www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=4015
An internal Yahoo memo written last week by Senior Vice President Brad Garlinghouse has been leaked to the press and urges a major organizational shake up which would cut 20% of the current Yahoo workforce. In what may become a nightmare public relations day tomorrow, the restructuring of Yahoo may be just what the company needs in an effort to concentrate on its core search, social media, entertainment and monetization efforts while trimming a bit of the fat (or the peanut butter oil). In what can be seen as an aggresive move by the Yahoo SVP, his Peanut Butter Manifesto' is as follows: Three and half years ago, I enthusiastically joined Yahoo! The magnitude of the opportunity was only matched by the magnitude of the assets. And an amazing team has been responsible for rebuilding Yahoo! I am fortunate to have been a part of dramatic change for the Company. More users than ever, more engaging than ever and more profitable than ever! And like so many people here, I love this company But all is not well. Last Thursday's NY Times article was a blessing in the disguise of a painful public flogging. While it lacked accurate details, its conclusions rang true, and thus was a much needed wake up call. A clear statement with which I, and far too many Yahoo's, agreed. A reminder that the measure of any person is not in how many times he or she falls down - but rather the spirit and resolve used to get back up. I believe we must embrace our problems and challenges and that we must take decisive action. We have the opportunity - in fact the invitation - to send a strong, clear and powerful message to our shareholders and Wall Street, to our advertisers and our partners, to our employees (both current and future), and to our users. They are all begging for a signal that we recognize and understand our problems, and that we are charting a course for fundamental change, Our current course and speed simply will not get us there. It's time for us to get back up and seize this invitation. I imagine there's much discussion amongst the Company's senior most leadership around the challenges we face. At the risk of being redundant, I wanted to share my take on our current situation and offer a recommended path forward, an attempt to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Recognizing Our Problems We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything - to everyone. We've known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don't talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn't to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics. Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like - rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy. I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. The most painful manifestation of this is the massive redundancy that exists throughout the organization. We now operate in an organizational structure - admittedly created with the best of intentions - that has become overly bureaucratic. For far too many employees, there is another person with dramatically similar and overlapping responsibilities. This slows us down and burdens the company with unnecessary costs. Equally problematic, at what point in the organization does someone really OWN the success of their product or service or feature? Product, marketing, engineering, corporate strategy, financial operations... there are so many people in charge (or believe that they are in charge) that it's not clear if anyone is in charge. This forces decisions to be pushed up - rather than down. It forces decisions by committee or consensus and discourages the innovators from breaking the mold... There's a reason why a centerfielder and a left fielder have clear areas of ownership. Pursuing die same ball repeatedly results in either collisions or dropped balls. Knowing that someone else is pursuing the ball and hoping to avoid that collision - we have become timid in our pursuit. Combine a lack of focus with unclear ownership, and the result is that decisions are either not made or are made when it is already too late. Without a clear and focused vision, and without complete clarity of ownership, we lack a macro perspective to guide our decisions and visibility into who should make those decisions. We are repeatedly stymied by challenging and hairy decisions. We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company. Global strategy from Int'l We have lost our passion to win. Far too many employees are "phoning" it in, lacking the passion and commitment to be a part of the solution. We sit idly by while - at all levels - employees are enabled to "hang around". Moreover, our compensation systems don't align to our overall success. Weak performers that have been around for years are rewarded. And many of our top performers aren't adequately recognized for their efforts. As a result, the employees that we really need to stay (leaders, risk-takers, innovators, passionate) become discouraged and leave. Unfortunately many who opt to stay are not the ones who will lead us through the dramatic change that is needed. Nearly every media and communications company is painfully jealous of our position. We have the largest audience, they are highly engaged and our brand is synonymous with the Internet. If we get back up, embrace dramatic change, we will win. I don't pretend there is only one path forward available to us. However, at a minimum, I want to be pad of the solution and thus have outlined a plan here that I believe can work. It is my strong belief that we need to act very quickly or risk going further down a slippery slope, The plan here is not perfect; My belief is that the smoothly spread peanut butter needs to turn into a deliberately sculpted strategy - that is narrowly focused. We can't simply ask each BU to figure out what they should stop doing. If we believe Media will maximize our ROI - then let's not be bashful about reducing our investment in other areas. We need to make the tough decisions, articulate them and stick with them - acknowledging that some people (users / partners / employees) will not like it. I believe there are too many BU leaders who have gotten away with unacceptable results and worse - unacceptable leadership. We must signal to both the employees and to our shareholders that we will hold these leaders (ourselves) accountable and implement change. By building around a strong and unequivocal GM structure, we will not only empower those leaders, we will eliminate significant overhead throughout our multi-headed matrix. It must be very clear to everyone in the organization who is empowered to make a decision and ownership must be transparent. With that empowerment comes increased accountability - leaders make decisions, the rest of the company supports those decisions, and the leaders ultimately live/die by the results of those decisions. My view is that far too often our compensation and rewards are just spreading more peanut butter. We need to be much more aggressive about performance based compensation. This will only help accelerate our ability to weed out our lowest performers and better reward our hungry, motivated and productive employees. b) We must dramatically decentralize and eliminate as much of the matrix as possible. I emphatically believe we simply must eliminate the redundancies we have created and the first step in doing this is by restructuring our organization. We can be more efficient with fewer people and we can get more done, more quickly. We need to return more decision making to a new set of busin...
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