Snap decision?

Two months ago, Kristen O’Hara left her prime job at Time-Warner, where she worked for 14 years. O’Hara had been the Chief Marketing Office for Global Media.

Then along came Snap, Inc. As in Snapchat.

Younger, hipper, cooler. Maker-of-millionaires. And billionaires. (Although O’Hara was likely joining too late to become one of the latter.)

Her new gig? VP of Sales. And after just a few weeks, she actually got a promotion to Chief Business Officer.

That was on a Friday.

Fast forward todays, and on the following Monday, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel

…rescinded the offer and hired Jeremi Gorman, who oversaw ad sales at Amazon.com Inc. The switch was jarring for Snap’s sales division, as O’Hara was well-liked according to people familiar with the matter. Now she’s gone. (Source: Bloomberg)

O’Hara put out a statement saying that her departure was due to “changes in team structure.” Those “changes” involved putting someone else in the job after she’d been announced for it.

Changes in team structure all right. More like change of mind, change of personnel. More like shoving someone into a revolving door while her replacement is pushing her way through.

Anyway, O’Hara’s statement has got to be the non-statement understatement of the year. I’m sure she’s seething and humiliated – not so much that she got screwed, but that she’d taken her chances in joining a company run by a 28 year-old who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to how to treat people, including an experienced professional twenty-years his senior.

Spiegel outdid himself in praising O’Hara. Pretty effusive given that she was there for a few weeks.

“In her time here, Kristen had an immediate and positive impact on the company,” Spiegel wrote. “She had a deep understanding of our business from the outset and forged strong client relationships that we will continue to build upon. I will miss the leadership and enthusiasm she brought to the organization and wish her only continued success.”

I have no doubt that O’Hara was a pretty good forger of strong client relationships. She didn’t get to that near-pinnacle position at Time-Warner marketing by not being a relationship-forger. But, realistically speaking, how strong were relationships forged in a couple of weeks?And that complete and utter nonsense about missing O’Hara’s “leadership and enthusiasm.” Talk about faux boo-hoo. The real answer is ‘not that much.’

Even if Gorman works well in the role, the incident has eroded trust in Spiegel’s decision-making as he is working to improve his leadership skills, and as Snap is depending on new managers to help boost the company’s performance.

Way to go, Evan. Eroding trust in your decision-making and demonstrating just how atrocious your leadership skills are in one fell swoop. Well, Spiegel’s still a billionaire, so there’s that. But you don’t have to be a skilled decision-maker, a skilled leader, to make money. You just need to know how to make money. You just need to have some tech idea that the market takes a liking to and enjoy the wild-arsed valuations that this market is capable of ginning up. In other words, you need to have a ton o’ luck.

And good luck to Gorman. She’s going to need it working for this outfit which, by the way, is losing active users at quite a clip.

O’Hara sounds like the real deal.

In her short time as Snap’s vice president of U.S. sales, she built trust with the team by gathering input from its members, and then using that to create strategic plans for 2019 and beyond, according to people familiar with the matter. Her management style, which was open and communicative, contrasted with that of others in Snap leadership, the people said.

O’Hara obviously made a poor career move here, but, hey, haven’t we all made mistakes when it comes to taking a job that turns out to be not such a hot fit. Just not at this level and with this degree of exposure. Yet I’m sure that she wasn’t making a snap decision, which sounds like what Siegel was doing in promoting O’Hara to a new role, only to change his mind with whiplash speed. 

I suspect that Kristen O’Hara is going to land on her no-doubt capable feet. Good luck, Ms. O’Hara. You’re well out of that shit show. Hope you got the most golden of golden parachutes.