Yahoo’s woes outlined in memo
Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, says its spreading its resources too thinly:
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 scared to be left out. 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.
I hate peanut butter. We all should.
Abraham Lincoln and SMS
A hundred years from now digital archivists will be poring through our digital trails and coming up with pure gems. Like the text message George Bush’s handlers sent to vice president Cheney after the first plane hit the Twin Towers:
“Still redng goat bk 2 kids. Hang on. ;-)”
Yes, I made that up. But the story of Bush’s SMSes would make for interesting reading on the redundancy of his leadership. Just like the Tom Wheeler book Mr Lincoln’s T-mails makes for pleasurable read on how Abraham Lincoln was an early adopter of electronic messaging.
Wheeler’s discovery of the thousands of telegraph messages Lincoln used to commandeer the civil war and give succint orders to his generals on the frontlines, sometimes with Lincolnesque candour, suggests an unheralded trait and perhaps a new
title: King of SMS.
Take his message to General Grant for instance:
How Dilbert creator got his voice back
Scott Adams posted a story on how the old rhyme “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick…” somehow helped him regain his voice after 18 months.
Read the AP story or inspiring original post and comments after.
Could Steve Jobs Get The Chop
According to Stratnews’ Mark Anderson almost 200 different corporations have announced external and/or internal investigations, generally followed by resignations of top officers on the backdating of stock options.
McAfee CEO and chairman of the board for nearly six years, George Samenuk, and CNet co-founder and CEO Shelby Bonnie were among the big names that fell.
Could Steve Jobs be next?