We love CEOs who tell it like it is. Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz appears to be one of them.
Here are some of Carol's greatest hits, most drawn from this glowing 2004 Business 2.0 profile:
On the press's fixation with Yahoo: Give the company some “friggin’ breathing room”
On demanding performance: "Tell me why I shouldn't fire the whole lot of you."
On speaking at conferences in the dotcom bubble: "I'd go to investor conferences—with standing room only at presentations by Used-Fucking-Golfballs.com—and I'd get four shareholders listening to me."
On breaking eggs: "My staff will tell you, never have a breakfast with Carol. That's when people tend to get fired."
On demanding performance, 2: Bartz even kept a list of the "most preposterous" dotcoms and showed it to her staff every week to keep the recruiting effort up. "I had to keep kicking them in the balls, because if we couldn't beat GolfBalls.com"—a real company at the time—"then we'd have to get out of here."
On lack of commitment: "I just can't stand people that walk. I'm not built that way."
On Autodesk competitor Adobe: "What the fuck does Adobe know about engineering drawings?"
On inspiration: "We've got to believe in ourselves. Because if we believe, there's no stopping us....So you'll hear this in the coming months: Do you believe? Over and over. Until you come up to me and say, 'I believe.'"
On fixing Yahoo: “frankly, could use a little management.”
See Also: Bartz: Tell Me Why I Shouldn't Fire The Lot Of You
