Sramana Mitra, in her plea for Yahoo to put up a fight, identifies the nub of the issue:

The problem with Yahoo at the moment is a complete lack of vision about how the web needs to evolve.

The MyYahoo user experience, for all its promises, has remained a marginal ?starting point? to the web. I still maintain, MyYahoo CAN be the starting point of the web. It?s just that Jerry Yang and team needs to map out precisely what role it plays in each and every web-based activity that we, users, perform.

There is also a lot of talk about layoffs this week. C?mon, how can you decide whom to layoff before you decide where you want to go with the company? (emphasis mine)

In Good to Great, the followup to Built to Last, Jim Collins talks about the importance of getting the right people on the bus, then figuring out where you want to go. He describes (and I’ve lent my copy out so I’m working from memory here) Fannie Mae at a time when they were losing a million dollars a day, yet took the time to get the right team and figure out its vision.

This isn’t contradictory to Sramana’s statement at all; the Good to Great focus is on the core team, not the general population at risk of being sliced and diced by Yahoo’s latest desperate maneuver. What Collins and Sramana (and now I) are saying is that solving the core questions will clarify the path ahead.

Getting the right team is a core question. Figuring out a company’s vision is a core question. Laying off 500 or 1,500 people is a tool that might be used in service of a company’s vision, but in Yahoo’s case, it seems they may be using this tool arbitrarily.

Sramana is asking the first principles question: what is the vision that is being served by Yahoo’s layoffs?

First principles. Ask the right questions. Sramana says to ask, “What’s the vision?” Gord Hotchkiss says to ask, “Why?” VortexDNA says to ask, “What are the purpose and values behind your behavior?”

Without these questions, our actions are meaningless.

What do you think is the most important question?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 1:47 am and is filed under People matter, Yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.