Yahoo SVP Tries Firing Up His Company with 'Leaked' Memo

Last week, Yahoo announced it had acquired the social networking site Bix (not to be confused with the old Byte Information Exchange). Bix's niche is that it encourages members to come up with unique contests amongst one another, which it then provides the software for members to manage. Once a contest is announced, other members may volunteer to serve as judges. Media submissions, such as videos and dubbed karaoke tracks, serve as contest entries.

Bix thus joins the Yahoo Media Group video project and the Yahoo Search video project, and Yahoo 360 and Yahoo Groups, as another possible redundant outlet for what should be Yahoo's burgeoning talent and expertise. What are Yahoo's business plan and objective for Bix? As Yahoo VP for product strategy Bradley Horowitz explained on his company's blog, it doesn't really need one. All Yahoo needs to do is apply its raw prowess in simply making things bigger, and the plan and objective should find themselves - just as they should elsewhere.

"So how does Bix fit into Yahoo!'s strategy?" Horowitz writes. "Bix, which was founded in January, is a young startup - not unlike Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, and Jumpcut when we acquired them. All represented emerging social media trends with great potential. Imagine where Bix's creativity could go once we scale it to over half a billion people worldwide. For example, we're currently looking into possible synergies with things like Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Video and our entertainment properties."

"We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company," Brad Garlinghouse writes. As a result, "We have lost our passion to win."

Some of the key aspects of Garlinghouse's strategy to resume a winning position involve determining once and for all who manages projects. There are so many managers in the house, he argues, that no one is clear at any one time where the accountability truly lies. In a newly realigned Yahoo, he says, senior roles could be held accountable for particular lines of business, rather than have multiple people managing pet projects at their own pace.

But in determining what the line-of-business-oriented divisions of the company truly should be, Garlinghouse states, the company could very well trim its corporate payroll by 15% to 20%.

If any credence can be given to rumor sites that give audience to anonymous, distraught employees from companies everywhere, Yahoo employees may be taking measure of how well its current business divisions are playing with the boss, by judging which division's promotions are given most prominent space on Yahoo's home page.

By that measure, Yahoo Media Group's leader, former ABC Television chief Lloyd Braun, continues on a losing streak that has run more than two years, outclassed on the home page by long-time senior VP Jeff Weiner, who leads the Search and Marketplace Group. It's Weiner's group that employees consider "old Yahoo" as opposed to "new Yahoo" - the analogy here being a reference not to peanut butter, but to "New Coke."

Garlinghouse may have dropped a subtle reference to this apparent practice, if it exists -- judging divisions' relative "score" by their placement on the home page -- in his memo, in which he advises, "Kill the redundancies. Align a set of new BU's [business units] so that they are not competing against each other. Search focuses on search. Social media aligns with community and communications. No competing owners for Video, Photos, etc. And Front Page becomes Switzerland."

It is a noble gesture that Brad Garlinghouse has made, in spelling out the challenges that lay ahead for a company he clearly, dearly loves. But his own challenges may have been made evident today, by the need for this memo to have been released for public dissemination, in order for it to gain traction.