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Yahoo! VP Calls For a Shakeup
prostoalex writes, "Yahoo!'s Senior VP Brad Garlinghouse sent out a company-wide memo calling for layoffs of 15-20% of Yahoo! staff and reversal of priorities to concentrate on major issues facing the company. (The Wall Street Journal posted a copy of the memo.) MarketWatch quotes Garlinghouse: '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. I hate peanut butter. We all should.'"
By the analogy he adopts, peanut butter is investment. What bothers him is the nature of the layer of peanut butter : it's too thin. So the problem is with the peanut butter allocation, not the peanut butter. And in fact, his favored projects should get more peanut butter given his chosen metaphor, since peanut butter == investment.
Which makes this, I hate peanut butter. We all should, a mind-blowingly asinine comment. This guy doesn't even understand his own analogy and maybe Yahoo! would be wise to re-allocate the investment it made in him. Sounds like he wouldn't mind that at all.
This is what happens when people make comments they think are snappy and incisive without actually thinking about what the hell they're saying.
Or Christmas bonus?
This sounds more like an exec trying to get a nice fat Christmas bonus for himeself by putting 15%+ of the workers out of work for the holiday season. I have worked for 3 fortune 500's and this is how they all do it. They layoff a nice chunk of workers and then give themselves a big fat bonus for doing it. Pretty sickening if you ask me.
Yup, I don't see anything new here. Yahoo! has always invested broadly and shallowly. This dude won't change anything. He just wants to get a fat Christmas bonus so he figured the only way to do that was to put a bunch of people out of work. Don't worry, he and his family will have a nice holiday season. As for the 15% - 20% that he fires? Well, that is where we come in by giving money to the Salvation Army to help out families like that.
Long live uncontrolled capitalism! Hey, it is only to "maximize profits" or to "increase share holder value" right? Those few hundred or thousand families, well, they don't count.
I will eat my shorts if this bum doesn't get some type of bonus for successfully executing this round of layoffs.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
'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. I hate peanut butter. We all should.'
This is so utterly bankrupt. HE IS THE MANAGEMENT, HE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE STRATEGY. Laying off 15-20% and not going after the problem - bad strategy, incompetance at the top. This sort of turmoil will only cause the talented people in Yahoo to bail out and find more rewarding opportunities.
The stock market is going to pummel Yahoo. It is one thing to drive costs down through keeping the number of employees down, it is another thing altogether to show signs that senior management has no fucking idea about what they are doing.