Little Jerry Yang almost steps aside
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Welcome to the latest chapter in the saga of Little Jerry Yang and His Yahoo. The Wall Street Journal has announced that he will step down as CEO, but not just yet.
The saga started in a trailer on the Stanford campus. Jerry had a doctoral dissertation to write. Like most people faced with such a daunting task he found a way to procrastinate.
"I know," he said, "let's catalog everything on the internet."
At the time that was a very new idea. People, including me, got all excited about Jerry's site, on Stanford University servers. First it was called "Jerry Yang's Guide to the WWW." Later it became Yahoo.
Yahoo was one of the boats the rising tide that become the Dot-Com Bubble lifted. Venture capitalists were throwing money at bright geeks with internet business ideas in those days.
But Yahoo has had leadership problems from the start. Yahoo first brought in what was called "adult supervision" in the person of Tim Koogle.
But the inner circle, including Jerry Yang, never listened to people who had a clue about the real world. The key executives of acquired companies left as soon as they could. By 2001, Yahoo was in trouble. Koogle left.
No problem. Yahoo did not have anyone inside the company they thought was qualified to lead it. They began a search for an outsider.
Little Jerry Yang helped select Terry Semel as the new CEO. Yahoo planned to make money on advertising. Semel had no experience in advertising. He had no experience in technology either.
Last year, Terry Semel was sent packing and Little Jerry decided it would be a swell thing to be in charge of the company for a while. He had two qualifications for the job. He was bright. And he was the founder, which meant he had enough stock to influence the board.
The fact that he had no experience or demonstrated competence in business didn't seem to matter. Little Jerry dug right in and started doing magic. So far he's made a deal with Microsoft, 70 percent of shareholder value, and a couple of thousand people disappear.
Now Little Jerry wants to go back to being a Chief Yahoo. In this case the title seems especially apt, but it's one of those honorary jobs that companies give to founders.
As Chief Yahoo, Jerry will sit in his office and think deep thoughts. He will, no doubt, concoct strategy. He will be important but not accountable.
Since he was busy doing magic, Jerry hasn't found the time to identify a successor. So Yahoo will begin a search. And Little Jerry will get to play CEO until one is found. He laid all this out in an email to Yahoo employees.
The email is written in lower case. That might be OK for text messages between friends. When the CEO of a publicly traded company does it in a formal communication, it's juvenile self-indulgence.
In his email Jerry tells the people who work for Yahoo that he will "always bleed purple." But here's a news flash, Jerry. You're not the one doing the bleeding.
You've gotten to play businessman for a year and half now, even though your credentials would send the HR department into laughing fits if you applied for a top job at any other company.
Yahoo is in worse shape now than when you took over. There's no plan for making things better. There's no new (and hopefully qualified) CEO on the horizon.
So do the right thing. Get out of the way and give somebody competent a shot at saving your company.
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.
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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.
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Nicely developed as always, Wally.
Whenever I see Yang's name pop up in relation to the CEO position I think, "Haven't we seen this movie before?"
This may serve as a trailer for the sequel "Son of Bailout" from another post.
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What will be interesting to see is whether or not the next leader of Yahoo! will be a true Geoleader or not, per Wibbeke's Geoleadership Model (www.globalbusinessleadership.com). For Yahoo! to remain competitive globally, someone with true intercultural savvy, as well as solid business acumen, is badly needed.
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