SiliconBeat

Speaking at Stanford University on Sunday night, Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz said it has been a “distinct pleasure” to have Carl Icahn, a famous corporate raider turned shareholder activist, on her board.
Last year, Icahn led a proxy fight to oust former Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang and replace other members of the board of directors after Yahoo rejected a $47.5 billion bid from Microsoft. Icahn later dropped his challenge in return for being given control of three seats on the 11-member board.
Speaking at the 15th annual Stanford Directors College Bartz, who replaced Yang in January, said she was “fortunate” not to have been at Yahoo during the proxy battle but added that it is “better” to have Icahn around and described him as a “smart guy.”
Bartz, who won respect for turning around a hostile board of directors while she was chief executive of Autodesk, said corporate boards need to have more members who are involved and willing to speak up. She also said boards need a diversity of ages and should be selected from different industries and positions — not just chief executive officers.

Could it be that Yahoo is finding it harder to hire a new chief financial officer than it expected. Its current CFO, Blake Jorgensen (pictured) is still leaving, as the company announced Feb. 26 when he became one of the first casualties of the house cleaning done by the Internet company’s new chief executive Carol Bartz. Read the rest of this entry »

Carol Bartz (pictured), the recently named chief executive of Yahoo, resigned from Intel’s board after serving on it for 14 months. She has been a long-standing member of the boards of two other Silicon Valley heavyweights: Cisco Systems, where she mostly recently chair of its  acquisitions and investment/finance committees, and NetApp, where she is set to step down at the company’s annual meeting next month.

Her resignation may take a bit of potential chill off of Read the rest of this entry »

At least four professors at the Wharton School of Business contributed to an article about the challenges faced by Yahoo’s new chief executive titled: “Carol Bartz’s Challenge at Yahoo: Choose a Path, Build a Team and Do It Fast”.

Don’t worry about a lot of deep academic analysis. Here’s a sample of what Wharton management professor Lawrence Hrebiniak had to say: Read the rest of this entry »