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America’s Worst Directors: Roy Bostock of Yahoo!

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Roy J. Bostock has made more mistakes than any media company chairman in recent memory. His latest misstep was to fire CEO Carol Bartz over the phone, and forgetting to block her ability to e-mail all the employees at Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO). Bostock’s choice to fire Bartz over the phone was an act of cowardice and one that allowed Bartz to immediately manage the public relations of the event.

Bostock has been Yahoo!’s chairman since January 2008 and a board member since May 2003. That means he was on the board when Terry Semel was pushed out as CEO for non-performance in 2007 and when Jerry Yang was fired for the same reason in November of 2008.

Bostock was chairman when Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) made its $31 bid for the portal company in February 2008, and was a member of the board which rejected that deal. It was the best chance Yahoo! ever had to maximize shareholder value. Yahoo! closed at $12.91 today, although it rose about 6% after hours. Bostock and the board have no succession plan which was demonstrated by the announcement that Timothy Morse was named interim CEO. Bostock and the board should have waited to find a replacement as CEO so there could have been a seamless transition.

Bostock commented after he fired Bartz that “The Board sees enormous growth opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and our primary objective is to leverage the Company’s leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these opportunities.” That certainly hasn’t happened on his watch.

The board should have pushed out Bostock with Bartz. It would have been an acknowledgement that he has been a failure as a board member and as chairman.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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