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09/07/11--21:34: One Year Ago, This Is How Carol Bartz Saw Her Job (chan 1315286)

carol bartz yahoo

The recently-axed Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has always been a polarizing figure (how many managers are so public with their F-bomb usage?), but she does have a more light-hearted side, which we came across in this fantastic Fast Company interview that captures Bartz during better times.

In the interview, she proudly talks about how she finally got Yahoo employees to attend meetings on time, the worst thing you can ever do as a manager, and well, how she's "just a manager."

Read the full Fast Company Q&A here >

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When Carol Bartz became the CEO of Yahoo two years ago, the thing folks were most excited about was the refreshing way that she spoke.

She said what was on her mind, and she spoke like a person, not a "Chief Executive Officer."

In an era in which communications professionals, attorneys, and brand consultants scrub everything many CEOs say, this was admirable and refreshing. More CEOs should speak like people. It makes them more approachable and likable. It reminds everyone that they are people doing jobs. And it makes everyone actually listen to what they have to say.

In any event, when Carol Bartz got canned as Yahoo's CEO, she went out exactly the way she came in: With a short note to the staff:

I am very sad to tell you that I have just been fired over the phone by Yahoo's Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with you, and I wish you all the best going forward.

Lots of folks read that email and pronounced it "snarky," probably because of the elbow Carol threw at Roy Bostock for canning her over the phone. And, yes, Carol did throw that elbow...

But I read the email and thought that it was a classy way to go.

Carol's note captured the emotion of the moment and conveyed it directly, in a language everyone could understand. She didn't shrink from the truth, or sugar-coat it in ridiculous corporate-euphemism-speak. (e.g., "I have resigned to pursue other interests.") It was short and to the point. It delivered a poke in the eye to someone who desperately deserved it (Roy Bostock). And the second sentence was pure class.

But now, of course, Carol's final moment of directness and humanity is being analyzed and dissected by the communications professionals, attorneys, and brand consultants—because CEOs so rarely speak that way.

Some are saying it was the wave of the future—a new "authenticity" that CEOs should use to speak to a younger generation that instinctively tunes out corporate-speak. (This "younger generation" should be defined as anyone younger than 112.)

Others are saying it was a mistake that will hurt Yahoo and harm its ability to hire a new CEO. (Please.)

Others are saying it was a blow to all female executives because it is yet another sign that woman can't control their emotions. (Oh, for goodness sake. This email is perfectly under control. It's just passionate.)

And so forth.

Whatever.

I salute Carol for writing that email—and for continuing to speak like a human being. Here's hoping more CEOs learn to speak that way.

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carol bartz

Why was Carol Bartz fired over the phone?

After she was fired, Bartz wrote a very brief note to her employees.

The whole thing:

To all,

I am very sad to tell you that I have just been fired over the phone by Yahoo's Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with you, and I wish you all the best going forward.

Carol

Sent from my iPad

The most interesting part of the email – besides the casual signature, perhaps – is how Bartz made sure to include in it that she was fired "over the phone" by Yahoo's chairman, Roy Bostock.

It's one last fiesty jab from a CEO famous for her F-bombs.

Clearly, the phone call upset her.

Why did it have to go down like that?

As we've been calling and emailing around to ask sources about more important things – like will Yahoo be sold and who will be its next CEO – we've also been asking about the over-the-phone firing.

So far, we've heard two perhaps-related theories. They are:

Bartz was fired over the phone because she was supposed to have been working in Sunnyvale on Tuesday, but was not. She was actually in Maine, having flown to the East Coast early ahead of an investors confence to be held on Wednesday in New York.

Bartz was fired over the phone because, as one gossiper puts it, Bostock and company "expected trouble," and preferred not to be in her presence.

Our favorite of the two theories is the latter.

Bartz's track record as a Yahoo CEO aside, we will miss her brio, and it's great to get a sense of how very real her fire was.

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carol bartz

Fired Yahoo CEO fired back with an awesome interview with Fortune's Patricia Sellers.

Here are some of the key quotes.

"[The Yahoo board] fucked me over."

"I said, 'Roy, I think that's a script. Why don't you have the balls to tell me yourself?'"
"The board was so spooked by being cast as the worst board in the country. Now they're trying to show that they're not the doofuses that they are."
In the interview, Bartz says that after the call, Bostock gave her two hours to decide whether to resign or be fired. "She called her husband, Bill, her three children—a son and two daughters—and her longtime assistant, Judy Flores. Learning that Yahoo's lawyers had gone to the St. Regis hotel to hand her papers, she ditched that hotel and booked herself into another. 'Am I stupid?!' she asks, making clear that she took her career crisis into her own hands."
Bartz is still a member of Yahoo's board and plans to remain a director.
"I want to make sure that the employees don't believe that I've abandoned them. I would never abandon them."
"I wish the Yahoo people the best because it's a fantastic franchise."

Read: Carol Bartz exclusive: Yahoo "f---ed me over"

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carol bartz

Carol Bartz went nuts on the Yahoo board in an exclusive Fortune interview, saying they "f**ked [her] over" and were "doofuses."

She suggested they were right to be called the "worst board in America."

And she said Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock, the man who has presided over the destruction of the company over the past 11 years--and the man who hired her--didn't even have the "balls" to can her without reading from a script.

In other words, Carol Bartz has outdone herself and her reputation for being colorful and blunt.

And while the outburst was certainly entertaining, Bartz has also probably destroyed her chances of getting another public-company CEO job. "Colorful" and "blunt" has now boiled over into an unprofessional tirade.

(Does Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock deserve to be criticized? Absolutely. Do tons and tons of Yahoo shareholders and employees want to see Bostock follow Bartz out the door? Absolutely. Is this an appropriate or professional way for a departing CEO to level her criticism at the board? Absolutely not. Lots of folks get fired every day and lots of them think their bosses are incompetent. They don't go rushing to blast their bosses in the press, at least not if they ever want another job. And the rant was particularly unsympathetic given the number of Yahoo shareholders and employees who wanted Bartz gone.)

So the next question is, did Yahoo's board insert a "non-disparagement" clause into Bartz's termination agreement?

If not--and it would be bizarre if they did not--they're idiots for not doing it. Bartz will now keep hammering away at them, and there's nothing they or anyone else will be able to do about it.

If they did insert this clause, though, Bartz has almost certainly violated it.

So the next question is... Has the board already paid Bartz her $10 million severance? If not, are they going to stop payment on it? If yes, are they going to get it back?

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carol bartz yahoo women woman ceo female

Fired Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz did in fact have a non-disparagement clause in her termination contract, as we suspected.

That's according to Fortune, which cites a source close to the company.

Fortune also published Bartz's goodbye interview, in which she claimed that Yahoo's board f***ed her over and called them "doofuses".

So it looks like Yahoo has the right to withhold her $10 million severance pay.

The only question: does Yahoo's board now have the balls to make good on it?

Bartz earned $15 million last year, and $47 million in 2009, so it's not like she's going to be hurting for cash -- perhaps it was worth $10 million just to be able to tell Bostock and company off in public.

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carol bartz yahoo women woman ceo female

Carol Bartz once told the New York Times that "people should understand that they will learn more from a bad manager than a good manager."

With her firing earlier this week, it's clear Bartz made some mistakes. And she knew that she wasn't perfect; she only graded herself with a B- after her first year as CEO of Yahoo.

Her best qualities: a no-nonsense approach to managing and savvy operational skills. Insiders have said that "Bartz doesn't get enough credit for cutting Yahoo's costs and upgrading its various company-wide systems."

Many of the problems she had were related to retaining talent and morale -- which ultimately affects how you get things done as CEO.

She couldn't rally employees

Yahoo employees recently gave Bartz a 33% approval rating -- which is astoundingly different from the initial 90% approval rating she got upon taking the job in January 2009.

She also didn't hire motivators. According to insiders, her new sales boss Wayne Powers didn't help the morale ("He's not a Tim Armstrong").

She threw employees under the bus

She blamed the Yahoo sales team for disappointing revenue numbers this summer. VP Wendi Sturgis left the company after Bartz called her out during a conference call.

She couldn't retain top talent

While Bartz was smart to streamline operations upon becoming CEO, she lost some key performers during her tenure.

This summer she lost SVP and deputy general counsel Belinda Johnson; and last year she lost Yahoo's top ad sales exec Joanne Bradford, among others.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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tim armstrong aol

We first ran this post last year, when AOL and Yahoo had one of their perennial flirtations. Now they're having another, and the same logic holds.

The two struggling Internet giants of the 1990s, Yahoo and AOL, should merge.

Immediately.

(In fact, it's ridiculous that they haven't already).

This idea isn't new--we've been calling for it for three four years, and, according to Kara Swisher, "big investors" are now calling for it, too.

"Big investors" want Yahoo and AOL to merge, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong to become CEO of the combined company, and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz to become Chairman (which would be in keeping with what Yahoo's board is discussing anyway). [Carol has since been canned, so that takes care of that problem.] We would certainly be open to that idea--assuming Tim can persuade us that he is tough enough to quickly and efficiently make the big restructuring moves (and cuts) that the combination would require.

[And, now that another year has gone by, this would actually require more persuading. In our opinion, Tim did not move quickly or aggressively enough at AOL. And the combination of AOL and Yahoo would create a combination many times bigger and more complicated. Perhaps he has learned his lesson now, though, and would be more aggressive and decisive this time.]

But the management structure isn't as important as the combination itself.

Here's why the companies should merge:

Yahoo and AOL are both in the same business, and it is a business that benefits greatly from scale. Yahoo and AOL are both basically media companies. They both use technology extensively, but their core competency is producing content to attract an audience and then selling display ads against that audience. They also both operate duplicative mail, instant-messaging, sports, finance, news, maps, and other services, all of which currently compete with each other. That is senseless. By combining, Yahoo and AOL would achieve greater scale and reduce duplication.

There are currently 4-6 big generalist destination web sites, and that's at least two more than there should be. The big destination sites are: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL (and, increasingly, Twitter). Facebook and Google have clearly differentiated businesses. Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL don't--they're still trying to be all things to all people. By investing hugely in Bing, Microsoft has picked its horse: It wants to compete with Google in search. Yahoo and AOL, meanwhile, have outsourced search to focus on content and display ads. That leaves Yahoo and AOL as the major competitors in content and display advertising. They both would be stronger--and they both would eliminate a major competitor (in the US)--if they combined forces.

There is huge and needless duplication of services at AOL and Yahoo: "Portal" page, finance, sports, entertainment, celebrity gossip, games, mail, instant-messaging, ad network, search window (outsourced), chat, etc. There is no reason for these services to be duplicated. And by splitting the market, Yahoo and AOL are splitting the market and thus losing more ground to their competitors. Take "mail," for example. Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail are critical traffic drivers to both company's content empires. They keep users coming back many times a day. But both Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail have lost ground to Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, and Microsoft Outlook is still a major competitor. Left on its own, AOL Mail will die: AOL just doesn't have the resources to keep it competitive with the offerings of far-richer companies like Microsoft and Google. Yahoo Mail may survive, but it would have a better chance with the added scale and resources of being combined with AOL Mail. And the same can be said for instant-messaging, voice-chat, and all of the other areas above.

AOL is affordable, even for Yahoo. AOL's enterprise value is about $2.4 billion. Yahoo's is $16 billion. Yahoo could probably get AOL for $3 billion, maybe $3.5 billion. That's only 20% dilution. And if Yahoo didn't want to take the dilution, it could always buy AOL for cash. Yahoo doesn't know what to do with its cash anyway. (It might have to borrow a bit of money to pay cash, but money is free right now. Alternately, it could sell off its Alibaba stake and raise the cash that way. The stake adds no strategic value whatsoever.)

The combination would be instantly accretive for shareholders. In combining, Yahoo and AOL could not only boost revenues, but cut hundreds of millions of dollars of costs. Both companies are already gushing cash, so the combination would immediately goose cash flow.

The combination will eliminate a major competitor for both companies--both in display advertising and, importantly, in the consolidation of the burgeoning online content industry. AOL just bought TechCrunch for ~$40 million. Yahoo should also have bought TechCrunch--and we suspect that AOL's move might just wake Yahoo's M&A team up. In future sales, therefore, AOL and Yahoo might be competing with each other for companies like TechCrunch. That will drive prices up...unless they're working together.

Combining AOL and Yahoo would make the combined platform a "must buy" for any display advertiser. The display market isn't growing as fast as the search market, but it's still a huge and fast-growing market. Right now, the two companies' sales forces are duplicated. They needn't be. And the combination would offer advertisers even greater reach, inventory, and targetability. This, in turn, would reduce content production costs as a percentage of revenue.

The combined search businesses would have (slightly) more leverage to get better terms with Google or Microsoft. AOL only owns 3 percent of the US search market, but that 3% is still worth ~$500 million a year. Search is an economy-of-scale business, so the added scale would likely allow the combined company to squeeze better terms out of Microsoft or Google.

The combined distribution business would have more leverage with Hollywood, the music industry, and other content creators. Why is the cable industry so powerful? Scale. Once again, the more people you reach, the more valuable you are as a distribution platform. This combination would bring more distribution scale.

AOL's New York media headquarters would give Yahoo an even stronger beachhead in the media and advertising capital of the world. New York still matters, especially in this industry.

Yes, putting the two companies together would be challenging and require painful cuts. But it's not rocket-science. And it also wouldn't involve combining enormously different cultures and businesses, the way, say, the disastrous AOL Time Warner merger did. These two companies are essentially in the same business. As long as management took a disciplined approach to the integration, the merger would stand a good chance of being very successful.

Unless it radically refines and focuses its business, AOL must combine with someone--Yahoo or Microsoft. There is no way it can survive as a generalist all-things-to-all-people brand when it is so much smaller than everyone else in the business.

Yahoo has less need to do this deal--Yahoo already has enough scale--but the combination would help Yahoo. And, as discussed, it would also eliminate a major competitor.

Merging Yahoo and AOL is not "the answer" to both companies' woes. Once they combine, they'll still have to execute. But it's a good step toward for both companies.

They should do it immediately.

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carol bartz yahoo ap

Former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, who the company fired last Tuesday, has also left the board of directors.

Bartz gave a scathing interview to Fortune last Thursday in which she called the board "doofuses" and "the worst board in the country." But she also said that she planned to remain on Yahoo's board.

Apparently Yahoo had a different idea. The company sent the following statement to the press today:

On September 9, 2011, Carol Bartz resigned from the Board of Directors of Yahoo! Inc. effective immediately.

Bartz is in line to receive $10 million in severance pay -- as long as the board is OK with her name-calling. Her termination contract apparently included a non-disparagement clause, so the board might be in its rights to keep the money back.

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carol bartz yahoo

The ouster of Carol Bartz certainly came quickly.

While Yahoo watchers weren't exactly surprised when the board fired their CEO, the abrupt timing of the move was a shock.

One of the reasons: The board moved quicker than expected, according to All Things Digital's Kara Swisher.

She reports that Roy Bostock and the rest of the board were not scheduled to review Bartz's performance until the end of 2011, but they moved up that timetable. (Her contract ran through 2013.)

The reasons for the decision were many.

They include the board’s feeling that Bartz had not responded to their requests for a credible strategic plan; worries that she would not ever meet annual performance goals, including improving its stock price; upcoming weak third-quarter numbers, which will continue a troublesome downward trend in Yahoo’s key advertising business; and, perhaps most intriguingly, the need to make a move before it was revealed that another activist investor, this time Third Point’s Daniel Loeb, had decided to target Bartz and the Yahoo board.

So Bartz was fired, and the situation got ugly (in part because Bartz, who had "no allies at the company," was caught unaware.

The move buys the board a little bit of time. But maybe only a month or two. The sharks are circling.

You get the impression Bartz was only the first big piece to fall.

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Leo Apotheker, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard

HP's former CEO Leo Apotheker is the latest high-profile executive to make an early exit.

The truth is, CEOs aren't sticking around as long as they used to. Research shows that the average tenure for a CEO is 6.6 years, compared to 8.1 years a decade ago. That figure dips even lower for external hires, who on average keep their jobs for just 4.1 years.

We looked into some of the most high-profile CEOs who left their jobs early -- inspired by other lists, such as this one from Investing Answers -- to create our own, ordered from longest-to-shortest-serving executives.

Carol Bartz, Yahoo -- 2 years, 8 months

CEO from: Jan. 2009 - Sept. 2011

By now, we all know the story of how Bartz was fired over the phone earlier this month -- and how she fired back at the Yahoo board.

During her tenure, she made a number of mistakes -- including throwing employees under the bus and losing top talent. She also missed big opportunities with Microsoft and Hulu.

Philip Schoonover, Circuit City -- 2 years, 6 months

CEO from: March 2006 - Sept. 2008

During Schoonover's time at the helm, Circuit City weathered its worst year financially, with losses topping out at $300 million. The extreme plight became especially devastating, as the record fiscal failure warded off prospective buyers.

Schoonover was unable to build up the electronics retailer, and under his leadership it fell further than it ever had before. He was even a finalist for Worst CEO of the Year, as judged by MarketWatch, which cited Circuit City's 70% stock tumble under his reign.

Kevin Rollins, Dell -- 2 year, 6 months

CEO from: July 2004 - Jan. 2007

In Rollins' final year at the company, Dell lost its lead in PC market share to rival Hewlett-Packard, and revenues landed below analysts' expectations.

This was disappointing, especially since in the years before he took the CEO post, Rollins was even considered a co-leader of the firm -- alongside founder Michael Dell, who resumed the CEO job after Rollins left.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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arianna huffington young

We found old photos of famous tech executives.

Recognize the woman on the right?

Yup, that's Arianna Huffington, at age 24.

Carol Bartz, then

Carol Bartz, now

Eric Schmidt, then

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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carol bartz

Yahoo hired executive search firm Heidricks & Struggles to look for a new CEO, Kara Swisher of All Things D reports.

That's the exact same firm that helped Yahoo hire now departed CEO Carol Bartz. Swisher says Heidricks & Struggles have a different partner working on this search.

Who on Earth wants the job right now? Yahoo is a total mess. The company doesn't know what it's going to do, or what it's going to be.

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carol bartz

At this rate, there might not be anyone left to run Yahoo in the near future.

The struggling Internet company has seen a rash of high-level departures since Carol Bartz was fired as CEO.

Interim CEO Tim Morse remains with Yahoo, but plenty of others are gone.

There is so much chaos and uncertainty that the search for a new CEO has not really even started, the New York Times reports. (Where have we heard that before?)

“There is so much turnover; it’s impacting the core business,” Ben Schachter, a Macquarie analyst, tells the NYT. “This company needs to find some kind of stability. There cannot be open-ended speculation.”

Additionally, the bankers overseeing its potential sale are scrambling to sell off bits and pieces or the entire Asian portion of the company.

Yahoo still has a $20 billion market cap, so investor groups are taking time to form. For Yahoo, the faster the better.

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jerry yang

Along with the broader market, Yahoo! has been sacked this week.

It is now back to where it was trading in early October. Last week, Yahoo! was up more than 25% in the last month.

It's now only up 13% for the last month. (Nasdaq is still up 7.6% for the last month.)

Don't get me wrong, I don't like that. It stinks, in fact.

However, let's take a step back from the ledge.

There were five things that were reported on with certainty last month that were not necessarily certain at all.

1. A couple of weeks ago, many media reports said that Jerry Yang told the AsiaD conference in Hong Kong that he wasn't going to sell the company. That was odd, as I was in the audience and don't recall him saying that at all. I forget his wording.

He might have said they weren't going to be a forced seller or they didn't have to sell if they didn't want to. He was saying they are playing from a strong hand. Maybe it was a bluff. Later on in the discussion, he said very clearly that they (the board) were going to do what was right for the shareholders. I took that to mean that — just as everyone suspects — this thing is still in the middle of a sales process.

2. A Wall Street Journal article a couple of weeks ago quoted some private equity bidders as saying they thought Yahoo! was only worth $16 to $18 a share in a buyout and was already over-priced at $15 as the stock was at $11 in August. Really? I think Apple has a fair value of $25 a share. It's all hype and I'd really rather buy it at that price than $400.

3. A Bloomberg report on Friday night interrupted an otherwise pleasant dinner I was having. It quoted — in its "scoop" — "5 unnamed sources" who said that Yahoo! was going to separate their Asian assets in a tax-free manner that would lead to a stock buyback or a dividend.

I immediately started getting emails and tweets from folks saying "they are screwing the shareholders" presumably because they aren't selling the Asian assets to someone who would have to pay 35% on assets worth $20 billion according to Yahoo! So, Yahoo! found a way to save $7 billion and that caused the stock to drop 10% or $2 billion on Monday.

This scoop about the "cash-rich split" method of tax savings was actually reported the previous day by the Wall Street Journal as a "scoop." Except I first discussed the cash-rich split method six weeks earlier than that in TheStreet as to what the Yahoo! board should do. Glad they listened.

So, once again, I'm trying to understand where the board was destroying value — and we don't even know that any of this is true. For all we know, these five unnamed sources could be KKR, Silver Lake, DST, TPG Capital, and Hellman & Freidman — all trying to bang down the price of Yahoo.

4. David Kenny stepped down from Akamai's board last week and speculation began immediately at how he was going to be named the next Yahoo! CEO. I spoke out last week about how Kenny left because he was a terrible fit for Akamai, where he was hired to start a new advertising analytics business. Then he decided to go on Yahoo!'s board to pump up his own reputation and burned bridges with Akamai's CEO. I said there was no way he'd be Yahoo!'s next CEO. He confirmed that on Tuesday.

5. They buy a company called Interclick for $270 million. People started immediately wondering, "Why is this company buying anybody if they're up for sale?" Except that they're not sold yet. Who knows if a deal will happen. Yahoo! has $6 billion of digital online ad revenues in 2010, second only to Google.

Yahoo!'s revenues were three times that of Microsoft and six times that of AOL.

It reported weakness in the second quarter in display advertising causing an earnings miss, shareholder hand-wringing, and Carol Bartz's ouster. So it bought a company in Interclick to help improve that area. The deal apparently has been in the works since the summer (when the weakness emerged). I think this is a horrible board as much as the next guy, but they didn't get drunk last night and decide to blow $300 million on a lark acquisition.

There is a lot of mindless tweeting and writing about Yahoo! these days. I can't believe all the folks at the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the New York Times, and Bloomberg falling over themselves for a "scoop" that actually means nothing in the grand scheme of what's happening.

Kara Swisher has been steady, consistent, understated, and correct about Yahoo! for the last four years that I've been following the company closely.

All this ignorance swirling out there is disconnected from what's actually going on at Yahoo! these days.

I expect a deal to happen before the end of January.

This post originally appeared at The Street.

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Mike Jeffries

There are a few ways to spot shady executive pay practices.

For instance if a CEO earns much more than other CEOs in his peer group. Or if he earns much more than other executives at his company. Or if he is getting rich while the company stock tanks.

This week GovernanceMetrics International identified the companies with the most red flags. They shared with us the ten worst.

Teradyne

CEO Michael A. Bradley received an average of $3.7 million in annual compensation from 2008 to 2010.

Teradyne received red flags because its CEO earned more than 3X the median pay of other named executives; his compensation did not reflect the company's share price over the past five years; his incentives were not based on diversified performance metrics; his potential severance package is not capped at 2X annual cash compensation; and more.

Data provided by GovernanceMetrics International.

Constellation Brands

CEO Robert Sands received an average of $7.2 million in annual compensation from 2008 to 2010.

Constellation Brands received red flags because its CEO earned more than 3X the median pay of other named executives; his compensation did not reflect the company's share price over the past five years; his incentives were not based on diversified performance metrics; his potential severance package is not capped at 2X annual cash compensation; and more.

Data provided by GovernanceMetrics International.

Moody's Corporation

CEO Raymond W. McDaniel received an average of $7.4 million in annual compensation from 2008 to 2010.

Moody's Corporation received red flags because its CEO earned more than 3X the median pay of other named executives; his compensation did not reflect the company's share price over the past five years; his incentives were not based on diversified performance metrics; his potential severance package is not capped at 2X annual cash compensation; his pension benefits are not in line with other big companies; and more.

Data provided by GovernanceMetrics International.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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carol bartz

Cisco's annual shareholder meeting is on Wednesday and 12 board members are up for re-election including two former Yahoo CEOs, Carol Bartz and Jerry Yang. Do shareholders want these two continuing to advise Cisco on its business?

The company has officially asked that all 12 be kept on the board.

Bartz's role at Cisco is the lead independent director while Yang's title is simply director. She's been on the board since November, 1996, back when she was flying high as chairman and CEO of Autodesk.

While the standard rate of pay for a non-employee Cisco director is $75,000 a year, the company pays Bartz an additional $30,000 because she has "lead" in her title.

Plus there's up to 50,000 shares annually of Cisco stock available to her, Yang and all the other non-employee directors. Not a bad haul.

Yang has been on the board since July, 2000, otherwise known as Yahoo's glory days. This was four years before the likes of Google would launch.

Let's note that John Chambers is up for re-election, too.

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Two former Yahoo CEOs were up for reelection as Cisco board members and despite their somewhat sullied reputations as of 2011, Cisco shareholders opted to keep them.

Carol Bartz and Jerry Yang will remain as key advisors for Cisco. Bartz's role at Cisco is the lead independent director while Yang's title is simply director.

As we reported earlier, between salary and stock, Cisco pays its board members well for what is essentially a part time gig.

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Leo Apotheker fingers in air

As 2011 draws to a close, we look back at the biggest departures of the year.

In some cases, to pay tribute and bid a fond farewell.

In others, to blow them a big fat raspberry on their way out the door.

Carol Bartz was fired over the phone and dropped a final f-bomb on her way out.

Bartz was always a fiery leader, and her exit was dramatic: she sent an email to employees letting them know that chairman Roy Bostock had fired her over the phone, then told Fortune "they fucked me over."

Her tenure at Yahoo was mixed -- she streamlined the place and got them out of the impossible search arms race, but wasn't able to get the company growing again. Then again, they only gave her less than two years to accomplish the impossible.

Leo Apotheker was canned after almost driving HP into the ground.

Apotheker was hired from SAP in late 2010 to turn HP into an enterprise juggernaut like IBM, and to throw sand in the eyes of rival Oracle.

Unfortunately, he couldn't communicate his vision in a way that the market understood or appreciated, and he never really seemed to be in control of the company.

On one particularly awful day, he managed to lose the confidence of almost everybody by announcing plans to scrap HP's mobile hardware business (a mere six weeks after the high-profile launch of the TouchPad tablet), drop more than $10 billion on a questionable acquisition of enterprise search company Autonomy, and perhaps get out of the PC business. The stock dropped 20% the next day. Apotheker was gone a month later, replaced by Meg Whitman.

Jonathan Rosenberg lost the game of musical chairs in Larry Page's big Google reorg.

Google tried to portray this as a resignation, but sources suggest that this was Page's decision — he looked at the people he wanted leading the new Google product groups, and current product boss Rosenberg wasn't on the list.

He was known as a bit of a character: One time he rode a scooter by a bunch of visiting reporters to demonstrate how wacky the company was.

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scott thompson

Yahoo announced its new CEO, Scott Thompson, on Wednesday.

Thompson was president of PayPal and he'll be joining Yahoo tomorrow. He was lured with a payment package of up to $26 million.

Thompson's 2012 base salary will be $1 million with a guaranteed bonus of another $1 million. Depending on the company's performance, he might be able to up that bonus to $2 million.

In addition, Thompson's stock grant this year is valued at $11 million with a $5 million grant tacked on as a "one-time hiring perk."

There's more. Yahoo is paying Thompson for the stock and bonus he'll miss out on by leaving PayPal too. "He'll get a cash bonus of $1.5 million, plus a grant of restricted stock units worth $6.5 million," writes CNN's Julianne Pepitone. "Of those restricted stock units, $5.5 million worth will vest on March 15. The remaining $1 million will vest in 2013 if Thompson remains in his position."

That all sounds like a lot, but it's about half of what Carol Bartz was given. Her 2009 payday was an estimated $47 million.

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Read: Carol Bartz exclusive: Yahoo "f---ed me over"

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Carol Bartz was fired over the phone and dropped a final f-bomb on her way out.

Leo Apotheker was canned after almost driving HP into the ground.

Jonathan Rosenberg lost the game of musical chairs in Larry Page's big Google reorg.