Reportr.net

All is not well at the net giant Yahoo. The Wall Street Journal has a story about a senior vice-president bemoaning Yahoo’s current strategy.

A four-page memo by Brad Garlinghouse , SVP of Communications, Communities, and Front Doors, compares Yahoo’s strategy to peanut butter.

Why peanut butter? In his words:

“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.”

The memo makes some good points, talking about Yahoo’s lack of a cohesive strategy and highlight areas where the company has competing services. Flickr and Yahoo photos anyone?

Looking at Yahoo’s behaviour over the past 18 months, it is clear that the company has been branching in new areas at breakneck speed. Where Yahoo has failed is to bring these different services and ideas together. The risk is damaging some very popular and successful services, such as Flickr.

Brad Garleyhouse’s solution? Focus the vision, restore accountability and clarity of ownership, and execute a radical reorganization. He spells out two key points:

“Blow up the matrix. Empower a new generation and model of General Managers to be true general managers. Product, marketing, user experience & design, engineering, business development & operations all report into a small number of focused General Managers. Leave no doubt as to where accountability lies.

Kill the redundancies. Align a set of new BU’s so that they are not competing against each other. Search focuses on search. Social media aligns with community and communications. No competing owners for Video, Photos, etc. And Front Page becomes Switzerland. This will be a delicate exercise — decentralization can create inefficiencies, but I believe we can find the right balance.”

You can read most of the memo at PaidContent - just in case the WSJ limits its copy to subscribers.