Marissa Mayer And Steve Jobs: A Case Study

Three technology organizations that have undergone well-documented, major changes include Marissa Mayer becoming Yahoo's CEO in 2012, Ellen Pao's resignation as CEO from popular Internet website Reddit in 2015, and Steve Jobs returning to Apple in 1997 after being ousted from the very company he founded. These instances involve the hiring, resignation, or firing of top executives at major companies for various reasons. The circumstances surrounding each change, and the types of changes that occurred, are unique. According to Poole and Van de Ven (1995), these changes address regulated change (life cycle), planned change (teleology), dialectic change, and evolutionary change. In Mayer's instance, when she was hired in 2012, Yahoo

These are examples of evolutionary change. Van de Ven and Poole (2004) state that these changes come across as competitive survival. Many of Yahoo's competitors already offered these perks to employees, so to stay competitive, Mayer sought to change the company's culture—a theme often stressed in the tech industry. Mayer herself came from a competitor, Google, which allowed her to seamlessly institute these changes. However, it could be suggested that Mayer unintentionally changed the company culture. “My goal is not to change the culture, but to amplify its greatness,” she said to attendees at the Great Place to Work conference in

This is seen as an example of evolutionary change—many Internet websites have anti-harassment policies, and Reddit adopted them to stay competitive in the tech industry. However, these policies became unpopular as many users believed free speech and discussion on the Internet were being stifled, and the banning of five controversial subreddits—which Reddit claimed was a banning of behavior and not ideas, as these subreddits were said to promote harassment—was once again seen as controversial by the site's users. Taylor's firing less than a month later was the final straw for Reddit users, who demanded Pao's