Yahoo’s bosses get boosts from their boards

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.