

Carol Bartz is, like beer, an acquired taste.  I like her, but she has a long history of bothering sensitive geeks. The old-timers at Autodesk (a very geeky company where she was CEO) absolutely hated Bartz for her brusque style.

Some of this was casting. Remember Bartz was hired specifically to be not Jerry Yang, the Yahoo co-founder who preceded her as CEO.  Jerry has a brusqueness of his own, but his brusqueness is on behalf of the geeks, since he comes from their ranks. To be different from Jerry yet also turn the company around pretty much required that Bartz piss-off nearly everyone, which she gleefully did. If the company was doing better business-wise, she’d still be getting away with it. But over the long haul Bartz came to be seen inside as a pain-in-the-ass who also wasn’t delivering.

Some people will ask whether Bartz would have been fired with the same style and performance had she been a man?  I think that had she been a man she wouldn’t have been hired in the first place, so the broader question is moot.

So what happens now for Yahoo?  While it will be pitched differently than this, I expect the second coming of Jerry Yang. Jerry can’t be CEO again (or shouldn’t — he’s smarter than to try that) but the real power still lies with he and his cronies. They’ll choose somebody to take the CEO job but I think the company will be run more by consensus.  Jerry’s a smart guy and he learns from his mistakes.  But will it be enough to satisfy Wall Street?  I don’t know.

For all Yahoo’s problems, this is the part of the show where I point out that Wall Street is really, really stupid about how tech companies should be managed. Analysts tend to take a structural approach, looking at inputs and outputs and cash flows like Yahoo or any of its competitors are manufacturing those electrons on assembly lines.  It doesn’t work that way.




Back to Yahoo, a distracted, demoralized, and not very efficient company.  But at this point bringing-in a manager with the goal of increasing efficiency would I think be a mistake.  People don’t get this.  What Yahoo needs to do is dig deep in the human resources it already has and pull out something new that will change the game.  And to do that the first thing the company needs to do is heal.

Next time around whoever runs Yahoo will have to be much more sensitive to cultural issues. They will want someone who can unite the company and create a more aspirational firm that looks to innovate and be forward thinking, yet also not trapped by the Jerry Yang syndrome of risk avoidance. Yahoo needs a bit of risk-taking at this point, but it would be a mistake to hire someone who comes in with the idea of making the company a more efficient machine.