When she reorganized the Yahoo management ranks three weeks ago, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz left some glaring empty spaces in her management chart, including for a chief financial officer, the top international exec and a new post for a customer advocacy czar.
So, who should get the nod for each? But might BoomTown suggest closet geek and good-thing expert Martha Stewart for Yahoo’s consumer guru?
Goodness gracious, make it stop!
You must know by now how much BoomTown loves internal Yahoo memos. But this is getting ridiculous.
It’s been like a flash flood after a long drought at Sunnyvale HQ today, as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz turns on the firehose of a whole lot of communicating.
“I know you guys have reorg fatigue,” wrote Bartz in the latest email to employees about the management reorganization finally announced this morning.
Also memo fatigue at All Things Digital HQ, if you can believe it.
Along with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s external email earlier today, the company also outlined the new management structure in another memo.
It’s pretty much what BoomTown has been reporting all week. Top-down simplification, which is another word for: Carol rules over Yahoo.
CTO Ari Balogh gets a lot of stuff as new head of products, and so does U.S. head Hilary Schneider, including mobile, as EVP of North American Region. Bot report to Bartz.
Here’s the entire memo of Yahoo’s new organization.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz declared reorg today on the company’s corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal.
Here is her entire memo:
Getting our house in order
Posted February 26th, 2009 at 9:16 am by Carol Bartz, CEO
A month and a half in the saddle and today I have the perfect excuse to get blogging.
I’ve been on a whirlwind tour for [...]
“It’s being changed every minute,” joked one Yahoo source about the reorg now in process at Yahoo, which is being shepherded by new CEO Carol Bartz.
Actually, it’s kind of true, as execs at the troubled Web company are being moved around the board like chess pieces, while others players are added.
According to numerous sources, mostly in Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif. HQ, things are still in flux and not completely settled as yet.
But one thing is clear: Layers are being collapsed quickly, as fewer people are in charge of more, with all roads leading to Bartz.
Yahoo’s top mobile exec, Marco Boerries, is departing Yahoo, according to an internal email obtained by BoomTown that he sent to some staffers on Sunday.
I have also since confirmed Boerries’s departure with company insiders familiar with the situation.
In a post on Monday on a restructuring at Yahoo that new CEO Carol Bartz is likely to unveil to the company this week–sources tell me it is now set to be announced internally tomorrow–I noted that Boerries was one of the more likely high-level execs to go.
“With a very heavy heart I have to tell you, that I will be leaving Yahoo!,” Boerries wrote, attributing his departure in an email titled “Personal Update,” to issues related to his family.
A few weeks ago, BoomTown got a rather compelling email from Marion Vermazen, who once worked at Sun Microsystems with new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz–and where Bartz actually fired Vermazen.
Her take on the experience?
“Amazing,” said Vermazen, given how Bartz handled it herself–driving 30 minutes to Vermazen’s office–in a very straightforward way.
In other words, a kinder, classier Donald Trump “Apprentice” style, but without the cameras and bad hair.
It’s instructive now, given that Bartz is likely to have to give several big Yahoo execs the heave-ho in the days ahead as she unveils her new management structure soon.
On Friday, BoomTown first reported that new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is likely to be announcing a sweeping new management structure soon, which can only mean the possibility that some existing top execs are likely to be broomed out, even as some new ones are ushered in.
“This is going to be a full-scale peanut butter recall,” joked one exec, referring to the infamous “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” which was sent around the company several years ago by former exec Brad Garlinghouse. It laid bare the problems at Yahoo, most especially a decided lack of decision-making and lugubrious levels of managers.
Here is the sticky skinny.
Besides the more massive management reorganization that new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz could announce this week, as BoomTown reported on Friday, the Internet company’s powerful media arm might also see a drastic shift in management structure even sooner.
According to several sources inside the company, U.S. Audience SVP Jeff Dossett has been working on the changes for a while, part of an overall change in how Yahoo makes and delivers content.
Under a plan being considered, the media unit will be split into three parts: vertical programming, network programming and search monetization.
Several sources inside and outside Yahoo told BoomTown that new Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz–whom some Yahoos have dubbed “Hurricane Carol”–could be ready to announce a major reorganization of its management structure as early as next week, most likely on Wednesday.
While that shift could be pushed out a week or two or rolled out in pieces, Yahoo execs are nervously awaiting the moves by Bartz to put a new regime in place in order to more easily power through a massive reset of the troubled company.
While many top execs are very much in the dark about what Bartz will do, most expect her to severely roll back a variety of previous reorganizations in favor of a more accountable C-level-style set-up, with execs like a COO, CTO and a new, more powerful CMO (who will also head PR), all reporting to her.
How much does BoomTown love the Friday weekly memos that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz sends out to the troops?
Very, very much since they are so full of significant news–a slowdown of Yahoo’s homepage redesign and a major limiting of the global rollout of its new advertising platform, APT, to name a few.
But they also have a weird but compelling kind of energy that nearly jumps off the page, giving clear insight into how Bartz thinks and operates.
Like the Energizer Bunny, I would say.
So, here are two memos Bartz sent out to Yahoo staff: one from today and one from last week on Feb. 13, both of which discuss just how busy she is keeping herself.
Today, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has convened a two-day offsite of its managers, to bring them all together to talk about the company.
Aside from a colorful all-hands meeting she has held with the whole company, the gathering is Bartz’s first major one of its top execs, sources said, and is being held on Yahoo’s campus in Sunnyvale.
Sources said they believe Bartz has prepared an organizational structure that she will unveil soon, but has not told Yahoo’s senior staff what will be shifted, what will be consolidated and what will perhaps be cut.
What does Carl Icahn, the billionaire activist shareholder who waged war on Yahoo and now sits on its board, really think?
“…I really think current boards and managements are killing the country,” he said in an interview published Friday in The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal. “I’ll tell you why, ’cause I’ve lived it. I’m on a lot of boards, I see how ineffectual they are.”
While he was talking about the state of American management in general and not Yahoo in particular, BoomTown thinks Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang might want to listen up!
Here’s a bright spot in Yahoo’s third-quarter earnings announcement later today: Sources told BoomTown that the company will not announce a specific number of layoffs tomorrow, although it will give an overall percentage of employees and costs to be cut.
In other words, you get to practice your long division and multiplication skills! Fun!
Other than that, of course, when Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang gets on the horn at at 2 p.m. Pacific time, the outlook is likely to be a wall-to-wall glumfest.
As has been copiously reported here and all over, Yahoo and AOL have been engaged in never-ending talks about a possible deal to merge their flagging Internet businesses.
Now, sources tell me, the circle of executives at both companies interfacing with each other has been widened, for purposes of due diligence.
That includes Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who is in New York this week–where AOL parent, Time Warner, is located–to meet once again with its CEO, Jeff Bewkes, to see if they can actually complete the merger.
Now, all this frantic activity does not mean a deal will necessarily be struck.
But it is just this kind of ramped-up blabbery that has many at both companies predicting that a deal will go through, sooner or later, as soon as Time Warner and Yahoo can agree on a price.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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