Valleywag
As part of Jerry Yang's promised 100-day turnaround of the company, Yahoo recruited some of its best and brightest, in small teams of 4 to 6 people, to cook up bold new tactics to compete with Facebook, Google, and the rest. Yahoo executive Ash Patel oversaw the initiative, which was disruptive to the company's day-to-day work, says a tipster brought into one of the secret skunkworks. Those drafted poured weeks into the effort, he says, with the hope that their ideas might actually get built. No such luck. Yang reviewed the projects — and then promptly sent them into Yahoo's managerial swamps for execution. Which, of course, means nothing's getting done, as usual. What will change that, I wonder?
"The only thing that's clear is many people in the upper rungs at Yahoo need to be fired as they continuously just get in the way of development by talking and not building," says the tipster. What I'd like to know is what some of these great ideas were. If they're brought into the light of day, I believe, Yahoo management might actually be shamed into greenlighting them. If your save-Yahoo plan is getting stymied by bureaucracy, drop me a line.
Comments
There will be NO great advertising ideas coming out of this sad, tired company. They wouldn't know a great idea if it hit them in the face.
I am not even sure of *any* great ideas will come, much less advertising related ones. Yahoo! are consistently losing market share to other, more dynamic companies that actually value the input from their employees. It has been the same way at Yahoo! for the past 4 years. Senior management are not concerned with listening and instead are more interested in talking. But hey, look where that has gotten them. Carry on guys, you are doing a fantastic job of ruining a great company. As long as you have those share options worht millions that are not performance related, you don't actually have to deliver anything. Which is great. Wow, I never thought it would come to Yahoo! not being a household name anymore. Ho hum.
one of the first changes Yahoo! needs to enact is a zero-tolerance policy for leakers.
your public criticism does no good and your leaking does real harm. if you want to lob criticism, i'd invite you to do so from outside of the company.
The problem with big companies attempting to do this sort of thing is that they always make one fatal mistake: they think that they need to have upper management (or rather, *any* member of management) vet the ideas before greenlighting them.
The problem here is that innovation really just involves making lots of bets, essentially random ones, and then nurturing the ones that take off. Executives think they can somehow take a bunch of ideas, look over them, and somehow spot the winners. That's totally wrong. If any human being could do that, venture capital would be a zero-risk investment. The key thing that everyone misses is that NO ONE can predict what's going to work, and the only way to grow the next big thing is to just let your people have at it, failing 95% of the time (a failure rate unacceptable at large companies), and hitting a home run 5% of the time.
Great post! We recently wrote a post on a blog or reasons candidates have given us for leaving yahoo!. www.askbinc.com
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