“Heads must roll”,”Blow up the matrix”, “Kill the redundancies”. These may sound like action movie dialogues, but these bold statements are from the “Peanut Butter Manifesto” written by Brad Garlinghouse. Now, Brad is the Senior Vice-President of Yahoo and owns critical areas like the main landing page, mail, IM etc. It is very easy to sense Brad’s frustration in the reactive mood of the me mo. After reading the memo, I got the message that Brad had nothing to do with what is happening at Yahoo. It was all about everyone else at Yahoo. Also, it is always easy to offer guidance and advice when things are not going as expected. It is very easy to ask for massive reorganizations and ask for heads to roll. I consider this as reactive leadership.
He kept repeating that he wanted to be part of a solution and not problem. If Brad really wanted to be part of a solution and examplify proactive leadership, Brad could have lead with example and brought major positive changes in his area of control. Major positive changes do not get unnoticed. Other statement which Brad makes, “We need to exit (sell?) non core businesses and eliminate duplicative projects and businesses.” Yes, any management rookie will advise that after looking at the current state of Yahoo. Brad, how about a concrete example on how this can be done.
To me, this memo looked to me like Brad’s exit strategy from Yahoo. Time will tell - I may be wrong. At best, to me, the memo seemed written by an external consultant or a blogger.
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