Subscribe to the Three Star Leadership Blog

The Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training.

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check Wally's Three Star Leadership Letter

Find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.

Find out more about Wally's coaching services.

This week the Wall Street Journal's Special Report is on "All Things Digital." There are lots of excellent pieces, including one on Yahoo.

You may have been following the Yahoo Soap Opera. Little Jerry Yang strives to keep the search engine he founded out of the clutches of the Evil Dragon of Redmond and safe from the Joker, aka Carl Icahn.

Jerry, you see, started Yahoo as a way to catalog everything on the World Wide Web. In those heady Dot Com Bubble Days, people were throwing money at anything related to the Web. Whether it was actually a business or not didn't matter.

So Jerry's way to play on the Web and avoid doing his dissertation at Stanford turned out to make him very rich as well. Alas, he mistook his good luck for business acumen.

The fact is that Jerry Yang is a very smart guy. He just doesn't seem to know or care much about the messy business necessity of making a profit. As proof I offer you the following exchange from an interview with Walt Mossberg, the Journal's savvy personal technology columnist.

"MR. MOSSBERG: We know what the business of General Motors is. We know what the business of Apple is. What is the business of Yahoo?

MR. YANG: We want you to start your day at Yahoo. That is homepage, that is mail, that is search, that is mobile. That is an incredibly powerful position that happens to be a position that we occupied for a lot of our history. That's our consumer goal, dream, aspiration."

Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland that, "There's no 'there' there." If you look at Jerry Yang's response about the business of Yahoo, you'll see that there's no business there.

That's Mr. Yang's problem. But if the Yahoo shareholders don't get rid of him and let someone competent run the place, there won't be any business left there.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.

Request your free copy of "Meeting the Challenges of the Boomer Brain Drain: An integrated approach."

Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

Click here to find out more about Wally's coaching services.

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check our Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Letter.

Click here to find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.