What is Yahoo? What is Every Firm's Toughest and Most Important Question?

The Wall Street Journal has a good article today about Yahoo discussing the company's lengthy struggles leading up to its sale to Verizon.  Jack Nicas writes, "Yahoo’s prolonged demise serves as a classic business case, with an existential question its numerous chief executives struggled to answer: What is Yahoo?"  He goes on to cite a famous memo written by Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo executive.   That memo, written a decade ago, questioned the firm's strategy.  Here's an excerpt from Nicas' article today in the Wall Street Journal: 

“If you’re everything, you’re kind of nothing,” said Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo executive who in 2006 wrote the “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” an internal memo criticizing the company for spreading itself too thin. “The sad reality…is it never solved its core identity crisis.”  Mr. Garlinghouse said Yahoo’s fluctuating strategies often confused employees. He recalled asking managers at a retreat in 2006 the first word they thought of when he named a company. Google, eBay and others yielded clear answers—“search” or “auction.” Yahoo didn’t. Managers said “mail,” “news,” “search,” and other things.

Does your firm have a good answer to this question? Can you define your organization's purpose/mission in a simple sentence? Marc Gobe, author of Emotional Branding, puts it slightly differently, but he gets at the same issue. He asks: Can you tweet your brand promise? In other words, can you express your core pledge to your customers in 140 characters or less? FedEx can do it: "Absolutely, positively overnight."  Ritz Carlton can do it as well: "Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen." What was Yahoo's brand promise? It's hard to find a way to describe its pledge to its customers in 140 characters or less. In the end, the lack of a clear identity led to its demise, and it hurts many other firms as well.

Marissa Mayer and the End of Telecommuting at Yahoo

The Wall Street Journal "At Work" blog has a terrific post about Marissa Mayer's memo to all Yahoo employees essentially ending telecommuting at the firm.   Some people reacted very negatively to her announcement.  How could she ban working from home given the proliferation of technologies that enable virtual collaboration?  What type of message did this move send to working parents trying very hard to juggle professional and personal commitments responsibly?  Would this announcement scare away some terrific talented people? 


The blog post points out, however, that there are significant downsides to extensive telecommuting at a firm.   The bottom line:  Face-to-face interaction does promote more effective collaboration and information sharing in many instances.   People do lose the ability to read nonverbal gestures if they are not physically present at meetings.   Moreover, many ideas get shared when people bump into one another in the hallways or at the cafeteria.   As Saul Kaplan of the Business Innovation Factory argues, innovation occurs through the "random collision of unusual suspects" in many cases.  We can't design or plan those interactions.  However, the right type of working environment at a firm can promote that type of interaction.   If many people work from home, they don't have those opportunities to engage with others in unplanned ways.  


The challenge, though, is that many people may interpret Mayer's move as a belief that telecommuters are simply not working hard enough outside the office. That interpretation may cause a drop in morale at the firm.  In addition, some very talented people may simply not be willing to engage in a lengthy commute each day.   Finally, not all jobs are alike.  While some tasks require intense collaboration and may benefit from having people in the office together, other jobs may not require frequent interaction with colleagues.   Does a blanket policy make sense when work comes in many different forms, and jobs differ significantly in terms of interdependence?