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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.'"
Do not support Yahoo, in their war against peanut butter. This is exactly what Google is trying to prevent with their "Do No Evil" Clause.
... that didn't have any buzzwords in it. Let's hope just that it doesn't get Yahoo into a jam - otherwise that VP could be toast.
Both Yahoo and Google this year have introduced a mind-blowing number of new services that make it easy to accuse either of spreading themselves too thin. Remember when Google said they'd only offer search, not chat or finance pages or horoscopes? Right, now they've also added 30+ other products (luckily they've stayed away from horoscopes for now).
The difference between the two is that Google has at least devoted the resources to improving upon their key product (search), while Yahoo has a difficult time defining what their key product is. I'm sure Brad Garlinghouse (being the VP of Mail) of the memo would say it's Yahoo! Mail, but if you were to interview every VP you'd likely get a different answer.
As an example of their lack of focus, look at the homepage. One week it focuses on news stories, the next it focuses on some random $50,000 video contest. This may keep people entertained, but it also reflects the lack of consistency inherent in the organization (or shows the bread through the peanut butter as Brad might say).
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I know someone who works in the Yahoo London office and there they've already been cutting back on some major departments. Fortunately he managed to find another job in his notice period, but it looks like a large portion of people there were getting the push.
These things unfortunately happen in any big company eventually if they have got involved in too many different areas.
...to call this guy a corporate douchebag.
The thing that really convinces me is the peanut butter metaphor. It's unforgiveable. What has this guy got against peanut butter? It's delicious. I think these guys come up with these ideas as they grunt on the toilet. It makes the blood pressure fall in your cerebral arteries and so you should be suspicious of any epiphany you have there especially if you are in management.
He also bleeds purple and yellow and he brags of having shaved a Y in the back of his head. I'd say that means case closed.
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.
..and having left pretty recently, I have to say this is right on the money. Too many VPs, senior VPs, and directors who just go to meetings all day and don't contribute anything except to get large bonuses (which the engineers rarely see). Properties which have large teams but haven't gotten any updates in years (Calendar, My Yahoo, just to name a couple), which were supposed to have released stuff months ago for "beta", but of course haven't. Stupid acquisitions (Bix, wtf??) instead of just concentrating on what they're good at (go back to the properties update), and duplication of efforts (Flickr, Photos, and last I heard, there were 3 different bookmarking technologies).
On top of all that, there's very little communication between properties so you see lots of duplication of effort, or something that'd be useful to one section of the company which nobody except the designers of that cool thing know about.
I enjoyed working at the company, but I agree it needs a major shakeup. Can the CEO for starters.
I like peanut butter.
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.
While Semel's challenge is painfully radical and hints at cutbacks as something of a panacea, his memo has some important points.
Yahoo needs to follow Jim Collins's advice - find the intersection of their passion, the thing they could do better than anyone in the world, and their profit engine. Focus all of their energies on that spot. Dismiss "good things" to gain "great things."
It's not too late for Yahoo....yet.
Yahoo had cutbacks last year at this time as well. The entire culture is bankrupt (from the veterans' point of view). Young people with fresh ideas and no discipline. Lower employment standards, lower benefits (if you're lucky enough to avoid contractor-dom), inferior products. The smart money sold their Yahoo stock LAST year. I'm trying to think of 1 service that is synonymous with Yahoo and I can't...but I have memorized a number of audio clips (commercials/IM). That's just what I've gotten from my friends who work there (check the blogs, you'll see the sentiments and realities). This spokeshole announcement is just delayed reaction to machinations set in motion long ago. For the few that care enough, plz post about what Yahoo's doing that's fantastic and new that's showing growth.
P.S.
This is not ANTI YAHOO FUD, but my personal conclusions from what I know. Take it with a grain of salt and an eye for how you can find out for yourself.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
'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.
Seriously, why can't a company that is making a ton of profit utilize their money to provide even more services to people? .. sole source of revenue .. gone. Imagine if IBM stayed "focused" on cash registers a century ago. What if iPods never got video capability ("tv shows and movies is spreading us too thin"). This VP lacks vision and I wouldnt trust then guy to do even the thing he's "focused" on properly. If you give a bully a magifying glass he goes out and burns ants, not something useful.
.. which is still the CEO's fault for not realizing it
.. he's getting a bonus!
What does this VP think Yahoo should fixate on? Does he really think Yahoo can be leaps and bounds beyond competition in one space? Does he have creative ideas for how this would happen? How long does he think one revenue stream can be milked for, staying focused in one market sector results in revenue stagnation and suddenly when a paradigm shifting competitor arrives you're screwed
Whenever a company lays off people en masse, it's ALWAYS because of the myopic vision of the CEO and senior management (save natural disasters). See here are two common reasons why an IT person becomes unemployed.
1. The worker is unable to do the job. - This is the workers fault, or (much less likely but possible) the management's fault for placing the worker in a job they arent supposed to do
2. Competitors in same industry doing fine but CEO cant figure out how to utilize thousands of people who are skilled - This is CEO's fault, unless the workers are incompetent en masse
But don't cry for the CEO in #2 situation
..... I thought it was another mod for Grand Theft Auto.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Unbelievably to me, some sites can already ascertain your character using little real info. For example, "www.LikeBetter.com guesses your physical and personality characteristics just by which pictures you like. Every 10 or so pictures you can click on the brain at the bottom and it tells you what it knows about you. I couldn't believe how accurate it was ... After about 10 rounds, it had given me 20 characteristics, only 1 was incorrect.
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Only natural peanut butter. Don't eat that processed partially-hydrogenated sugar-enriched peanut-flavored garbage also known as Jif, Skippy, Peter Pan or one of the many other faces of this great Satan.
This guy is a typical MBA cut throat loudmouth who thinks he should run yahoo.com:
g arlinghouse.html
http://www.ptc.org/events/ptc06/program/speakers/
He became president of dialpad.com from working at the venture capital company that funded dialpad, when dialpad was bought by yahoo.com they inherited this master of the obvious.
Notice he has virtually ZERO technology education, he is a diametrically opposite of Google.com management, yahoo's competitor (actually yahoo is google's bitch). Yet they continue to promote and stack the management with these same types. Shareholders should revolt.
This screed reeks of the Good Manager's First Priority: Blaming someone else. In this case it's the whole fscking organization.
I think it's reasonable to assume this guy's department has as many problems as the next department except he's doing the classic pre-emptive management tactic of shifting blame by calling out someone else.
They are your worst kind of manager. They stink up the whole organization as soon as they drop their first pre-emptive strike. Get out quick because they tend to drag everything down and stay around launching strike after strike on others and collect hefty bonuses at the end of the fiscal year.
What makes it so insidious is they get all of the people that want a better organization (change advocates) behind them because jackasses like this blindly fire salvo after salvo around the organization. The change advocates typically don't like the person in question but see any kind of change as "Better than it was." It turns the departments in the work environment into a fortress.
I can't imagine a job that would be worth staying in with nut jobs like this.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html