Hey there, it's Stephen Dovner.

You're about to hear a conversation with Carol Bartz, the former CEO of Yahoo, and before

that, an auto desk.

This interview is recorded in November for our recent six-part series, The Secret Life

of a CEO, which you can find at Freakonomics.com slash CEOs.

And now we are releasing some of our full interviews as special episodes, like this one.

Hope you enjoy.

I know it gets really hard to do in the corporate sphere.

It strikes me that as a CEO, it's kind of a different ballgame when you are running a company

that is public-facing or maybe better put a company that the media for whatever reason

cares about a lot, just because with Yahoo versus Auto Desk, every move is magnified, even

if the company that the media cares about happens to be much smaller than the other, it's

magnified just because the media cares.

Is that observation accurate of mine or is that not really the case?

No, it's accurate, but there's another part to your observation.

And that is that when I ran Yahoo, it was when social media was just starting to gain

ground.

When I ran Auto Desk, we were still waiting for people to send us letters.

It wasn't quite that bad, but there wasn't any instant feedback on, quote, how well or

not well we had done.

And my first meeting at Yahoo, I could not believe looking out, seeing all the little red lights

of people recording me at an internal meeting and I thought, oh, this is going to be really

...