Yahoo Internal Memo... A Jerry Maguire moment!

Yes, yes... it's everywhere. I hopped this off Vinny Lingham's blog. It's a great piece - so I'm quadruplicating content as a sign of respect.

In all seriousness... there's a lot we can learn from this memo. It's frank, it's brilliantly written and it applies to all South African businesses. Learn a lesson. Just print it out and Jerry Maguire it. With Google around - the web is just too dangerous!

1 x Tom Cruise moment follows:


Recognizing Our Problems

We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything — to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.

Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like — rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.

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.

We lack clarity of ownership and accountability. We lack decisiveness. We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company.


• YME vs. Musicmatch
• Flickr vs. Photos
• YMG video vs. Search video
• Deli.cio.us vs. myweb
• Messenger and plug-ins vs. Sidebar and widgets
• Social media vs. 360 and Groups
• Front page vs. YMG
• Global strategy from BU’vs. Global strategy from Int’l

The Solution:
1. Focus the vision
2. Restore accountability and clarity of ownership
3. Execute a radical reorganization
4. Blow up the matrix.
5. Kill the redundancies
.

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