Freakonomics Radio
Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner
Stephen Dubner's conversation with the former C. E. O. of Yahoo, recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “The Secret Life of a C. E. O.”
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Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. You're about to hear a conversation with Carol Bartz, the former CEO of Yahoo, and before that, of Autodesk. This interview was recorded in November for our recent six-part series, The Secret Life of a CEO, which you can find at Freakonomics.com/CEOs. And now we are releasing some of our full interviews as special episodes, like this one. Hope you enjoy.
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.
Hello.
Hi, Carol, it's Stephen Dubner. How are you?
I'm fine, Stephen. Thank you.
Nice to meet you. I like your style, I have to say. I like, I didn't know too much about you before we got into this, but I like your forthrightness and competence.
So which bad YouTube video me did you watch?
I didn't watch that much, but I just, I mean, I personally, I'm a big fan of people who actually say what they mean. And I know it gets really hard to do in the corporate sphere. I mean, obviously, in the political sphere, too. But no, I just, I like it. You know, before we get started, it strikes me that as a CEO, it's kind of a different ballgame when you are running a company that is public-facing, or maybe, better put, a company that the media, for whatever reason, cares about a lot, just because, you know, with Yahoo, let's say Yahoo versus Autodesk, you know, every move is magnified, even if the company that the media cares about happens to be much smaller than the other, it's magnified just because the media cares.
Is that observation accurate of mine, or is that not really the case?
No, it's accurate, but there's another part to your observation. And that is that when I ran Yahoo, it was when social media was just starting to gain ground. When I ran Autodesk, we were still waiting for people to send us letters. It wasn't quite that bad, but there wasn't any instant feedback on, quote, how well or not well we had done. And my first, my first meeting at Yahoo, I could not believe, looking out, seeing all the little red lights of people recording me at an internal meeting. And I thought, oh, this is going to be really different.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And let me ask you again, as a piece of that answer, just something you said really interested me. You know, I think most people, or most smart people at least, I would argue, know that feedback is really important if you want to improve or do well. It's hard to, hard to do it without good feedback. In a way, social media provides a massive, you know, feedback loop or pool, I guess, maybe. On the other hand, a lot of it is A, not well considered, B, necessarily truncated, C, necessarily emotional, and D, maybe not that, you know, valuable for you.
I'm curious, you know, having been a CEO on, on both sides of the social media, you know, start, launch, how you tried to sort out the useful feedback in the social media storm from just the noise.
Well, that's very difficult. And as you said, feedback is extremely important. And normally, you look to people that you respect, admire, and, and you listen to their feedback, and you have a chance to comment on their feedback, or at least consider it privately. When you get into the, as you say, social media storm... People are commenting that know nothing. Um, I mean, a lot of the comments, which I didn't go up that often and look at because you could spend your whole day crying. Um, a lot of the comments were just because I was a woman.
You know, a woman can't run Yahoo, that's the problem. Um, you know, so they were, a lot of stuff was just so far off the wall that you, you can't spend your time sorting through all the riffraff to figure out where the good comments are. And so it, it actually, um, it actually is not helpful. And so you have to work harder to find real, honest feedback, not, there's nothing with honest, real feedback that, that you should pay attention to and act upon.
Yeah. All right. So let's go backwards to the beginning. First of all, um, let me have you just saying your name and what you do and then what you do if you want to include companies you've run great, if not great, whatever you want.
Uh, I'm Carol Bartz. I'm a retired tech exec.
Um, give us a little background on your family, your schooling and your early years in the technology industry.
Um, I actually was very fortunate to get a computer science degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1971. And why I say fortunate is because first of all, I fell into a world that I just loved and I could continue in that world, uh, for, you know, the next 40 years.
Good timing.
I came from a, I came from a dairy farm in Wisconsin. My mom died when I was eight, so I was very motivated always to do well, the good girl. And, um, and then from there was fortunate to go right into
Technical positions, 3M, then digital equipment, then Sun Microsystems, then CEO of Autodesk, and then CEO of Yahoo. And frankly, enjoyed that entire run.
Talk for just a minute about whether in the technology realm or the corporate leadership realm, and we'll get into this more in detail for sure. But talk for just a minute about how being a woman affected your career, if you can kind of measure that input.
Well, I was both fortunate to be a woman and unfortunate. Let me tell you why. First of all, it was easier in the beginning because not many people had computer science degrees. And so they didn't care if you were orangutan. You could get a job. And because they didn't understand what was going on and they thought maybe you could help them. So I felt fortunate from that standpoint. Unfortunately, though, at that time, I walked into a mess of typical bad men that you read about today,
bad actors. And but that didn't matter. I was a tough farm girl, so I didn't let too much get in the way.
You mean bad in a sexually harassing kind of way?
Oh, absolutely. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, my first job, well, actually, my second job when I was at 3M, the guys that I worked with called me Carl because they didn't want their wives to know they were traveling with a female. So that, of course, wasn't harassing me. It was just kind of an indicator of how the world was.
And, you know, as time went on.
And I was able to move up. Um, I was fortunate enough to have some very good mentors and leaders that believed in me and, um, and I was ornery. Uh, and so I would speak my mind. In fact, uh, something comes to mind. I was working at a company and I got called in by the HR VP who said, Carol, um, we don't want you to talk at executive staff anymore. And I said, you don't want me to talk at executive staff? What do you mean you don't want me to talk? And they said, we don't want you to talk because we're sick of hearing what you have
to say because you're always right. And I said, well, wait a minute. And he goes, listen, this is it. You don't talk or you go. So I thought, okay, I got it. I don't talk. So I went in, I didn't talk. I didn't talk for about three, four meetings and the CEO finally called me and said, how come you're not saying anything? Cause if you don't say anything, I don't know what's going on. You know, so I've gotten mixed messages my whole life, but, um.
None of those guys ever offered to like buy your wisdom, like have you shut up at the meeting, but pay for what you were gonna say so that they could take credit for it? Nobody tried that?
Oh, oh, trust me, many of them took credit for it. It's one of these things and it still happens, which is I'll say something and then five minutes later, they say the same thing. And now it's like the pope has landed and, um, but I, these days I saw, I go, wait a minute. A, you know what? I just said that. Uh, cause I'm old and tough enough now that I don't take that stuff.
All right. Name, um, name a couple of things about being CEO that you really had no idea about until you became a CEO?
Well, I would say the first thing, and people don't talk about this a lot, but it is a very lonely job. Um, you don't, there's really.
No one you can talk to about concerns in the company that's working for you unless you're trying to coach them on something. I'm just talking about how you feel personally. The board is there and many times there's at least one or two board members that are pretty easy to confide in. But for the most part, you know, they show up six times a year and also it's a little dangerous to talk about today's problem because then they never forget it. And so, you know, then they keep asking, "Well, how is such and such doing?"
And you're like, "Oh, my God, that was put to bed six months ago. I should never have said anything." So the first thing is it is lonely. I'd say the second thing is the power that you don't know you have. So you have to fight what I call Carol says. So anywhere in the organization, "We have to do this because Carol says." Well, Carol didn't even know about it. And so you get a lot of people speaking on your behalf that have no business doing it and
no, you know, dictate to do that. So that's the second thing that's strange and you have to bat down. The third reason is the enormity of the task. I remember one specific moment at Autodesk, we were trying to put a program into the company called Shared Responsibility. And that meant that we were telling teams that no matter what level you're at, you have some responsibility to make all this work. It's not just, you can't just look up, up, up, up and finding it's Carol, that you also have a responsibility.
And so my HR VP came in and I said, you know, I don't think shared responsibility is working because they're just arguing about it and nothing seems to be getting done. So I think we have to go back to command and control, the military style. And he looked at me and he said, okay, Carol, now that means you're going to have to always be right.
Uh huh.
And I said, oh, no, no, that's not going to work. We'll try to make shared responsibility work. And so.
Yeah. It's funny, it makes me wonder, I mean, just that idea makes me wonder why the actual notion of the CEO position is not challenged more, or maybe it is challenged more than I know, but we seem to have accepted, you know, look, we have the model of the presidency in government, right? There is a person, there is a chief executive. And in corporations, there are occasionally cases where you've got co-CEOs or whatever, usually in smaller firms, it seems. But do you ever think it might be a good idea to take a new look at top leadership of a firm, you know, as if you were starting from scratch and maybe you'd arrive at something other than a chief executive at the top?
I think there has to be one place where the buck stops, not to be too corny. But there has to be a team. And if you're a chief executive, if you are on a board and you find that your chief executive does not have a team that is working effectively, and when I say working effectively, I don't mean wheel and spoke where.
You have the CEO and the CEO talks to the VP of Engineering and then the CEO talks to the VP of Marketing and then talks to the VP. I'm talking about the engineering guy will talk to the VP of Marketing without having to go through the CEO. So you have a very effective team that knows together they're running the company. If you don't have that and if the CEO believes that they dictate all the shots, then that's a really bad model. And, you know, boards have to watch out for that.
So we've interviewed a couple other ex-CEOs like Jack Welch and Ray Dalio, both of whom made the point that speaking really candidly, even bluntly, to their employees is not only the best way to do business, but the kindest way to do business. You know, there's nothing worse than being lied to or deluded about where you stand. From what I've read about you, Carol, I gather you would put yourself in their camp as well, but I'm curious to know how you thought about talking to employees, whether, you know, just below you in rank or all the way down.
I have a reputation, good or bad, that I do speak my mind. And I've always felt that if people know where you stand and what you stand for, then they can make a decision about what they think about that and therefore what they want to do. And I always use this example of a friend says, "Let's go to lunch." And I say, "Okay, great. Where do you want to go?" "Oh, I don't care." "Okay, let's go to get Mexican." "Oh, I had that last night." "How about Chinese?" "No, I don't really like Chinese." And you're sitting there saying, "You just told me you didn't care."
And so, to me, that's the absolute perfect example of obfuscation. I mean, just tell people what you think and then you have a chance to discuss it. If you don't know, you might as well talk to the wall.
So you took over as CEO of Yahoo in 2009. The Great Recession was raging. Online ad revenue was plunging. Google had been gobbling up search business. There was a sense that Yahoo's glory days were behind it. Also, you were replacing Jerry Yang as CEO, one of the founders of the company. How did you, at the time, how did you weigh the pros and cons of taking over Yahoo?
Well, let's kind of take them in order. Great Recession. I have always had this belief that it goes down, then it comes up. And then it goes down and comes up. You just don't know the depth and the... So it's sort of frequency and length.
So that wasn't that big a concern for you, per se, the recession?
And so I felt, now, I felt that it was so bad in '08, in the fall, that it certainly was going to last, but that would give me time to sit under the shadow of the recession to get some things done. And I wouldn't be criticized because, gee, everybody's in recession. So I viewed that as a positive. And Jerry actually personally courted me to take this job. I had known Jerry before. And he personally pushed really hard for me to take this job. So I wasn't worried about Jerry as a founder.
The third thing was, it just looked like a fun problem. It really did. It just looked like something that would be very, very interesting.
And when you say a fun problem, how would you define the problem?
Well, as you already said, I mean, ad revenues were stalled a lot because of the recession. Yahoo had fallen way behind in search. It's unfortunate, several reasons, but had fallen way behind in search. And...
And had lost, had really lost its confidence because the Microsoft takeover attempt had just ended when I, when I went in and the, and the employees were just beaten. Uh, because the, the company was, the company and the board especially, which was more correct, um, they were just beaten to the ground and I really felt that I could help with that and, um, give us some airtime to get back together.
In retrospect, do you feel that it was to any degree for you, a kind of suicide mission, that there was no way it was going to be fixed to your satisfaction?
Um, yes, I do now believe that, but I, but it was for the raw, it's for the wrong reason. Um, what I didn't understand correctly was the influence of Alibaba. And so I didn't get the time to refresh the technology because the, the one thing Yahoo had unfortunately had a habit of doing was to release products. And so they, you know, the first with the, basically the first with a big email presence, messaging, you know, groups, which is a social,
early social media idea, uh, GeoCities where things are in the world. So they had a, they were first in a lot of things. So they had, they were ripe with ideas. They would bring a product to market and then move on and never continue to stabilize the product. And so when I got in there, I realized there was just a lot of tech debt, as I called it, that we had to, to work on. Um, and there would have been time for that, but Alibaba was just such a big presence hitting us constantly. Um, and that part I totally missed.
Mm-hmm. Do you feel that there were, um, there were signs that you should have anticipated or could have, or did it really, the Alibaba feud kind of, um, accelerate without, you know, proper warning?
Well, the only way...
The only way that could have been solved is Alibaba wanted us to sell their the shares back to them for like less than $10 a share. And, you know, we own 40% of the company. And, I mean, I, I should have been fired if I'd have done that. And I fought so hard against that and fought and fought and fought directly with the Alibaba management team that they were going to get me one way or the other.
Coming up after the break, Carol Bartz on the difference between male and female CEOs.
I don't believe a female is ever hired as a CEO, especially from the outside, for the reasons that she was the absolute number one pick. I think it's because their number one picks wouldn't take the job.
It's coming up right after this.
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Back now to our conversation with Carol Bartsch, who was CEO of Autodesk for 14 years and Yahoo for a much shorter tenure.
So let me ask you this. Some researchers, academic researchers, talk about this glass cliff phenomenon, that women are more likely to become CEOs when a company is in trouble. For whatever reason, it's in trouble. Whereas, men are more likely to become CEOs for stable companies. So in this research literature, you, Carol Bartsch, are sometimes held up as a classic example of being placed on and maybe shoved off of this glass cliff at Yahoo. What do you make of that characterization?
Well, first of all, I would say Autodesk was in trouble when I took it over and I didn't get shoved off any cliff. But yeah, quite the contrary. But listen, it is absolutely true that women have a better chance to get a directorship or a senior position if there's trouble. And I think there's a couple of reasons. It's not, mostly because a lot of times, men don't want the job. And so they go for the tier one men on their list, and they take a look and say, I wouldn't touch that with anything.
And then they get to the tier two men, and by the time they get to the tier two men, some woman has finally popped up in their mind. And she's so happy that she has a chance
Right.
To have a senior position as a director or a CEO, that she takes it.
That even if the circumstances are prima facie suboptimal, yeah?
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, and I think it's good that she takes it. I have no problem with that. But it's not that all of a sudden, the boards wake up and say, oh, there should be a female here. They do that sometimes because it's easier to hide behind, well, of course, of course that failed because it was a female. What could we have been thinking? But... It's still a pretty nefarious way of thinking.
Mm-hmm. One theory is that boards will pick female leadership when a company's in trouble in order to signal to investors that, hey, we're really, we're really trying something new and different here. Do you think that was part of the equation when Yahoo's board hired you?
Uh, well, I'd like to think not, but, um, probably. I'd like to think that they hired me because they actually thought I was good.
I mean, you're a different case, too, in that your track record running Autodesk was pretty remarkable, and that was known, you know, especially in the tech industry, less so in the public sphere, just because Autodesk was not such a public-facing company. But do you, again, in retrospect is, I guess, the easiest way to think about this, do you think that the board saw you as, wow, she is really the person who can turn this around? Or do you think the board saw you more as some kind of combination of, well, let's take the best we can get, considering we're in trouble, or let's signal to the markets that we really know we've got to make a change?
Um, listen, I believe if they had found what they consider the perfect male, they would have taken the perfect male. There's no doubt about that. I don't, I don't believe a female is ever hired as a CEO, especially from the outside, for the reasons that she was the absolute number-one pick. I think it's because their number-one picks wouldn't take the job.
That's depressing, isn't it?
Well, of course, it's depressing.
I mean, even at this relatively late stage, 2017, 2018...
Have you noticed that there's less females in the Fortune 500 now than there were? I mean, I, we have made no progress. We have made absolutely no progress.
And why do you think that is?
Because old white men rule.
Mm hmm.
I had this, I had this interesting idea that I was so hopeful that my daughter would go to college and be with open-minded young men. They'd all work together in school, and when they got out, they all realized that they were equally smart and, you know, off we'd go and things would change. It's exactly the opposite. They got out, the guys got these jobs, they got a little money, and they turned into old frat boys in, in business
as opposed to schools. But, I mean, I really want you to understand, the young men are groomed by the older men to run the thing. And they, they're not predisposed to treat a female any more than a female, not a business partner.
Hmm. Let me ask you this. Do you think that sexual harassment is in some ways related to the kind of inability to accept women as leaders, or at least as equals in the corporate world, that there's something between men and women, whether in a corporate setting or, or elsewhere, that just prevents men from seeing women essentially as co-equals?
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's all about power. It's power. And they have the money, they have the power, and they have the colleagues that will support them.
Where do you think that comes from, other than, you know, I guess, the, the, the basic desire for most people, or at least most men, to have more power? Is it like a biological imperative? Or do you think it's just the way that corporate structure has been built and maintained for so many years?
I don't think it's biological. I just think it's historical. Um, you know, if, if, if, if we could just do a, you know, a quick change of the world and flipped it around, I believe women would be abusing. I think power abuses. And, um, and that's what we see. I mean, I mean, I am flabbergasted, but so delighted that Harvey Weinstein could be brought down in two weeks. That is, I never thought I'd see that in my lifetime. But I just think when people have the po, when they have the money, position, power, they abuse. And not a hundred percent.
I mean, I wouldn't ever, that, that, that's ridiculous, but, but much more so than people want to admit.
What is a, a well-intentioned, fair, equitable, wanting male in corporate, in the corporate world to do?
Well, first of all, if a female friend of theirs comes and says that something horrible has happened to, to a supporter and believer and, and, um, and not turn his back. Um, and by the way, I want to tell you, there are many males in the corporate world who are superstars. They are defenders of the females. You can pick them out of a crowd, uh, and they will be there for the women. There just aren't enough of them.
What do you think should change in our systems, whether it's family systems, or educational, or legal, or corporate, that would improve that, that would, that would increase the number of those people?
Well, I think you first, instead of increasing the number of those people, we have to get the bad actors out.
And decrease the other ones, yeah.
Yeah, exactly. And, um, and, and then we get the actors that are on the, you know, the, the border to say, well, that obviously didn't work. I better go back and be a nice guy. But it's the bad actors and it's giving women the confidence that if they do find somebody to talk to, that they can get help.
You know, given everything you're saying, I can't help but think that you, as an observer from the outside, must have been particularly chagrined at what's been happening at Uber in the last couple of years. I mean, not only was there, uh, behavior in leadership that, you know, kind of gives frat houses a bad name even, but then the board came out and said, you know, I think one, we think one way to address this is to really, uh, work hard on finding a female CEO. And then, of course, their three finalists were, were all male. What was your assessment of that scenario?
Well, first of all, it, it, that, that was just, those are just words. Let's find a female CEO, cause oh, wow, that means that'll all get fixed. All that, all those years, six years of bad behavior. So that was a turnoff to me. I think personally, they selected a great CEO. It looks like he's going to be very good. And it also looks like he's not going to take any, you know, he's not going to let the bad actors hang around.
Um, I think they could have, they would have waited a long time, too long, to find a, a female CEO that was senior enough to take that role. Uh, and, you know, I hate to say that, cause I should always say, oh, well, obviously a female, but, um, there, there wasn't one in my mind, ready to jump into that politically charged.
Very visible role.
I'm curious, one CEO that we've interviewed lately, who I think is so impressive on so many levels and sets a kind of standard, she happens to be female, but I think she sets a standard for a modern CEO, is Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo. I don't know if you've interacted much with her, but I'm just curious, you know, she, look, PepsiCo is one of the most valuable companies in the world. She's been there a long time. She has done a lot of things that the board and shareholders and activists initially recoiled at, but she fought hard and smart and won. I'm curious if you could just comment on, you know, whether that is a kind of beacon of female leadership and whether you think that kind of leadership
might have a substantial impact long term on the availability of females for leadership?
Absolutely. I mean, anytime we can put up someone like her, hold her up as an example of what females can do, and she did, she did things against the, I don't want to say advice, but against popular opinion. She's been very strong. You know, the more of those we have, the better we all are. But, you know, we've got to look at the pipeline. The pipeline, we're stuck. You know, you've been spending this whole time talking about CEOs. Let's talk about why we can't get senior vice presidents and,
you know, and that's the problem. I mean, so they're not likely to be picked over into a different company as a CEO if they're sitting as a vice president in one company, and they're not likely to even get to be vice president of that company. So we've got a really, we're really stuck.
Yeah. And again, you've been in business for a long time and in technology for a long time. How would you compare, you know, the status of female leadership and the hopes for more now versus, let's say, 40 years ago?
Forty years ago, I was promoted to be the sales manager from the team I was actually working with, and one of the guys came in and said, "I'm just going to tell you that I'm not going to work for any plug-compatible boss." Now, many of you technical people don't know what plug-compatible means, but it means you have one end and another end. And I said, "Fine, but I'm not going anywhere." And he made it very, very clear that he was unhappy and was going to just sit there and cross his arms and pout. And I said, "George, I don't care what you do, but you've got about three days to get your act together or get out of here."
And so I even had a little moxie forty years ago, but, you know, I'm not going to go hide in the corner because somebody comes and says, "I don't like you."
The Glass Cliff researchers have found that if a company led by a woman continues to have trouble, that she's often replaced by a white male CEO or returned to the status quo before the fact.
Oh gee, what a concept. Did they pay a lot for that research?
Well, maybe they paid a lot for the name. This is called the Savior Effect. I guess it could have been the Messiah Effect if they wanted to really get their money's worth. So that happened in your case at Yahoo with Scott Thompson, but interestingly, he had to resign six months later because of, he fluffed on his CV, said that he had, I guess it was a computer, a computer science degree that he didn't have.
He said he had a computer science degree.
Which interestingly, you did have. I assume, right?
I did have, yes.
You want to clarify that? You actually have the degree, completed it?
I actually have the degree, University of Wisconsin.
All right. But then, interestingly, the next person up then was Marissa Meyer at Yahoo. Do you feel the dynamics of her appointment were similar to yours, or was the situation so different by then?
It was very different by then because they had, I had an activist when I came on, I had Carl Icahn. They had an activist when Marissa came on, and they were trying to get...
They were trying to get some Google Magic spread on Facebook. And so she was an excellent candidate. I don't think they had, I don't think, it's very odd. I mean, I agree, you're not going to find another one of these where it was a female, male, female. That's very unusual. They would, history would tell you, they wouldn't find another female for a hundred years because they were so burned. But, yes, very unusual. If it's going to happen anywhere, it's going to happen in tech.
So, let me ask you this. A lot of CEOs, at least from my perspective, and I'm not in the business world, I just, you know, follow it like any amateur. But, a lot of CEOs seem to want to be as uninteresting and unrevealing, almost as inhuman as possible, when, at least when they're speaking in any public or quasi-public setting. This, I should say, does not describe you. You're, you were known always for being pretty unvarnished. But, talk about those very unrevealing CEOs. Is that strategy? Is it personality or something else?
I think they have bad advisors. They either have, I think, one of two things. They either, or I'll say three things. They either have that as a basic personality. Two, they've been advised to be as benign as possible. Or, three, they are scared. And, and I, I don't, I don't buy any of that. I think, I think people want to know, again, where you stand, where your company stands,
what you stand for, where you're going. And, I mean, one of the things that I did in the, in the early conference calls at Yahoo, which, you know, later, of course, I can get criticized for anything, but... I just tried to stand up for the people because they were so beaten down from this botched Microsoft deal that all the analysts wanted to ask me about is why we didn't do Microsoft. I wasn't even there. And would you have done Microsoft? And I said, let's get back to what we're doing now, not what happened last year. And give the Yahoo people
some chance to breathe. And I really went after them. Because that started our long love affair.
Now, if you'd gone after them, if your very same words and the very same tone happened to have been attached to a male human, right, how do you think that position, your position of trying to buy that breathing space would have been received by the analysts?
Oh, I think it would have been received great. And I'm not, I'm positive. I'm not hiding behind any, oh, poor Carol. I'm just saying, they just don't like it.
Of all the CEOs who talk sometimes, but say not very much, I think one example, really interesting example, for a lot of different reasons, is Mark Zuckerberg. So I don't know if you've interacted with him much. But I'm curious what you think of his speaking style. He does speak publicly, more and more, although in circumstances that are atypical for CEOs. And yet, it is a different kind of CEO speak than I've heard before. I'm curious what your take on it is.
Mark is an extremely smart guy. And so, he has chosen to be the CEO as intellect.
And so these are the 12 books I'm going to read these year, this year. These are, I'm going to visit, you know, every state this year. I'm going to build a robot this year. Um, it's like, well, okay.
(laughing)
That's fine.
Mm-hmm.
Um, but I think if you look at the, what's happening right now with the testimonies on political ads, um, that's gonna have to change. And, I mean, he didn't have to. He was a golden boy. He didn't have to talk about real things. Um, and besides, the company's doing great. I mean, the real things are, you know, real. And so, so it allowed him to, to get this other persona, which might actually not be good going forward for a while.
Uh, name a couple of current CEOs that you really admire and why?
Um, I admire Chuck Robbins at Cisco. We, we, we replaced, uh, John Chambers, who was a CEO I greatly admired. I hate to say this because it's, because he just died, but Paul Odelini was one of the best men I ever knew, um, as far as being a friend of females, tough guy, nice guy, and very qualified. Um, and I, so I'm just gonna give him that shout out even though he's not with us.
Let me ask you about one in, in your former orbit. What about Satya Nadella coming into Microsoft, making a lot of?
Yes.
Absolutely. Absol- brilliant.
And brilliant because why?
You know, brilliant because um he moved fast. He was willing to break glass. He obviously knew what to do. And I think, I mean, he did the unthinkable. I mean, he actually has Microsoft back in the picture.
I mean, I, I have a lot of time for him and, and he's a nice guy.
Let me ask you this. One um big change uh that he made consciously and now that's being carried out strategically is that Microsoft is back in the partner and collaboration business, which obviously they, they never were out of, but you know, in the, in the early years, they, they did a lot more of that. And, and it, I, I'm just curious whether um, you know, trying to be the big dog in any fight, which Microsoft was for a while, if you think that is kind of a more male CEO trait and the idea of reaching across different aisles and trying to form different partnerships and maybe being more collaborative is a trait that is not necessarily more female. I'm not saying that Satya necessarily has more female traits than the average male,
but if that school of thought about um, you know, uh, success and growth via collaboration and partnership as opposed to just massive dominance might be um, one of the areas in which old school CEOs are, you know, bad and new school CEOs, including potentially female ones, might be better.
I think there's no doubt about that. I mean, you, you can take it out of, out of corporation, the corporate world for a minute, and you can look at um, school boards, you can look at a lot of places where there's contention and um, it's the females that are bringing people back together.
Uh, so I think that, and, and the good news is in a corporation to accomplish this, it doesn't have to be, it can't only be the CEO, it has to be the lieutenants. And again, the more lieutenants that are female, the more they will actually really partner. Microsoft always said they would partner, but give it a try and you'd find out that didn't work. Uh, because each, each group would say, "Fine, I don't care if that group is partnering with you, but I, I'm your competition, so get out of here." And nobody, nobody could stand at, at the top and say, you know, "Make this work, play."
Um, and I think, so I think the more, the more that there's females involved in either the deals or the, um, resolving the conflicts, that things are work, they, they do work better. I think females are better collaborators.
So, um, when you were, uh, three days after you were fired by Yahoo, you told Fortune Magazine that the Yahoo board were quote "doofuses" and you said that "These people [bleep] me over." Why'd, I mean, you're known for being straightforward, but that was a little bit more straightforward than most people were accustomed to.
[laughing]
Why'd you go so, um, you know, honest or ballistic at that moment?
Well, I was in a limo, driving into the city, New York City, when I got a call from Roy Bostock, the chairman of the board, and told me I was fired. I was literally 20 minutes away from where he was physically located. He, there was another board member in New York that had volunteered to, to work with, with Roy, double team to tell me I was fired. He didn't have the nerve to see me face to face. I do not believe that that would have happened to a man. He didn't have the nerve.
Now, I like to think he didn't have the nerve because he, he knew I would have probably punched him out, but, um...
And was he right?
Might be right, I don't know.
But that board was so beat up by the time I got there because of, again, the Microsoft stuff. And then Carl, I, listen, I love Carl Icahn, and I bet if you called Carl, he, he would tell you he likes me. I spent so much time the first seven months on the phone with Carl and his two board placement, the two people who also got on the board, and actually worked that deal for the company. Everything is going swimmingly. We get in a little problem with Alibaba, and they start making a stink, and the board starts getting scared.
And they got scared, and they didn't want to be considered the worst board in the, in the world again. And they thought, well, that, we know how to do this, we'll just fire Carol. And, you know, hey, probably lucky, I'm probably lucky they did. I don't take any of those words back.
Now, I, I understand, I'm not, I'm curious to know if this is true. I understand that interview reportedly cost you about $10 million for having violated a disparagement clause in your contract. Is that true?
You mean that one F-word was $10 million? I don't think so.
Now, did you, did you have to, did you have to pay back anything from the settlement for having disparaged the board, though, publicly?
Oh, no, all those little men just ran in the corner.
So, it was worth, it was worth it, I, if you did have to pay, I gather it was worth it?
Always worth it. Stand by what your words, stand by what your words are. Don't, you know, why should I have sugarcoated that? Say, oh, I'm, I have to go spend some time with my family now because, you know, I'm, I was working the whole time my daughter was, was growing up, but now she's out of college, so I really need to spend some time with her.
Carol Bartsch, this was a blast, and I can't thank you enough, and I wish you the best, best in everything.
Well, thank you. It was fun. We'll see if any of it gets on the radio.
In next week's special episode, you'll hear my full conversation with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.
Yeah, well, I never started this to build a company.
Also, please keep your ears out for our regular Freakonomics Radio episodes, which hit your podcast stream promptly at 11:00 PM Eastern Time on Wednesdays. Thanks for listening.
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