Is Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino heading toward a glass cliff?

Less than two months into his $44 billion buy of Twitter, Elon Musk declared that whoever took over as the corporate’s CEO “must like pain a lot.” Then he promised he’d step down as quickly as he discovered a substitute “foolish enough” to need the job. That individual, Musk introduced Friday, is Linda Yaccarino, a highly-regarded promoting government from NBCUniversal. She’ll begin in six weeks. How lengthy she’ll final would possibly depend upon her ache tolerance.

When Musk tweeted on Thursday that he is discovered a brand new CEO however did not say who, one phrase caught out: “she.”

Some of his extra excessive Twitter followers took quick concern with the brand new CEO’s gender, however the truth that Musk employed a lady is definitely notable just because it’s so uncommon – in business general and particularly within the tech business – to see feminine chief executives.

Her appointment renewed questions concerning the “glass cliff,” a principle that ladies – in addition to underrepresented minorities – usually tend to be employed for management jobs when there is a disaster, which units them up for failure.

The time period was coined in 2005 by University of Exeter professors Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam, and there have been loads of well-known examples since then, from Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer to the UK’s Theresa May.

Could Yaccarino be headed towards it?

“Her credentials are impeccable and she’s been extremely successful so far. But she’s also been in settings where her success was achievable,” mentioned Jo-Ellen Pozner, a business professor at Santa Clara University who research company governance. “I mean no disrespect to her or to diminish her in the least. I just think that this is an impossible situation for basically anybody.” Whether or not she succeeds relies upon partly on how a lot Musk is prepared to step again from Twitter’s day-to-day operations.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO mentioned he’ll proceed to function Twitter’s government chairman – Yaccarino’s boss – in addition to its chief know-how officer, reporting to her. He added that Yaccarino “will focus primarily on business operations.”

From the second Yaccarino’s title was confirmed, promoting business consultants hailed the choice as a superb one – maybe the one one – to steer Twitter towards stability and profitability.

Yaccarino oversaw NBCUniversal’s market technique and promoting income for its broadcast, cable and digital belongings, which totalled practically $10 billion. In comparability, Twitter’s ultimate quarterly income as a public firm, reported in July, was simply $1.17 billion.

“She is exactly what Twitter needs to start rebuilding advertiser trust, bring back big advertisers and really start improving Twitter’s ad business,” mentioned Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence who follows Twitter. “That said, there are still a lot of challenges and Yaccarino is going to have her hands full from day one.”

Musk’s tenure at Twitter’s helm has been chaotic at finest. He started his first day firing the corporate’s prime executives, adopted by roughly 80 per cent of its workers.

This has meant that Twitter has far fewer engineers to make sure that the location is operating easily and much fewer content material moderators to assist rid it of hate speech, animal cruelty and graphic violence.

He’s upended the platform’s verification system and has scaled again safeguards in opposition to the unfold of misinformation. It’s been a few of these modifications – together with Musk’s personal penchant for spreading misinformation and interesting with outstanding conspiracy theorists and far-right figures – that analysts say soured many advertisers on the platform.

“Elon Musk has been telling us for months repeatedly that Twitter’s problems are the result of advertisers pulling away. But that’s not the source of his problems. Advertisers pulling away are a symptom of the problems at Twitter. He’s created chaos. He’s eliminated internal controls. He’s eliminated critical functions like content moderation. He’s made the user experience very unpredictable. He’s allowed dangerous voices to flourish,” Pozner mentioned. “Nobody – man, woman, alien – is going to be able to right this ship given these circumstances.”

The glass cliff principle holds up in business in addition to politics, and, in keeping with a 2011 Harvard Business Review report, “does not seem to apply to organisations with a history of female leaders.”

Twitter, like most tech corporations, doesn’t have a robust historical past of feminine leaders. Its founders had been all males, as had been all 5 of its CEOs, together with Musk. While feminine chief executives are uncommon throughout industries, they’re exceptionally uncommon in tech. Of the 340 CEOs in a latest survey of S&P 500 corporations, 18 had been girls, up from 16 in 2020. In tech, outstanding feminine CEOs embrace Oracle’s Safra Catz and chipmaker AMD’s Lisa Su.

Yaccarino appears able to go head-to-head with Musk, although it is not clear how that’ll play out. In a latest on-stage interview with him, she requested Musk if he may decide to not tweeting after 3 a.m. Agreeing that he is “gotten myself in trouble a few times” with late night time/early morning tweets, he responded with a noncommittal “I will aspire to tweet less at 3 a.m.”

She additionally requested Musk if he is open to let advertisers “influence” his imaginative and prescient for Twitter, in “product development, ad safety, content moderation” so they might get extra enthusiastic about investing within the platform.

Musk shortly shut her down.

“It’s totally cool to say that you want to have your advertising appear in certain places in Twitter and not in other places, but it is not cool to to try to say what Twitter will do,” he mentioned. “And if that means losing advertising dollars, we lose it. But freedom of speech is paramount.”

Regaining advertisers’ belief would require stabilising Twitter and guaranteeing that key product choices are made thoughtfully and intentionally and never, as Musk has typically been identified to do, on the spur of the second, impressed by a fan’s tweet or a passing thought. Industry insiders describe Yaccarino as extraordinarily succesful, with a confirmed observe report and spectacular resume.

But if she’s to succeed on the business aspect, she’ll want Musk’s buy-in on the product aspect.

“It is really debatable whether or not he’s going to hand the reins over entirely to Yaccarino,” Enberg mentioned “And a lot of Twitter’s success from here on out really depends on what he decides in terms of that.”