Why CEOs should serve on boards: Yahoo’s Bartz
“You need to build your career not as a ladder, but as a pyramid,” Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz said in the New York Times yesterday. I wholeheartedly agree: In today’s ever more complex world, you need to build a broad experience base–with peripheral vision and a willingness to make lateral moves. If you’ve been reading Postcards, you know that my favorite image is a jungle gym. That’s kind of like Bartz’s pyramid.
You can read more of Bartz’s career advice in her first-personer, “Just Deal with it.” But it was at last month’s Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit that she spoke about public-company board work as essential to career-building and vented about the “nonsense” of CEOs prohibiting high-potential execs from serving on other companies’ boards. The Yahoo chief is colorful, as usual, as she describes her first board meeting as the new CEO of Autodesk (ADSK) in 1992, the day after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. “I didn’t even know what a friggin’ board was,” she says:
During her 14 years running Autodesk, pre-Yahoo, Bartz was on the boards of Cisco (CSCO), Intel (INTC), NetApp (NTAP) and BEA Systems–until it was acquired by Oracle (ORCL). That’s a heavy load that I’d say paid off in prepping her for Yahoo, where she arrived in January. My Fortune colleague Adam Lashinsky and I have sparred on the value of such multiple directorships. We’ll see tomorrow how well Bartz is doing. She’s due to report Yahoo’s quarterly earnings.
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Patricia Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Can Meg Whitman Save California?", Melinda Gates ("The $100 Billion Woman"), "MySpace Cowboys," Martha Stewart ("I cannot be destroyed"), Ted Turner ("Gone with the Wind") and Oprah Winfrey ("Oprah Inc."). And she has broken ground with insightful pieces on career management issues such as ego ("Get Over Yourself!"), and "Charisma: Do You Need It? Can You Get It?" Pattie chairs the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business, philanthropy, government, academia, and the arts. And she has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women in Business" cover package since its launch in 1998. She started at Fortune in 1984, covering the big consumer brand companies.
“She’s due to report Yahoo’s quarterly earnings.” – I think she will just report that earnings were guano (she’ll probably be more “salty” than that) but she did very well personally. She’s tanked the deal with MSFT and will continue to drag Yahoo down while continuing to line her pocket book. And give it up with the breast cancer and messed up knee story. Shareholders don’t care and are not impressed. Do the job of creating value vs. talking about yourself.