learn to be confident when you are not. You have to learn to be calm when you are not and brave when you are not. Learn to be a cobra and act until you really have that confidence.”

No doubt, Bartz will take her own advice to heart at Yahoo, which has three times Autodesk’s revenues and plenty of problems in terms of product, people, and strategy. Not to mention a stock price that has dropped 50% over the past 12 months. Given Bartz’s age, 60, and her connections across Silicon Valley – she’s on the Intel (INTC) and Cisco (CSCO) boards – Yahoo watchers are sure to speculate that she’s been hired to dress the company for a sale.

With Jerry Yang demoted at Yahoo (YHOO), who might be the struggling Internet giant’s next CEO?

Former COO Dan Rosensweig and ex-AOL chief Jon Miller are known to be on the candidate list held by Heidrick & Struggles’ uber-recruiters John Thompson and Gerry Roche. Also: Tim Armstrong, who oversees Google’s (GOOG) North American and Latin American sales and operations, and Todd Bradley, EVP of Hewlett-Packard’s (HWP) $28 billion Personal Systems Group. As for rumors that Meg Whitman could go to Yahoo, not a chance. EBay (EBAY) would be her last CEO job, she has long insisted. And since she left eBay last March, she has plowed into politics, co-chairing John McCain’s Presidential campaign. She’s now likely to run for governor of California.

As its talent has drained steadily, Yahoo has one lone insider who is a CEO contender: Sue Decker. The DLJ securities analyst-turned-CFO-turned-president of Yahoo pops up often at confabs, but she so protects her personal image that she hasn’t spoken for a profile in any publication in years. I spent a bit of time with her at Yahoo in September, when she was admittedly reeling from the stresses on her company: the attempted takeover by Microsoft (MSFT), the pending partnership with rival Google (subsequently canned) and the everyday battle to prove Yahoo’s value to employees as well as investors. “An individual’s tolerance for pain goes up over time,” Decker said, quite seriously.

Decker, who turned 46 on Monday, grew up in Denver. She was an avid skier who eventually made ski patrol. There on the slopes and at home with her dad, she said, she learned to “push through your fear threshold. He told me, ‘If it’s that hard, that’s exactly why you need to do it.’ ” The past year has been more than hard. Had she known what she’d be up against, “I would have said, ‘I can’t imagine leading through that. Yet you get up everyday. There are 50 things that you can focus on. You realize that one or two are really critical. You have to keep that clarity.”

While Yang has dealt with the board, the press and investors, Decker has hunkered down to fix Yahoo’s operations. It’s been a slog. Obviously, her record is stained by Yahoo’s ongoing poor performance and by reorganizations she has led that are ineffective so far. And to her detriment, many people say, she’s been loyal to Yang. Yahoo’s co-founder is vilified by some for rejecting Microsoft’s buyout offer of $33 a share. Yahoo is now trading around $11.

Beyond determination and durability, though, Decker has a few things going for her. She is smart, analytical, and very engaging when she lowers her guard. And she has a big fan in Warren Buffett, who last year added her to his Berkshire-Hathaway (BRK.B) board. She’s also a director of Costco (COST) and Intel (INTC) — and Pixar as well until Disney’s (DIS) acquisition of Steve Jobs’ film company. That stellar resume allowed her to make this year’s Fortune Most Powerful Women list, though her ranking fell from No. 20 to No. 39. Of course, the next CEO of Yahoo will need much more: a stellar management record too.

Photo: Maryanne Russell Photography

Did you hear where Joanne Bradford, Yahoo’s new SVP of U.S. Revenue and Market Development, met Yahoo (YHOO) president Sue Decker for the first time? Kara Swisher says on her blog, All Things Digital, that it was “at a poker table several years ago while attending a women’s executive conference run by Fortune magazine.”

Hmm, I didn’t know that. And I chair that Fortune confab. It’s officially called the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. And yes, in 2006, when we held the event in Lake Las Vegas, the female leaders of the free world fiercely faced off over poker after dinner on our second night. Bradford won at her table. A hopeful sign for Yahoo, perhaps?

Decker and Bradford, who arrives at Yahoo via Microsoft (MSFT) and Spot Runner, will be back with us (and most of the other star women of Silicon Valley, in fact) at the MPWomen Summit October 1. Kara, thanks for the plug!

Quelle: golem.de

27.06.2008

Nobody currently employed by Yahoo has the answer to Yahoo’s problems. Sue Decker just announced a reorganisation of the few remaining executives she has but with people like Qi Lu and Joshua Schachter gone it boils down to rearranging (rickety) deckchairs on the Titanic. I doubt if they can actually agree what Yahoo’s problems even are, let alone solve them. Brad Garlinghouse came closest with his peanut butter manifesto, but he left too. That document boiled down to the observation that Yahoo is unfocused and bureaucratic.

The result was that in the good times Yahoo went on a totally random spending spree with no idea how all the acquisitions fitted together. As I have said before this approach has meant they lucked out and got hold of delicious and Schachter for an absolute bargain $30m. Unfortunately they then proceeded to do nothing with the only tool which could make any meaningful impact on search with the result that the man who created it subsequently left the company.

Sculley’s ghost

When they hit trouble their first instinct was to kick out Terry Semel and reinstall Jerry Yang as CEO. Presumably the idea was some kind of John Sculley/Steve Jobs mojo but the plan had one minor flaw: Yang is not Jobs. To a large extent companies reflect their leaders’ personality. So Microsoft likes to overcomplicate and have fifty different versions of everything, Apple is ultra secretive and design focused and Yahoo can’t make a decision on anything. After a year of fudging all Jerry’s fudge has caught up with him and it looks like the fudgathon is likely to end with a much deserved boot up his backside.

There is no doubt that Yahoo has a lot of good properties which make decent money. They have almost nothing to do with each other so why not spin them all out as separate companies and set them free from Yahoo’s bureaucracy? Then at least they would be smaller and freer to innovate. It may not be the whole answer but with Yahoo going down they need some radical action not endless reorganisations.

Read more:
On Yahoo
On Microhoo
On Microsoft’s biggest mistake
On Joshua Schachter

Pic: Forbes

Please can you explain why you are increasing my Domain price from $9.95 to $34.95.

I have been faithful to you for the last 10 years.

Please tell me this is a mistake.

Silicon Alley Insider reports Yahoo has created a list of 1500 – 2500 employees to be eliminated within 2 weeks.

The “list” is reportedly the product of a Q4 project in which all group heads were asked to look at redundancies and create their own lists of potential cuts. All the group-level lists have now been turned in to corporate.

The decision to go ahead with lay-off is said to be largely dependent on stock price: Yahoo’s stock trading in the low $20s has gotten Jerry’s and president Sue Decker’s attention. Jerry will feel vulnerable if the stock goes into the teens and will try whatever he can to prop it up. He’s not ready to give up the CEO job, sell-out, or shop the company around at this point.

There’s a great post by Kara Swisher at WSJ/All Things D with the complete email sent out to Yahoo!’s today. the best part is the header of the email, “Update on President Organization — CONFIDENTIAL and PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD.”

And so it goes. If you don’t want something to be posted all over the place, don’t send it out on email (especially if your company is the one that everyone used to use to go around corporate email programs).

Want to read the whole thing, here it is.

“I would like to tell you about a number of organizational changes that will help us achieve our goals to better serve our customers, accelerate the speed of making fast, smart decisions, and create cleaner lines of accountability across key leaders.”

Yahoo president Sue Decker, on booting a rival executive to make way for an ally in a corporate reorganization, in an internal memo published by AllThingsD.com, 29 August 2007