60. How to Deal with a Direct Attack

“That was certainly a downer!”

The annual shareholder meeting of Yahoo! Inc. in June, 2011, was an “unlikely lovefest”—according to the report of the event in the New York Times1—unlikely because the company’s stagnant stock price and poor performance against its competitors would seem to have invited a more critical session. The lovefest carried through more than an hour of glowing outlook from the board and management as well as softball questions from the shareholders.

But then a man named Steve Landry took the floor and identified himself as a personal investor who also advised institutional investors holding more than a million shares of Yahoo! Mr. Landry then proceeded to attack the company in general ...

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