Business Insight Zone

Granted: just because Wall Street or the chattering classes of the business world call for the head of a CEO doesn’t mean a company should offer up that head.

That said, it seemed clear to . . . well, to just about everybody outside of Yahoo that Jerry Yang had not been able to stem the company’s slide since he took the company’s reins last year. Now Yang has announced his departure as CEO, effective when the board names a successor. Kara Swisher has great coverage of this:

• Yahoo’s Jerry Yang to Step Down, As a Search for New CEO Commences
• Jerry Yang’s Entire Memo to His Employees on Stepping Down as CEO
• Yahoo’s Peter (Chernin) Principle–And Other CEO Choices

(By the way, Swisher’s assessment of Yahoo’s death-by-meetings operating style seems as solid as ever 14 months later.)

A few things seem to me worth noting here:

1. Most successful corporate turnarounds are well underway within 18 months after new management takes over. It’s been about that long since Yang became CEO . . . and Yahoo hasn’t turned around.
2. After the first few months of his tenure, Yang’s assertions that he was the right person to lead the company he co-founded rang hollow: What was changing? Where was the vision? These shortfalls became all the more glaring after Yahoo botched its big chance to sell out at a premium to Microsoft. Regardless of his unquestioned smarts, a company founder like Yang couldn’t be expected to acknowledge the merit of following any path besides independence for Yahoo — even though shareholders would have been much better off if Yahoo had taken Microsoft’s $31/share offer and been done with it.
3. One of the worst things you can do — personally, as a manager, leading a company, whatever — is to put off making an inevitable choice. Many fairminded observers believed that Yang would have to give up the CEO role sometime. If this move was, indeed, inevitable, “then ’twere well it were done quickly.” Dragging it out only lengthens the time until a new CEO can get a grasp on the company’s problems.
4. My biases on this are clear, but the very fact that the company isn’t ready to name a successor is damning in itself.

This Economist story has it right: Yang is “a nice person and a pioneer of the web.” I wish him well. But it was clear long before now that he wasn’t the right person to turn around the company he loves.

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Food for thought: what inevitable decisions are YOU postponing?

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Related posts:

• Company of the Day (10/22/2008): Yahoo.
• Microsoft decides to play hardball with Yahoo.
• The Illogic of a Microsoft-Yahoo deal.

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Category: Executives, Internet, Management