Yahoo's Management Exodus Could Be a Very Good Thing

Wall Street, the media and the blogs are unanimous in their view that the management exodus at Yahoo! (YHOO) this past week is a terrible thing and shows the the company is in shambles. The rats are leaving the sinking ship, as it were.

I'll take the opposite side of that argument, because someone has to

Jeff Weiner, Usama Fayyad, Qi Lu, Brad Garlinghouse, Vish Makhijani, Caterina Fake, Joshua Schachter, and Stewart Butterfield are all talented people who will be missed. I know quite a few of these people and I would love to have the opportunity to work with them in the future.

But the truth is, Yahoo! needs some new blood in its executive ranks. That new blood can come from within the company or from outside the company.

Yahoo! probably needs more people to leave in the coming months, particularly senior people who have been around for a long time.

And it needs to reach into its organization and tap people on their shoulders and say 'its your time to step up'.  And it needs to go find some new leadership who can bring talent with them

Yahoo has over 500mm worldwide unique visitors a month. It has massive reach. It has massive scale. There is no reason it cannot and will not be an important business going forward

It needs to focus on monetization, rationalizing its products and services, and making money, lots of it.

All of this is still very possible. But it's clearly a turnaround of sorts and needs to be approached that way. The best turnaround people I know start with a challenge to the team. 'Are you ready to dig deep and work really hard for the next five years to get this thing working again? If yes, let's do it. If no, then you have to leave now.'

That's what is happening at Yahoo! - and it can be a very good thing.

Comments

[marketwatchr]

Yahoo does need to change from the inside....out and from the Top--- Down.

[tillman]

I agree with your view. It is surprising to see the same people crying over many of the same executives leave the company who were responsible for the mess the company is in today. I mean, come on; except for Flickr duo everyone was there from 2002 onwards. And, they not only didn't do a very good job of managing the company but also lost to Google. Some more heads should roll too. Somebody like Sue Decker should also be gone. It is surprising that nobody talks about her on the Wall Street inspite of the fact that she is the defacto CEO in the company. Jerry is nothing but a mask for the public while all major internal decisions are make by her.

[kcube99]

as a yahoo mail us from 1998 or so onwards i have appreciated the free email facility nd large storge available. though gmail/google started this trend oinglarge storage space yahoo caught up fast . microsoftook many years and many lost mails for me that i very rarely log on to msn mail. and that adds on to my owes of lost news bullein. yahoo merger with microsoft would have been a great loss to the millions of yahoo comunity if microsoft implemented similar policies in yahoo too. though am not an informed blogge like the above i agree with the views expressed i the article aboout the exodus in yahoo.

[sweetrevenge2008]

It's a real shame that those top executives that are jumping ship managed to be there when yahoo was doing great, but when it came to the "chips being on the table" and everyone sticking together and turning the struggling company around in the right direction toward being profitable again, they decided to jump ship. Maybe this is a good thing. Why keep someone around that won't do their part to help turn the company around when their talents are needed the most? Of those employees that do remain and they will turn their company around, these individuals should be rewarded with a higher pay then what they are currently receiving, since they could have joined the others and jumped ship, but they haven't and are still there at yahoo, doing their jobs and trying to help yahoo turn itself around. My hat comes off for those individuals that are hanging in there and rooting for yahoo! This takes a very special type of person to do this and a person that the company should be mighty proud to have in their employee ranks, especially now, when its going to take teamwork and lots of it.

Thank you

[Carl Icahnt]

Good riddance for most of them, I say.

Take Usama Fayyad, for example. He's peddled several companies owned by friends/extended family for Yahoo to buy out for overpriced sums of money. It wasn't too hard since his wife was the CTO's (Farzad Nassem) cousin. Then, after the acquisition, folks in the company wonder what the heck it was bought for.

Or, Brad Garlinghouse, do you really think he is responsible for Yahoo Mail/Messenger/etc being good? No, it was the engineers in those teams! He has plenty of failures under him too. The new Yahoo Mail was so slow for the first year, it convinced many Yahoo mail users to switch to Gmail. The new release of Yahoo Photos was even slower then the new Yahoo Mail (see the pattern), until it was canned. The only reason Brad was saved the embarrassment for that failure was the Search team purchased Flickr after Brad decided he didn't want it!

The Flickr folks it seems were only waiting for the last payout from their buyout to leave. Seems like a longtime plan.

From my sources inside the company, Qi Lu is a loss, but can you really expect people to work one place forever. I think he's worked there for 10 years or so.

Thanks Fred for a fair and insightful article.

[WAKEUP]

People leave companies all the time. It's not even news.

[Mit]

True what you say, Yahoo has an incredible reach, has the best web mail with about 270 millions of users, is still the most visited site from the internet (according to Alexa.com) and people needs Yahoo.

I think that a MicroHoo or a YaSoft will not be a good idea for the Internet Market, if this will happen then I will move out to another email service, to another internet search, I don't want to be a Micro-internet-custome... (windows is sufficient for me).

[sv_observer]

"Take Usama Fayyad, for example. He's peddled several companies owned by friends/extended family for Yahoo to buy out for overpriced sums of money. It wasn't too hard since his wife was the CTO's (Farzad Nassem) cousin."

Wow, so Usama is married to Zod's cousin? That explains a lot!

[tyneham]

The issue is whether the alleged rats are leaving and deck-chairs rearrange on a stinking, sinking ship. Do the alleged rats (Jeff Weiner, Usama Fayyad, Qi Lu, Brad Garlinghouse, Vish Makhijani, Caterina Fake, Joshua Schachter, and Stewart Butterfield, etc) have the guts to expose Yahoo and/or Google in a way that would help stop defrading online advertisers every day?

Internet click fraud is underestimated by web-traffic auditors. The fraud is deceptively downplayed by major financial beneficiaries and their small time accomplices or affiliates. Big or not, no online advertiser is immune from growing the fraud. There is mounting unease and concerns over the fraud on all websites that have affiliate programs. These serious, legal issues are not being addressed by the law makers in most countries.

US Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, the Commerce, the Justice Department, Trade and Consumer Protection panel, the House Small Business Committee panel, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection panel and the Senate Commerce Committee and all law makers, for example, must also scrutinise the pending/proposed Yahoo-Google deal, and its impact on defrauded advertisers, big or small.

By some logical estimates, click fraud could be over sixty percent. However, even one percent of $90 billion of global 2008-2009 Internet ad spend is too high, mainly because advertisers, big or small, are still deceived, overcharged by millions and thus defrauded every day.

Read how, for example, "Yahoo protects online fraudsters, locks out legal ethical experts," web links here tyneham.wordpress.com , del.icio.us/tyneham?se... where some cases are cited, www.networkworld.com/c... , tyneham.blogspot.com , tyneham.newsvine.com