Now that Carol Bartz is on board at Yahoo!, I'm sure she's meeting all the senior people and getting presentations of all the 2009 plans and the critical investments. Having lived through more than one change of the guard at Yahoo!, I'd counsel Carol to consider the following:
1) Optimize premium service revenue
Who can you bring in-or bring back--to help optimize revenue from your premium services businesses? Have Small Business, Personals & flickr--three businesses with healthy paid services--been managed optimally, with the right investments (I think not). If you can add 8% to your revenue stream from these products, you'd see a very healthly number that would off-set concerns about your knowledge of the ad market.
2\) Reconsider local, local ad revenue and self-serve advertising.
What's the ROI to date on Yahoo's latest attempt to capture this holy grail? Unless you have the data that says yes, this may have been another huge investment on a nut Yahoo! won't crack.
3) Differentiate your advertising. Consider what to acquire to beef up strategic targets and markets.
Want women? Roll Shine up with some new properties. News? Clean up the mess in Santa Monica--that group has been left to wander in the desert for way too long.
4) Do NOT sell search for 100 days
Search makes Yahoo! a complete portal--and selling off the search business bit by bit was one part of what helped scuttle Netscape (of course, another part was getting rid of the Netscape search team!)
5) Be bold and pragmatic all at once
Yahoo! has made so many decisions by committee and concensus in the past few years, not always to its benefit. Have a vision and a strategy--and work from that, not committee-speak. Put eight senior execs in a room and they can talk themselves into anything. Don't go there.
6) Ask--and meet--the rank and file and get their ideas
That "NO" culture means that there are dozens, maybe hundreds of ideas filed away that could make things better or create new revenue and user engagement. Once you have a strategy, turn these folks on it--good will come out of it.
1) Optimize premium service revenue
Who can you bring in-or bring back--to help optimize revenue from your premium services businesses? Have Small Business, Personals & flickr--three businesses with healthy paid services--been managed optimally, with the right investments (I think not). If you can add 8% to your revenue stream from these products, you'd see a very healthly number that would off-set concerns about your knowledge of the ad market.
2\) Reconsider local, local ad revenue and self-serve advertising.
What's the ROI to date on Yahoo's latest attempt to capture this holy grail? Unless you have the data that says yes, this may have been another huge investment on a nut Yahoo! won't crack.
3) Differentiate your advertising. Consider what to acquire to beef up strategic targets and markets.
Want women? Roll Shine up with some new properties. News? Clean up the mess in Santa Monica--that group has been left to wander in the desert for way too long.
4) Do NOT sell search for 100 days
Search makes Yahoo! a complete portal--and selling off the search business bit by bit was one part of what helped scuttle Netscape (of course, another part was getting rid of the Netscape search team!)
5) Be bold and pragmatic all at once
Yahoo! has made so many decisions by committee and concensus in the past few years, not always to its benefit. Have a vision and a strategy--and work from that, not committee-speak. Put eight senior execs in a room and they can talk themselves into anything. Don't go there.
6) Ask--and meet--the rank and file and get their ideas
That "NO" culture means that there are dozens, maybe hundreds of ideas filed away that could make things better or create new revenue and user engagement. Once you have a strategy, turn these folks on it--good will come out of it.
The Harvard Business Review recently revisited this phenomenon, where women are overrepresented in what they call "precarious leadership positions." That is, they're set up to fail by being given opportunities to lead only after a company is in so much trouble that it's too late to do anything except dismantle it.
So, your determination: golden opportunity, or glass cliff?"
The HBS piece Lisa is referencing, by Sylvia Anne Hewett, summarizes a piece of British research by MIchelle K Ryan and summarized in a BBC piece, that makes the following points:
- Women promoted into top corporare positions--CEO, Chairman, etc--are more likely than their male counterparts to have moved into a more risky or precarious role.
- In a study of 100 companies during a period of overall stock-market decline those who
appointed women to their boards were more likely to have experienced
consistently bad performance in the preceding five months than those
who appointed men.
- Appointment of a woman director was not associated
with a subsequent drop in company performance.
- Companies that appointed a woman actually
experienced a marked increase in share price after the appointment.
- Poor company performance may lead to the appointment of women to positions of leadership, viz, the glass cliff.
The piece also says "Women who take on leadership roles may be more exposed to criticism than men in the same position. They may also be in greater danger of being held responsible for negative outcomes that were set in train well before they assumed their new roles."So, whaddya think? Did Carol Bartz step onto the glass cliff?
Or are things so bad at Yahoo! she can only make them better?