The recent New York Times article titled “What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs” is frustrating.  It’s frustrating to watch Yahoo! continue to flounder (and oh, flounder it has).  It’s frustrating to see a new CEO come in with the goal of righting the ship, but insufficient experience to do so.  It’s frustrating to see the Times resort to a clickbait headline involving Steve Jobs.  And it’s frustrating that the Times puts the blame solely on the shoulders of the CEO, only noting that Yahoo!’s board of directors had “hesitations”: “One of the Yahoo board’s hesitations upon hiring Mayer was her relative lack of experience as a manager.”

So let me get this straight.  The board makes the decision to hire a CEO who doesn’t have sufficient experience leading an organization, and who is well-known to be extremely (one might say excessively) hands-on in an organization.  Somehow, though, her failure is solely hers.  The board gets no blame for making a poor decision.

Welcome to the glass cliff.  I’m relieved that New York Magazine also noticed that the Times story should have been more appropriately titled “Marissa Mayer and the Glass Cliff”.  The board of Yahoo! did not set up Marissa Mayer to succeed, and apparently didn’t give her the right resources where she could succeed.  And they get to blame her, instead of themselves, if Yahoo! does fail.  Nevermind all of their bad decisions long before she came on board (passing up the Microsoft offer is but one of them).  No, if Yahoo! fails, the blame will fall solely on her, and she will be pushed off of the glass cliff.