How open is this "Open Strategy" Yahoo!???

Last year, as I sat in my cube and watched executives leave amid financial turmoil, I snapped this picture, which I thought nicely summed up the feeling many of us employees had at the time. Unsure if things were on their way towards getting better, people were asking themselves if the future held more of the same or some brighter possibilities.

I had no way of knowing just how much worse it could get.

Today, I’m attending the Yahoo! shareholder meeting as an ex-employee and a frustrated shareholder. I’m curious to see how management deals with what will likely be a media circus and an auditorium full of vocal people. Additionally, I really want to discover how this management team deals with this pressure. If Yahoo! is really embracing “the Open Web” and understands that the corporate culture starts at the top, I expect them to fess up to their mistakes, take difficult questions and admit to not knowing the answers to certain questions that get asked.

However, if the management team is as weak as I think it is, I expect them to be evasive, use double-speak and generally avoid the really challenging questions.

I thought it would be interesting to make my own Top 10 list of key questions that I think shareholders would like honest answers to:

1. Why are you hiring back people who were laid off and given generous severance packages; especially at higher salaries and with signing bonuses? Isn’t this a complete waste of company money, not to mention a huge burden on employee time and morale?
2. What reason do your search-only customers have for staying with Yahoo!, now that you’ve agreed to place Google searches on the list of results?
3. Are you going to be using the data from the Google partnership to allocate search monetization resources?
4. How long do you believe it takes for a reorganization to prove effective (or not)?
   1. Given your answer, don’t you think that the number of reorgs in the past 18 months has actually been harmful, rather than helpful? Why do you keep pursuing this tumultuous line of action?
5. When will you know you’re not the right leadership for this company? What are you measuring yourselves on?
6. If your Asian presence is so important to your future strategy, can you give us more specifics on what is going on there and how it should be evaluated? The generalities are unsatisfactory at this point.
7. Why is the Connected Life segment of the business still operated separately from the rest? That doesn’t make sense, are you kowtowing to egos?
8. Why aren’t you firing more often? Any large and disciplined company understands that it needs to set the tone for unacceptable behavior – why aren’t you more clear on this?
9. What are your metrics around retention and how have they trended over the past 24 months? Couldn’t you tell that you had a workforce issue quite a while ago, if you’d been seriously tracking these numbers?
10. Given all of the turmoil around the company related to being publicly-traded and the bearish valuation (according to your evaluations) of the company, why haven’t we heard more about a Management Buyout of Yahoo!? Wouldn’t the company be more nimble out of the public markets for a while?

If you've got additional questions, please feel free to add them in the comments and discuss them.

 

Technorati Tags: Yahoo! Shareholder Meeting,Yahoo! management,Open Strategy,ex-Yahoo!

Comments

[Dave]

11. The six months of the combined search and display ad sales team matches up with Yahoo! significantly lagging the market in ad revenue growth -- was the combination a mistake?

12. Their appears to be an extreme disconnect between the revenue potential of the Newspaper Consortium and resources prioritized against them -- how should we reconcile this?

13. In February, CNet wrote an article recommending 13 people Microsoft should retain during the acquisition effort -- 8 of them have already left Yahoo! -- how do you retain people that aren't moved by the money? http://news.cnet.com/Memo-to-Microsoft-Yahoos-A-list/2100-1022_3-6230484.html

14. With the stock at a low point, how does this change priorities in EBITDA and investment? If you're already in the basement, is there flexibility?

15. The menu at URLs hasn't changed in a year -- is this killing morale?

[Peter]

What answers did you get? CNBC just covered it and they said, "nobody from the 200+ shareholders who showed up took the microphone to ask tough questions"

[Sean]

Dave - that's not totally true. URL's did get rid of the salsa verde at the Mexican bar. And I want it back dammit!

[Robi]

Dave: Wow, great additions to the questions. Thanks man, really appreciate it. I just wish they'd actually taken the time to have real discussions with the shareholders at this meeting to voice some of those concerns

Peter: Unfortunately, I didn't get to ask any of these questions. They didn't take many at all and I made the mistake of waiting before getting into the mic lines. Shame on me.

[Ben]

Damn, that sucks dude. Would have liked to hear how they responded to even one of them. You should consider submitting the list to one of the Silicon Valley tech publications as an open letter or something like that....

Anyway, at a minimum, guess you learned a lesson about how/when to ask questions at the next stockholder meeting you attend. ;-)