Carol A. Bartz

Former CEO of Yahoo!

• Born: August 28, 1948
• Place of Birth: Winona, Minnesota

Primary Company/Organization: Yahoo!

Introduction

Carol A. Bartz is an American business executive who served as chief executive officer (CEO) of Yahoo, an Internet corporation best known for its web portal and directory of websites, from 2009 to 2011, when she was fired amid a storm of media exchanges. She was among the nation's best paid CEOs, with a compensation package that totaled more than $75 million for her brief tenure at Yahoo! Earlier (1992–2006) she was the CEO of Autodesk, Inc., where she more than doubled the company's revenue and transformed it from a little-known creator of computer-aided design software into the world's leading supplier of design software used in buildings, automobiles, and movie animation.

Early Life

Carol Ann Bartz was born on August 28, 1948, in Winona, Minnesota. Her mother died when Bartz was eight and her younger brother Jim was two. For four years after her mother's death, she and her brother lived with their father, who worked at a feed mill for $40 per week and never hesitated to reinforce discipline with a belt. When Bartz was twelve, she and Jim went to live with their grandparents on their farm near Alma, Wisconsin. Bartz flourished under their love and support. Her grandmother was especially influential in teaching her to be a strong, independent woman, capable of completing whatever job needed to be done. Although Bartz showed an early aptitude for science and mathematics, she was far from the stereotypical nerdy girl. In high school, she was a majorette, a cheerleader, student body president, and homecoming queen; she was also the only girl in her physics and advanced algebra classes.

She still found time to work in the bank where her Sunday-school teacher was president, eventually earning seventy-five cents an hour as a teller. Her employers helped her get a scholarship to attend William Woods College in Fulton, Missouri, at that time an elite, private institution for women. Working in the cafeteria serving food to her wealthy classmates taught her humility, but it was her enrollment in a computer class at a neighboring all-male school that changed her life. There that she began to think that her love of mathematics could lead to careers other than teaching. She transferred to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to study computer science. Working as a cocktail waitress in a local supper club, she learned the importance of remembering details about her regular customers, a lesson that served her well later when she worked in marketing. After graduating with an honors degree in computer science, she sold automated banking services briefly and then worked for four years at the 3M Company, where she was the only woman in a sales division of three hundred men. She was employed in product-line and sales management by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) before she moved to Sun Microsystems in 1983.

Life's Work

Bartz started at Sun as a customer marketing manager, but within a year she became marketing vice president. She then served as vice president of customer service until mid-1990, when she was promoted to vice president of worldwide field operations. Bartz helped triple the division's sales. In 1992, her final year with Sun, the company's worldwide revenues increased from $2.6 billion to $3.6 billion.

Bartz's achievements at Sun made her a top candidate for the position vacated by the departure of Alvar J. Green, the president, chairman, and CEO of Autodesk, in 1992. Autodesk was a major player in the computer-assisted design (CAD) software industry, but growth was minimal and profits were falling when Bartz was named CEO. As if the challenge were not great enough, on her first day on the job she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a radical mastectomy and TRAM flap surgery to rebuild the breast with abdominal tissue, but she worked from her hospital bed and returned to work two weeks earlier than her doctors advised, full time, continuing on the job through seven months of chemotherapy.

Bartz soon proved not only that she was tough but also that she was skillful at balancing business acumen with a vision for the technology. Smart acquisitions and new product development protected the company's base while extending its reach. In 1996, the company created Kinetix, an animation division. By 2006, Autodesk was a different company from the one Bartz had taken on seven years earlier. In 1991, Autodesk had catered to a niche market by offering software that made it possible for engineers, architects, contractors, and others to produce powerful models on relatively inexpensive personal computers. In 2006, the company had diversified into broader markets, and its growth had earned it a place on Business Week's list of the fifty best-performing large companies. Revenue, which was about $275 million in 1991, exceeded $1.5 billion in 2006. Profits reached $315 million the same year, up from $47 million in 2003.

At the age of fifty-seven, Bartz took stock. The transformation of Autodesk had been successful. Her husband had retired, and the man she had been training as her replacement was being courted by other companies. On January 17, 2006, she announced that she would step down as CEO on May 1, remaining to chair the board. She spent the next few years relaxing in Hawaii, volunteering with charities, and serving on the boards of Autodesk, Cisco, Intel, and NetApp. However, the less stressful life had grown dull by 2008, and when Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang came calling, Bartz was willing to listen. She became chief executive of Yahoo! in January 2009.

From the beginning of her tenure at Yahoo, Bartz was under pressure to manage a turnaround far more complex than the situation she had faced at Autodesk. Even critics concede that she made some right moves. Under her leadership, Yahoo! hired dozens of editorial employees and bought Associated Content, a freelance news site, allowing the company to focus on the plan to make Yahoo! a hub for news, sports, finance, and entertainment. E-mail and instant messaging, popular Yahoo! products, were high priorities. The new CEO also cut costs, eliminating some services and outsourcing others that were not a good fit for the more focused Yahoo! The cost-cutting helped the company double its operating income to $748 million, exceeding a goal of $630 million set by the board and garnering Bartz a $2.2 million bonus in 2010.

Despite all these changes, Bartz was unable to increase Yahoo!'s advertising revenue significantly, even with an audience that was one of the largest on the web. The celebrated agreement with Microsoft in 2009 that outsourced Yahoo!'s search business to Microsoft failed to live up to its promise, and by 2012 the partnership was rumored to be on the verge of dissolution. The stock remained flat, Yahoo! missed revenue targets, and Bartz was attracting more press for her salty language than for delivering good news to shareholders. Pressure from major investors increased, and employees gave their leader a grim 33 percent approval rating. On September 6, 2011, after thirty months at the helm of Yahoo!, Bartz was fired. Company chairman Roy Bostock delivered the news to the CEO by telephone. She resigned from Yahoo!'s board of directors on September 9, 2011.

Media gleefully had reported Bartz's early memo to her new Yahoo! team to fire any employee who leaked company secrets (the language she used was much more emphatic and colorful). Now, news outlets just as eagerly reported the drama surrounding her firing, from the graceless cell phone call to Bartz's reference to the company's board members as “doofuses” to the Yahoo! stock jump of more than 6 percent in afterhours trading following the announcement of her termination. Ironically, the rise in stock prices increased the value of Bartz's severance package of more than $11 million in cash and stock. Less than a year after Yahoo! rejected her leadership, Bartz advised audiences in her frequent speeches to graduates and others to accept failure and remain open to new challenges.

Personal Life

Bartz is married to William G. Marr, a retired Sun Microsystems executive. They live in Atherton, California, and are the parents of three adult children: Bill, Meredith, and Layne. They are also grandparents. She is an avid gardener, a passion she shared with the grandmother who brought her up. Through half a dozen moves around the country, from the Midwest to Atlanta to Boston to California, she has transported plants she was nurturing, from bearded irises to heirloom tomatoes. Other hobbies include golf and tennis.

Personal experience has made Bartz an advocate for women's health issues. A survivor of breast cancer, she has served on the board of the National Breast Cancer Research Foundation. As a woman with daughters, she is also interested in educational issues concerning girls and has advocated for separate classes or schools for boys and girls. Bartz was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997, received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing in 2003, and was named to the most powerful women lists of both Forbes (2004 and 2005) and Fortune (2005).

Bibliography

Bartz, Carol, Doug Fairbairn, and Burt Grad. "Bartz, Carol Oral History." Computer History Museum, 13 Oct. 2021, www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102792289. Accessed 5 Mar. 2024.

Fortt, Jon. “Yahoo's Taskmaster.” Fortune 27 Apr. 2009: 80–84. Print.

Hardy, Quentin. “Carol Bartz.” Forbes 7 Sept. 2009: 84–88. Print.

Lacy, Sarah. “Just Don't Call It Retirement.” Businessweek 6 Mar. 2006: 66–68. Print.

Malone, Michael S. “Carol Bartz.” Betting It All: The Entrepreneurs of Technology. New York: Wiley, 2001. 108–21. Print.

“One Tough Yahoo!” Economist 17 Jan. 2009: 66. Print.