Her discipline was iron—and possibly excessive. To keep her family in Atherton, she commuted to the office, which required a long, traffic-clogged drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. To regain these lost hours each day, she spent the whole time behind her chauffeur reading and working, often stopping several times along the way to throw up out of carsickness. Her driver knew all the best places to pull over along Highway 101.
Secateurs at the ready
All of which exemplifies Ms Bartz’s general approach to “work-life balance”. To Ms Bartz the very notion is nonsense. You can “have it all”, as she does, but only by cutting life into compartments and then ruthlessly maintaining the boundaries. When her daughter, whom she had at 40, was a baby, Ms Bartz spent three days a week looking after her at home in Dallas, where she was living at the time. On Mondays she handed the baby to her nanny and flew to Silicon Valley for four days of work; then she flew home again at midnight on Thursdays.Unlike a lot of men in her position, Ms Bartz kept her power in perspective.
She had groomed a successor at Autodesk and became worried that he might leave if she stuck around too long. So she made way for him and became Autodesk’s chairman. “There is a real difference between managing and leading,” she once said. “Managing winds up being the allocation of resources against tasks. Leadership focuses on people. My definition of a leader is someone who helps people succeed.”
How, then, is she likely to make Yahoo! succeed? It is hard to imagine her trying to be geekier than the Young Turks at Google, Yahoo!’s larger and far more successful rival. Instead, she may approach Yahoo! as she does her life, or her garden in Atherton, stuffed at various times with everything from heirloom tomatoes to bearded irises. “If you don’t kill a lot of plants along the way, you don’t know how to garden,” she once said. In short, if there is one person tough and unsentimental enough to disassemble Yahoo!, sell parts of it to Microsoft and merge others with some media company, it is Carol Bartz.
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