BUS 119 Week 2 Assignment

Marissa Mayar

Week 2 Assignment

BUS 119 Principles of Personal & Organizational Leadership

Who is Marissa Mayar

The Leader that I have selected to write about is Marissa Mayar. Marissa first attended school at Stanford University in 1993. Her desired profession at the time was to be a pediatric neurosurgeon. She was initially enrolled in premed classes. But where she really excelled was in computer programming. She took her first computer science class at the end of her freshmen year and got an A in the course. She eventually changed her major and ended getting a bachelor’s degree in symbolic systems and a master’s degree in computer science.

In 1999 she joined Google as employee number 20. She quickly advanced in her career at google being promotes to production manager and later director of consumer web products. In 2005 she became vice president of search product and user experience until the end of 2010. She then headed up the Local, Maps, and Location Services. In July of 2012, Marissa was appoint CEO of Yahoo. She held the position of CEO for 5 years when she announced her resignation in June of 2017.

Characteristics of Leadership

Marissa Mayar had many great leadership traits. Some traits that really stand out are here passion, communication, and her ability to motivate people. Marissa has passion for what she did. She worked day in and day out 13 to 14 hours per day. Often times responding to email at midnight. On average she would only sleep about 4 hours before getting up to start her day again. A person cannot have that kind of energy everyday without having the passion that the product and brand can possible change the world.

Marissa was also known for her great communications skills. She speaks as a person with authority as someone who came up as an engineer but has the ability to connect with everyone. She has so much experience behind her, and yet she been able to twist it in a way that connects with other people, and that’s what so many people in tech are not able to do. They are not able to make that transition and really connect with a variety of different audiences like she can (Gallo, 2012).

Her ability to motivate people. Mayer felt that her staff was worth more than just a paycheck. She took pride in her staff and it showed. One example of this was while at Google she wanted to make sure everyone was heard and everyone had a voice. She set aside time at 4pm every day, for about 90 minutes where employees had the chance the speak with her one on one on a first come first come basis to discuss ideas and give feedback on projects.

References

Gallo, Carmine (2012) “Google’s Marissa Mayer: 3 Leadership Traits She’ll Bring to Yahoo.” Forbes. 17 July 2012. Web. 24 Oct. 2014. .